I gave a talk last week at CodeMash. The conference was fantastic! I hope to make some time to do a write up on my first experience at CodeMash. However, this blog post isn’t about CodeMash or the talk I gave. No, it’s about a talk I’m about to give.

At CodeMash, like many conferences, people pay money to go to the conference. People then pick from  very good sessions to allot an hour (or so) of their time to a particular talk. I have given talks at user groups, where people come and learn for free. Typically, sponsors pick up the food tab and might have some swag to give away. Some location offers their shelter for free and people come and learn and don’t pay a dime. This is also the case with code camps. Typically, code camps are held on a Saturday and are basically a mini-conference that have many sponsors to keep the cost at $0.

Public speaking in general, can be a challenging task. Will you mess up? Will you say the wrong thing? The thing you are talking about … is there a better way to do it? Will you be found out that you have no idea what you are doing? What if someone asks you a question you don’t know the answer to? What if there is a “Well, actually…” person in the audience? What if you get stuck or look dumb?

Once we get past all of that, then the next level is: Wait, someone is going to pay to just hear me talk?  Even if they pay someone else directly?  So people paid to hear me talk back in 2010 when I gave a talk at CodeStock. I had given several talks at user groups and code camps before then and had worked up a little bit of comfort with speaking publicly. Still, I remember feeling a little overwhelmed that people paid money to come to the conference – to come to sessions – to listen to ‘experts’ about some subject. Then, they paid with a currency even more valuable than money, they paid with their time. They selected to be in my session instead of the other 3 or 4 that were going on at the same time.

This could paralyze someone. Or it could motivate someone to really do the best job they can do. I’d like to think that these types of circumstances motivate me. When I put myself in the uncomfortable situation of being accountable to someone that I’m going to deliver value, it always works out for my benefit. Even when I don’t see any benefit in it for me, it always works out to be good for me.

I actually enjoy speaking. I still get nervous. I still think I can do things better. I still think of things I would have done differently when I get off stage. Yet, I enjoy speaking. I mess up. I talk too fast. I try to cram too much information into a small period of time. But, I still have people who come up and thank me for the talk and tell me that they learned a lot. I have people ask me more detailed questions which proves they were listening and did actually get something. This is confirmation that while a talk may not have been perfect, it did hit the mark for some people.

You said something about confidence…

So what does any of this have to do with building confidence? Well, you have to start somewhere. If it is public speaking or playing a sport or learning an instrument or learning a new skill, you have to start somewhere. The more you do, the more confidence you will build. They say practice makes perfect. But I also heard that perfect practice makes perfect. I think that is better, but it makes it much harder to attain. How can I ever get perfect, when I have to practice perfectly? The answer is that I will never be perfect. But that is ok. The goal is to always be getting better. I’m better at writing software now than I was 20 years ago, but I’m still not perfect. I still write code that has bugs in it. But, the software I write now has less bugs in spite of the fact that the systems I write are more complex than they were 20 years ago. Am I perfect? Absolutely not. Does it matter? Not a single bit.

I’ll be speaking soon where people will be paying just to hear me talk. I’ll be speaking on game design. As I was going over my notes and re-reading some material, I came across the following paragraphs from the book, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell:

… it is terribly important that you get good at building your confidence, for doubts about your  abilities will forever plague you. As a novice designer, you will think, “I’ve never done this—I  don’t know what I’m doing.” Once you have a little experience, you will think, “My skills are so narrow—this new title is different. Maybe I just got lucky last time.” And when you are a seasoned designer, you will think, “The world is different now. Maybe I’ve lost my touch.”

Blow away these useless thoughts. They can’t help you. When a thing must be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility. If you look at the great creative minds, all so different, you will find they have one thing in common: they lack a fear of ridicule. Some of the greatest innovations have come from people who only succeeded because they were too dumb to know that what they were doing was impossible. Game design is decision making, and decisions must be made with confidence.

Will you fail sometimes? Yes you will. You will fail again, and again, and again. You will fail many, many more times than you will succeed. but these failures are your only path to success. You will come to love your failures, because each failure brings you a step closer to a truly phenomenal game. There is a saying among jugglers: “If you aren’t dropping, you aren’t learning. and if you aren’t learning, you aren’t a juggler.” The same is true for game design: If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying hard enough, and you aren’t really a game designer.

Reading this again prompted me to write this blog post. I was thinking about the fact that I’m not a professional game designer. While I know a great deal about it, there is so much to know. There is another quote I like and it goes “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” I feel like a one-eyed man sometimes, but the key is that I know more about the subject than the people I’m teaching. Am I an expert? No. Does it matter? Not when I’m teaching beginners. In the world of technology, everything moves very fast. By the time a particular topic is mastered, the information changes. If we waited until mastery no one would ever teach.

