Here's a few upcoming local events that you might be interested in. I think that being a good developer is a start, but getting involved in the local developer community - whatever language or OS you're into - really helps make a technologist more well-rounded.

• Tonight at 6:30pm at the Microsoft Portland Office Jason Mauer will be talking about XNA Game Studio Express. I'm watching Z tonight so I'll stop by to give away a Wrox Box and hang out until he cries.
  • "XNA is the future of game development with all the comforts of managed code, and it's here today for the PC and Xbox 360. Come see how much easier XNA makes it to build a game for Windows, and run it on your 360 in the living room."
• Tues, Feb 6th at 7:30am at the Governor Hotel in Portland, I'll be on a panel discussing "Why Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) is Important to Your Product Success" with Joe Daly, Director of SOA at Intel and Gordon Ferlitsch (my old boss), VP of Technology at Transcore. Should be a spirited (!) talk and you'll still make it to work on time.
• Saturday, Feb 10th at 10:00am at Willamette University in Salem, there's an event that's open to the public on Future Potential in Computing. While this event is primary focused on getting college students to consider a career in geekery, check out folks (plus me) that are on the panel and presenting. It might be worth the short drive down from Portland and making a day of it, we are. Don't tell anyone I only have a B.S. in Software Engineering.
  • Paul E. McKenney - Distinguished Engineer at IBM
  • Kathleen O'Reilly - Computer Animator from LAIKA
  • Karen Ward, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor of Computer Science in UP's School of Engineering
  • Mike Bailey, Ph.D. - Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State
• Thu, Feb 15th at 11:30am at Microsoft's Portland Office, Stuart Celarier and I will be talking about CardSpace and the Laws of Identity. Stuart has created an excellent deck on this topic with some great Beyond Bullets designs that really lend themselves to the topic. Hopefully I'll have some demos of DasBlog running CardSpace along for the ride.

See you there!