Redmond Startup Weekend Reunion

I recently attended the Redmond Startup Weekend Reunion in Seattle where the star of the night was Friend Mosaic. Roy Leban handed out our Startup Weekend Friend Mosaic shirts and took pictures. Not sure if those pictures have been posted online yet, but if I find them I’ll post the links here. Roy’s camera, while taking said pictures, identified the faces in the shirts as real faces. It was quite amusing. I learned that it’s difficult to take photos of the LCD screen of a camera. If you look really closely, you can see a thin green box around the face in the shirt on the left in the left photograph.

 

It was really great seeing lots of people again without the pressures of shipping a product by 7pm. The gathering was a much more relaxed atmosphere where everyone had a story or two to share about their SWRedmond projects or other current business endeavors.

Marc showed up (who did not attend the SWRedmond), but Clint, who ran the event, was not present. What’s the deal?

I learned that stories written in online articles about a product don’t necessary result in sales of the product, simply views of the website.

As for my own startup from SWRedmond, Find Common Ground was not ready to go live for this event. I will be spending some time on it this month. There are a few features that need to be implemented before going live. I will definitely blog about it when that happens.

There are two more Startup Weekend events coming up that I plan to attend: Seattle and Corvallis.

Thanks everyone for a great night and a great event.

P.S. Here are the links to my previous posts about SWRedmond:

http://ryankyle.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/startup-weekend-in-review-friday/

http://ryankyle.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/startup-weekend-redmond-in-review-saturday/

Patterns, Process, and Architecture Reading List

I have been reading a lot of technical books recently. So much so, that I recently designed a new software architecture application based on the book I’m reading, Pro .NET 2.0 Code and Design Standards in C#. Another book I was reading, but somehow lost is Learning WCF: A Hands-on Guide.

I picked the following books because they are already on the bookshelves behind my desk. There are hundreds of books on these bookshelves, but these particular books stood out to be because they are about patterns, process, and architecture. My goal will be to read at least one of these book per week.

Here’s my list of books to read in the near future:

• Martin Fowler – “Refactoring”
• Web Services Architecture and Its Specifications: Essentials for Understanding WS
• Application Architecture for .NET: Designing Applications and Services

If I had any books on Silverlight or better books on WPF, I would probably add those to the list. For those that are connected to me on LinkedIn, you can look at my Reading List to see what else I have read.

Reading technical books like these is one of my favorite and fastest ways to learn new technologies. I encourage those who want to learn, to find a book on a topic you are interested in and just start reading.