Do you think the medical field has it all figured out? They don’t, but they continue to practice medicine. Yes, practice. I can’t think of a more critical profession to have experts in, and yet there are many things that the experts don’t understand. Keep learning, keep stretching, and keep practicing.

It is ok if you fail. Fail early and fail often. The main thing is that you learn. Now, failing in front of a room full of people, who have paid good money (and time) to hear you talk can be hard and humbling, so the key there is to practice. Practice a lot. Record yourself. Listen to yourself. It is painful, but it is required in order to become better. If you have never given a talk before, I’d suggest you give it a shot. Pick a topic you are passionate about and see if you can give the talk to your local user group.

The only way to get better at something is to actually do it. Design and create that game, play that instrument, give that talk, learn that new skill. It is within your reach and you can make it happen! Don’t delay, get started on it right now!

Happy New Year!

Here are my overall desires for the coming year:

1. Invest quality time with my family
2. Focus on relationships
3. Make GlobalCove Technologies a sustainable business
4. Provide training products for video game development at devgame101.com
5. Provide training products for web development at devweb101.com
6. Correctly schedule energy and effort between family, friends, projects, and products
7. Build communities around the products
8. Engage in the communities at least twice a week
9. Be present on this blog and in social media
10. Work on retirement strategy

But those aren’t exactly goals.  There is no plan.

When I decided to go out on my own and devote full-time to my GlobalCove Technologies business, I decided I needed to not only be an expert in certain areas of the software development field, but I needed to start learning how to sell and even market myself and ultimately my products. This was a hard thing for me to do. In the past, I have just created content, thinking that “If I build it, they will come”. That just didn’t happen. I built it and no one knew about it – so how could they come?

So I spent more time in the last few months of 2014 trying to better myself on selling and marketing in general. No, not the sleazy selling that you see everywhere and definitely not the email spamming about special diet pills, but rather how to let people know in a non-interrupting way about the products and services I offer. If people want more information then they can opt-in. If I provide value, then people will stay. If I don’t, then people will leave. But if I don’t let people know, they never have the opportunity to opt-in and some people would miss out on something that could actually make their lives better in some small way. Once I started thinking about it that way, it became easier to sit down and focus on this thing called marketing. And really, all marketing is in this context is relationship building.

For the last decade and a half, I’ve worked out of my home. There are tons of benefits with that, but there are also some drawbacks. One of the drawbacks is limited interaction with other people. I’d sit in my basement office and toil away for hours and days and even weeks by myself working on some gnarly problem without ever speaking to any colleague, supervisor, or client. Now, to many people that can sound like a dream. And sometimes it was – “just let me get my job done and stop bothering me!”, but over time when that is the attitude and that is what I was striving for, I ended up missing out on helping others when I could have and being helped when I needed it. I’ll be more alert to those around me and the needs they have.

So my actual goals are to:

1. Invest quality time with my family by being in the moment when I’m with them
2. Focus on relationships by allocating time to talk with others and see where I can help out
3. Make GlobalCove Technologies a sustainable business by seeking God to take on the right projects and working with the right clients
4. Provide informational products for video game development at devgame101.com by setting aside time every month to create quality work
5. Provide informational products for web development at devweb101.com by setting aside time every quarter to create quality work
6. Correctly schedule energy and effort between family, friends, projects, and products by tracking my time and being present in my current activity, whatever that may be
7. Build communities around the products by utilizing new technology along with social media
8. Engage in the communities at least twice a week by planning out my week ahead of schedule
9. Be present on this blog and in social media by scheduling interaction times
10. Work on retirement strategy by mapping out where I want to be in 20 years and creating a roadmap of what is needed to make that happen.

So what are your goals for 2015?  I didn’t set any for 2014 so I didn’t meet them. If you haven’t set any goals for the year, no matter when it is in the year, you should set some goals today. Where do you want to be a year from now? What do you want to accomplish? What steps do you need to do along the way to reach those goals?

Let me know in the comments what your goals are for this year. I’d love to hear them!

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog.  Several things have happened.  On July 1st, I received notification that I was renewed as a Microsoft MVP for 2012.

This made me very happy since I also had just signed a contract with Sams publishing (Pearson) to write a third book for them, and I figure this would mean early access to the Windows 8 bits through a MSDN subscription.  To me, that subscription is the second best perk of being a Microsoft MVP.  The best perk is being able to talk to the product teams and to see conversations by folks that are much smarter than I.

My first two books were on game development using XNA.  This third book is about creating Windows 8 apps.  I signed the contract the last week of June with the plans of writing the first chapter on July 1.  

