Transition : Developer to Manager - St. Louis Day of .Net

August 3rd, 2012, I presented a talk at St. Louis Day of .Net. The topic was about my experience transitioning from a developer to a manager.  What I tried to do was to provide some guidelines and provided advise based on what I went through. This is really a difficult topic to present, unlike a technology talk (and to be clear, I am NOT implying that technology talks are easy). There are no "better" way of doing things, in this case, making the transition. I consider the topic of this talk more on the soft skill side.

I was shocked to see that there were so many interest in this talk. All the seats were filled and there were quite a few people were left standing at the back. I was thrilled to see that there were a lot of discussions and questions in the talk. There were a lot of tough and yet great questions.

One of thing that I noticed was that there were quite a few folks that were taking pictures when I brought up the slides of the list of books. And I also had a few folks that came up to me afterwards asking to see the list again. So, here it is. I hope you will find this list a good start and if you have other books that you have personally read and like, please feel free to email me at parkite@gmail.com or leave me a message on this post.

• One minute manager - Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
• How to win friends & influence people - Dale Carnegie
• Change your questions, change your life - Marilee Adams
• The three signs of a miserable job - Patrick Lencioni
• 7 habits of highly effective people - Steven Covey
• QBQ! The question behind the question - John G Miller

I have also read a few other books from Kenneth Blanchard. They are a very easy read and provided me  a lot of information that I have found very useful.

For those of you who attended my talk at St. Louis Day of .Net, I hope that I was able to provide some help in your quest. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I hope to be able to do this talk again in the near future.

St. Louis Day of .Net 2012

St. Louis Day of .Net once again, was held at the Ameristar Casino in St. Charles, MO. This year was a three day event. The first day was a day of pre-compilers with topics covering Windows 8, Azure, TFS, and many others. That evening, Unhandled Exception officially kicked off the event with a great concert. 

Overall, this event was definitely better than last year. The number of attendees grew to a little over 900, the food was great, helpful volunteers, great entertainment, and the location was fabulous. The staff at Ameristar St. Charles were friendly and they provided great service. 

Once again, kudos to the organizers and volunteers of the event. I look forward to another great conference next year.