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It’s this time of the year, and DDD Sydney is taking place again by end of June 2012 :-)
Yes, it’s “the other” DDD …  Developer Developer Developer!

If you don’t remember the way sessions get chosen in DDD is that call for submissions is first open for everybody for a couple of weeks, then the submitted sessions are listed for public voting for similar time (or so). Anyone can choose up to 10 (TEN) sessions that they want to have available if they decide to register for attending the event. Later, most voted sessions are what gets into the event agenda.

The registration is usually open by voting time (now!), although more actively publicized after the vote is closed.

My Session Proposals

Like last year, I have submitted some session proposals for DDD in the hope to get one of them voted most to deliver within the day.

You can see all submissions and vote for the ones that interest you most from here. I have included a copy of my submissions here in case you find the page hard to read (or just zoom-in a bit).

Too long to read?

Readify, the great consulting company where I work now, is hiring for Senior Developer (Consultant) and Senior Consultant positions all across Australia, and sponsors work visa for accepted international applications. You can apply here: http://bit.ly/readify-openings.
You don’t have to mention this post (but I’ll be happy of you do of course)

Working at Readify, what’s it’s like

Through blog, twitter stream, and more, you probably saw me talk about how awesome it is to work here at Readify. Being in the same company with Tatham Oddie (the creator of WebformsMVC and tons of other things, and frequent speaker in MIX and other events), Richard Banks (the father of ALT.NET Sydney, and great Agile master), Krzysztof Kozmic (the Castle Windsor guy), Philip Leonardo (the creator of LinFu dynamic proxy, used by default in NHibernate),, and .. the list is so long actually, and I have missed most of them…

Not just that, through my work at Readify, I have had the chance to play with a lot of technologies and frameworks. Windows Azure, OData, WebformsMVP, Windsor, Autofac, SQL Server 2008 R2, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, jQuery UI, knockoutJS, HTML 5, CSS3, and have all sorts of geeky conversations about the newest hypes like Windows 8 and VS 11. 

For many years, people used to laugh at the World End 2012 prophecy. This year, people’s joke was that we’d be very lucky if we manage to get to the end of 2011 even!
Yeah, 2011 is such a bloody, surprising, rich, optimistic, pessimistic, and loaded year. So many events, so many famous deaths, so much fire, so much energy, and indeed, so much hope.

Seems we are lucky anyway. We’re only less than two weeks close get into 2012, Many have either started their holidays already, or just about to.
Unless you believe that year is the end of the world truly (no, not discussing it even!), that alone should make you optimistic :-)

The title “Year O’clock” is not mine, it’s my colleague, Steven Nagy. I may talk about the origin of the name later, for now, let’s say it’s a friendly internal new year’s resolutions cheer-up message.
Few days after I responded to it, I thought I’d share my response with you too, after removing some customer identifying parts and adding some context to a few parts of course.

The Year O’clock Email:

Just Three Questions

1. Work related highlights for the year

   • Been across 4 different big clients in the same year. Really enjoyed them all

This is copied from one of my replies in WebHostingTalk. Thought it might be useful for GuruStop readers too.

The purpose of the reply was to provide a review to Burst.NET, my budget VPS hosting (with some references to a premium (yet premium) VPS, SoftSys Hosting), but the real value of the reply, is to help give realistic expectations about various differences when deciding to choose a "good" budget VPS Windows hosting.

The Review

Generally speaking as a "current" customer with Burst.NET. Their equation is:
Budget Price = Good Service + Enough Support + Poor SLA

So, most of the time the server is working, most of the time it’s working, it works really fast (compared to my chosen specs, 1.5GB RAM Windows), the network also is really nice especially their West Coast (LA) location.

Given that, sometimes the VPS is slow, sometimes too slow, once it was slow that was unusable.

When the server is just slow, the services hosted on it didn’t seem to be much affected, when the server is too slow or reaches the unusable state, I get between 5 minutes to 2 hours downtime (happened only once).

While I was doing some timezone stuff (that will likely have its own post), I came across some gotachas browser around working with date and time in JavaScript (blame the browsers, not JS itself):

1. There are very nice ISO standards to model date and time, their support is flaky, especially in, yes, IE. So, if you want to use them, you need a library that parses your standard and deal with it nicely (yes, there are some).
2. If you try to format dates with dd/mm/yyy instead of mm/dd/yyyy (the American standard), browsers will will play messy, Some methods will simply invert the values (They will think the day 30 is June, maybe as 30-12-12=6, and some methods may fail to parse getting you NaNs and "Invalid Date"s getting values of fields and trying to convert to string). They’re not broken in consistent way I think.
   The important note is that setting language preferences in browsers to "not" include English (US) does not change this.
3. The "toString()" implementation of date objects in browsers is not exactly the same. For example, IE might try saying "UTC+1100 2010" at the end for EAST with daylight saving on, while Chrome will say "AUS Eastern Daylight Time".