Around the same time I was invited to participate in an App Excellence lab.  For some reason I thought it was more of a Dev Camp setting.  The lab is really for for folks who have an app that is at least 80% done and are wanting to put the app in the Windows Store.  The dev camps are a full day (or 2) of learning about what makes a Windows Modern UI style app and what is needed to put the app in the Windows Store.  I found out the day before that what I was attending was the “80% app done lab” and not the “training / work day with experts lab”.  So I apologized to the field engineer and we discussed the app and I got some good pointers about the app in particular.

My original idea was to create a version of the app for the book and then finish it up to submit it to the store.  I realized the concept of the app was too complex for the book.  There would be too much time spent on explaining the app instead of the technology behind the app.  So going through that exercise allowed me to have my first failure within the first week.

I created my Table of Contents (TOC) and spent that first week (before July 1) mocking up 3 apps.  Two of the apps mocked up I would use in the book.  The third was a good exercise, but proved to not be the right game for the book.  The idea was to create two apps and one games as a “Putting what was learned it into practice” section of the book.  In fact, here is the table of contents in its current state.  Perhaps some of the words will change a little, but this is what we have:

Part I: Building the Foundation
1    Getting a Refresher on JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3
2    Trying out File | New | Project
3    Exploring the Windows Runtime (WinRT) and Windows Library for JavaScript (WinJS)
4    Creating WinJS Namespaces, Classes and Custom Controls
5    Understanding Microsoft Design Style Principles
6    Customizing the Style of our Apps
7    Debugging, Securing, and Measuring our Apps Performance
Part II: Handling the Hardware
8    Working with Multi-touch and Other Input
9    Working with Location and Hardware Sensors
Part III: Working with Data
10    Binding Data to Our Apps
11    Storing Data Locally
12    Using Remote Data
Part IV: Making it a Windows Store App
13    Working with Fullscreen, Filled, Snapped, and Portrait Views
14    Using the App Bar and Pickers
15    Handling Our App Life Cycle Events
16    Using Contracts and Extensions 
17    Using Live Tiles, Secondary Tiles, Notifications, and Toasts
18    Creating a Trial and Handling In App Purchases
Part V: Putting it into Practice
19    Making an App: RSS Aggregator
20    Making an App: Finger Painting
21    Making a Game: Simon
Part VI: Sending it out to the world
22    Understanding the Windows Store
23    Getting an App Certified
24    Making Money with Windows Store Apps
Part VII: Appendix
         This Book’s Website

Yeah, this book is about JavaScript development and not C# which has been my bread and butter for the last 12 years.  I started working with JavaScript excessively around April this year and  have really come to enjoy the language.  Something I would have never thought back in 1996 when I first used it.  Visual Studio tooling could be better, but it is much better than was in the past.

The table of contents went through a few iterations but not many changes overall.  It is currently being reviewed by the technical editor.  Once I get notes I’ll make modifications and then it will go on to editing (for thing like, gramar, and, speeling, altho I’m a very goood speeler, and, gramarist person).

Writing a book in 8 weeks is challenging.  I did the same thing for my first book on XNA.  Writing a book in 8 weeks and working full-time provides very little time for anything else.  On the flip side, with my second book, I gave myself 6 months of time, plus it was an update to the existing XNA book.  I figured that would be a breeze, but that was a long 6 months.

The 2 month approach wreaks havoc on my family though.  I thought I’d have a better handle on writing  it this time around but I got behind on my schedule after about the 3rd week and was in catch up mode ever since.  That means the last 5 weeks, out of the 8, I was in my “worst case scenario” phase of not going to bed some nights and neglecting time I had set aside for my family.

End result?  The book content is done and the deadline was hit.  My daughters haven’t suffered too much but my poor wife has had to really pick up the slack.  We homeschool our girls, so my doing the book from June 26th to August 27th caused my wife to not really get much of a summer break.

I kept track of my time for this book and I spent 695.2 hours researching and creating content. Ouch.  Fortunately, the main content of the book is done and now I’m just waiting the for the technical editor to come back.  I’m also going through and updating the first chapters to work with RTM as all the code (and screenshots) were originally done on Windows 8 RP.  I downloaded RTM on the 15th and installed it on Thursday night (16th) while attending my local .NET User Group where Brian Hitney and Glen Gordon talked about Windows 8.  Their boss, Brett Wolfe was also there and I was able to schedule another App Excellence lab.  This time I was prepared and had 2 apps to choose from.  We got it scheduled for Tuesday morning, the 21st.  It passed and, just like Jennifer Marsman, I got a Windows Store token.  This was extremely beneficial as it allowed me to grab screenshots of the Windows Store and submitting apps which was crucial since I had an entire chapter devoted to it.  So I’m very grateful that Brett hooked me up with another timeslot.

