Happy Thanksgiving!
Regardless if you are in the United States or anywhere else in the world, I hope you can take a little time think about what you are thankful and grateful for.
It is really difficult to complain or be fearful when you spend your time thinking about all the things you have to be grateful for.
I made a quick two-minute video mentioning what I’m thankful for.
I’d love to hear about what you are thankful for. Please leave me a comment and let me know!
I decided to dust off some code I had that visualized music. I added a few more visualizers that are similar, but slightly different.
I’m thinking about spending some time into making this a proper app that would work not just on the HoloLens but on the Xbox One as well. If this is something that you would be interested in let me know in the comments.
Enjoy the video:
I’m writing this blog post from a hotel room in Seattle. I’m attending the Microsoft MVP Summit. To attend this summit, you have to be a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP).
I was fortunate enough to receive this award from Microsoft back in 2009 and every year since then.
Originally, I received this award for DirectX/XNA. I’ve written a few books and two of them were on game programming using XNA. XNA was the game programming framework created by Microsoft that powered the vast majority of Indie games available on the Xbox 360.
Folks who have a large XNA library code should take a good look at MonoGame.
For those who don’t, should look at another game engine like Unreal or Unity.
If you want to do HoloLens development, I’d highly suggest you get going with the Unity engine.
One of the big benefits of being a Microsoft MVP is that you get to meet the product teams at Microsoft and provide feedback.
Here’s a secret…
If you are into web development at all …
If you want to know what it’s like to be a MVP, then watch the weekly stand-ups of the ASP.NET team. The work is done in public and everything is open source. Your feedback can be heard. You don’t need to be a MVP to talk to the product team.
User Voice is another great way to get in front of the product teams.
The Forums is another great way to get in front of the product teams.
If you have a suggestion for Microsoft, you can make it heard all of those ways. You don’t have to be an MVP to get your voice heard.
Microsoft is very big on feedback. They want to make products that you want. So if you see something that should be done better, let them know!
It’s a great privilege to be able to come out to Seattle every year and meet with the product teams. I’m hoping I’ll be fortunate enough to be able to attend next year.
I’ve heard over and over again so far this week from Microsoft that they want feedback. And it is true, they take the feedback and they make products and/or product changes because of the feedback.
It is a great time to be a software developer. HoloLens and augmented reality is really exciting. I’m grateful that a great community is building in the Learn HoloLens site.
If you are interested in HoloLens development, make sure to check out the Learn HoloLens site and sign up for the notification list.
If you are wondering if you should get into software development in general, then go check out code.org and try it out. You just might like it… and being able to tell the computer what to do is a pretty satisfying feeling!
I made a companion video to this blog post, which you can see below:
A couple of months ago I created a membership site to teach developers all about HoloLens development.
Most of the time, the membership site is closed. This is so I can focus on creating the master classes and on the community.
I plan to only open enrollment to Learn HoloLens a couple of times a year.
Back when I did a limited launch in September, I opened up the site for alpha members. Now, in November, I’m opening it up for beta members. I’ll open it up with a full launch sometime next year. I’m not sure exactly when that will be yet.
Trying to get everything setup correctly, from email campaigns, to shopping carts and membership software, continues to be a lot of work.
I’ve mentioned the Essentialism book a couple of times, but I’ll mention it here again because in the past I would have just left enrollment open all the time and wouldn’t have done a good job at promoting the site, nor a good job at providing the service the site needs.
Instead, I need to focus on one task or another. It takes planning to make sure the members don’t suffer while I work on promoting the site and to bring in more people to the community.
What I’ve had to learn is that by saying yes to one thing, I have to say no to something else.
By consistently creating YouTube videos and blog posts each week, I’ve had several opportunities come my way. Many, I’ve had to decline in order to focus on growing this community in the right way.
The cart has been open for about a day and I’m excited to see how many people have already signed up. The slots may fill up before we even hit Sunday night when the cart closes.
You should head over to LearnHoloLens.com and see if this membership site is something you want to be a part of. I’ve only received positive feedback so far, and I’ve had zero people cancel their subscription since joining, which I’m very proud of.
If you happen to be reading this when the membership enrollment is closed, go ahead and sign up for the notification list. That way you will be the first to know when enrollment opens again so you can jump in.