So another Internet meme is making its rounds... and here's how I got it:

Josh Holmes > Michael Eaton > Sarah Dutkiewicz



The questions I have to answer are:

Who has inspired you and how?
What have they inspired you to do?
Who else have they inspired?

There are two guys who came to my mind when I initially thought about this post, and since Mike talked of two guys, I'm going to talk about two of my sources of inspiration as well.

When I graduated from college, I came back to a fairly dead technology market in Cleveland. I ended up answering an ad placed in the local newspaper and got into tech support. A few months after being at the internet service provider, they brought in a new postmaster (Martin Hebrank). Since I did a lot of running between departments, I would stop and chat with Martin every now and then.

Just talking with him and seeing the various things that he worked on outside of mail server stuff (like his work with NOOSS) inspired me to keep up on my programming skills even though my job didn't use it.

Martin has been good at encouraging me on checking things out and staying up on my programming skills. When he heard about my IronPython presentation this past May, he emailed me and sent me links to PyOhio, ClePy, and other python resources.

I have no idea for sure who else he may have inspired, but hopefully they are as enthusiastic and chaotic as us!

---

As I mentioned, there were two guys who came to mind. Martin was my source of inspiration at the ISP. After the ISP, I disappeared into the void known as the 80% and out of the realms of influence. When working in manufacturing, it's easy to fall out of the sphere of influence where the 20% live. After falling in the 80% and hitting a dead end, I knew it was time to follow my heart and get back into programming. So I accepted my current developer job, and thanks to my buddy Russ, I started going to user groups.

Now going to user groups is something that people in the 20% do, but the overachiever in me wanted to come out and do more. However, I didn't see much there that I could do - nothing at that point could inspire me to get involved more. Little did I realize that going to user groups would lead me to another source of inspiration.

At the December user group meeting, Jeff Blankenburg came up and showed us his presentation of cool stuff. Some of the things he showed us really caught my attention, so I looked at them later when I got home. His excitement for technology came across in this presentation, and it had me wondering more. So I read his blog, wondering who this guy was and why he seemed so excited about technology.

In the beginning, there was Twitter. From there, I somehow ended up meeting a lot of people. Then, he mentioned that he read my blog. At that point, I realized that I probably should setup a technical blog - hence how this site came to be. And apparently I hadn't mentioned it once it was setup, because once he found it, he told me that I needed to talk about it more. Then, there was Central Ohio Day of .NET and the poker event afterwards. This poker newbie wasn't sure about it, but he talked me into that too. And the inspiration continued from there...

As quiet and reserved as I tend to be, Jeff somehow saw through all of that. He's been a great source of inspiration and encouragement, and I look forward to seeing what I'll be inspired to do next.

As for inspiring others, maybe he inspired John to get more into Silverlight? I don't know for sure, but the more he gets his name out there, the more chances he has to inspire others.

These guys have a strong passion for technology, and that's what caught my attention and inspired me. They're incredibly brilliant and know how to present technical stuff while keeping it exciting. It's gotten me this far, and I plan on running with this as far as it will take me.

Call to Action

But all this inspiration here makes me wonder... who inspires them? And for some of my Tweeps, who inspires you? So I'm tagging these 5 people to write their "Inspired By" posts:

Jeff Blankenburg

Jennifer Marsman

John Stockton

Joe Fiorini

Mark Gilbert (his response)

Labels: inspiration, inspire, inspired by, Jeff Blankenburg, Martin Hebrank

The following IRC discussion is real. There are no actors in this scene - just real .NET devs chatting on random geeky stuff, which got me thinking...

21:45 <@mjeaton> ok, so given a typical DoDN or Code Camp...what about
 an "intro track".  Have one track (4-5 sessions) dedicated entirely 
to beginners...and when I say beginners, I mean OOP 101, SQL 101, etc.  
Super basic stuff.
21:45 <+nkohari> that's not a bad idea
21:45 <+nkohari> you'd have to market it correctly though
21:46 <+nkohari> people might be embarrassed to attend a 100-level
 track course
21:46 <@sadukie> actually....
21:46 <@sadukie> what about doing a day of 100-level topics for college kids?
21:46 <@sadukie> since .NET isn't really covered well in most
 college classrooms, it'd be a good way to expose them to what's out there

When I was in college, I was involved with the professional computing groups and I managed to also get involved with the Toledo Area Linux Users Group. It helped that they had their meetings right on campus, which made it easy for students to attend. However, the only way we had heard about that group was through the flyers throughout South Engineering. It was never mentioned in any classes or extracurricular meetings.

Being the vice president and later the president of the student ACM chapter, I would have loved to team up with the local user groups to get our members a view of what it's like in the real world. We did mention the linux user group meetings when I was in charge, as the linux group was cool enough to let a Microsoft-based girl like me speak on non-Microsoft topics with only a little ribbing. However, looking at it in retrospect, I think the student group and the linux user group could've interacted a lot more then.

Talking with these guys tonight really got me thinking back to those days. I think it would've been neat to hear presentations from people in the real world on the Microsoft programming side of things and not just from the LUG. However, if there was a user group for the Microsoft devs back then, we never heard about it, and being in academia, we probably wouldn't have known to even look for these things called "user groups". Since our university had some kind of special agreement in place, we had access to Microsoft software at a discounted rate. It would have been nice to meet people who use it in their career so that we could have taken advantage of that benefit better. Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced the aptly named project DreamSpark, which gives students access to software at no charge. (Thanks to Mike for pointing this out to me.) For a user group to reach out to the student population and show them the coolness factors and possibilities with these software packages, the students may be able to take advantage of what they have offered to them. By reaching out to these students, you may also find that they show their 80/20 standings early on - if you reach out early, you may have someone in the 20% stay in the 20% right out of school and wow the community with their talents and innovative ideas.

I think we may have been on to something in our chat. An event of some sort... with 100-level and maybe some 200-level talks... geared to the college kids, so that they know about this thing we have in our world called "community" and the cool and fun things that we can do as developers/architects/DBAs/whatever it is that we do.

I think that this could be pulled off, especially if the community teams up with a student organization - like ACM or IEEE. The student organization should be able to use their ties with the college/university to establish a location for such an event, and we as the community should be able to bring our knowledge and experience to influence them and inspire them. Maybe a Day of .NET College Edition? I'm at a lack for a name, but I think it's something that we as a community should consider.

We should reach out (to the younger community) and touch (influence/inspire) someone!

(Side note: The title was a slogan of Ohio Bell back when I was a kid many moons ago. It just seemed too appropriate in this case. )

Labels: ACM, college, IEEE, influence, inspire, IRC, Mike Eaton, Nate Kohari, Ohio Bell, reach out