One obstacle I ran into was not having Windows 8 hardware.  I didn’t attend Build 2011 so I didn’t get one of the nice Samsung Series 7 tablets.  I had purchased an ASUS EP121 in June of that year and have enjoyed using it.  I installed Windows 8 Consumer Preview on it in March and really enjoyed using it.  I then also installed Windows 8 CP on my desktop and only used Windows 8 on those machines.  I was booting to Windows 8 CP on a VHD on my Windows 7 desktop, but I never went back to load Windows 7.  That will change this week as I’ll boot into Windows 7 so I can do an upgrade to the final version of Windows 8. 

Anyway, back to my tablet … I used the ASUS EP121 in order to test my code around touch.  Unfortunately, the device only supports two touch points.  During the App Excellence lab, the Microsoft Field Engineer confirmed that the app was working as expected when 8 fingers were being used.  Writing code for the GPS is no problem even for devices that don’t have a GPS so that was no problem.  But the new accelerometer, magnetometer and gyrometer hardware that will be in all Windows 8 tablet and convertible PCs is something I needed to provide examples on.  The Sensor Fusion software that takes those three hardware pieces and provides results is pretty cool.

Unfortunately, my ASUS EP121 hardware didn’t support it.  I went purchased a STMicroelectronics Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) which is the piece of hardware that is in the Samsung devices and will be shipping in many of the upcoming devices.  Paying $140 for that was a lot better than shelling out a grand or so on a device that I would loath after October and November gets here and all the new devices start coming out.  Plus, I was able to snag a seat at the Build 2012 conference coming at the end of October.  I’m hoping there will be some hardware goodness there.

Getting information on the Windows Store and the hardware were the only two problems I had with creating the book (other than running into bugs as I was creating the examples and learning the technology, of course).  This book is an introduction to Windows Store app development in the Sams Teach Yourself series.  It was hard for me to not spend time drilling down into topics as much as I did with my XNA books.  When dealing with a framework like the XNA Framework, there is only so much surface area that needs to be discussed so there is some wiggle room to dig down deep on a topic and even spend a chapter or two discussing non XNA related, but game related content like physics and artificial intelligence.  However, when talking about Windows 8 – that is a HUGE amount of API that can be covered with multiple ways of doing the exact same thing.  How does one determine what is included in a book with limited pages and what is not?  Making those decisions was challenging, but I tried to just stick the items that would be most common to folks starting out and needing to get an app or a game created quickly.

The other challenge was that I wanted to have one of the three main example apps be a game.  Game development can be difficult.  How does one teach game development in a single chapter?  It can’t be done, but what can be done is to introduce the topics such as the game loop and game states as well as introduce other game type of items all throughout the book like working with the HTML5 canvas and using the requestAnimationFrame API.  One of the apps created was a finger painting app.  Even though it is an app and not a game, it has certain properties of a game where the screen needs to be drawn at the refresh rate of the display and separating out the update logic (receiving input from fingers, stylus/pen and mouse) and the drawing logic (of actually drawing lines on the screen based on the touch points).

In another post, I’ll list all of the examples discussed in the book, like the Ink example which uses hand writing recognition, and the three (mostly) complete apps, one of which is a game.  I’ll be submitting those three apps to the store in the next few weeks.  All of the source code for this book will be put on GitHub once the editing process is complete and the book is sent off to the printers.

So while writing the book was a strain on my family I am still happy I did it.  My wife would most likely disagree but she was and is supportive of my efforts.  I think if I did another one, I’d like to have 3 months to do it.  6 months is too long, but 2 months is too short.  I have the ability to focus on something and push through until it is done, but the down side is that I tend shut out almost everything else as I focus on the task at hand.  It is the only way I know of how to get something done when it is very unlikely to get done.

I’m unsure of what the release date of the book will be at this point, but it should be out before general availability of Windows 8.  So writing a Windows 8 book in 8 weeks was challenging, I learned a lot and realized I could write another 2 or 3 books on the subject.  Could, but won’t … at least not for a while … and not in a 2 month period.

Up next, I’ll be putting the finishing touches on the three apps created in the book and submit them to the store.  Then I’ll start work on the next 7 apps.  All of these will be released through my company GlobalCove Technologies.  After the first batch of apps are submitted and before I start work on the next 7, I’ll be redesigning the website to better align with the company’s new focus of Windows 8 app and game development.  While the company will still do training and provide consulting services our main focus will be creating apps for the Windows Store.

If you are contemplating writing an app for the Windows Store, don’t delay.  Don’t put it off.  Get it done.  Some of the first apps will have great success as in millions of dollars success.  Don’t miss out.

Happy Coding,

-Chad