I was an honored to speak at the West Michigan Day of .NET (WMDoDN) last weekend. I did two new talks, even though only one of them was scheduled. Brian Prince had been doing a great “Soft Skills, Not Just for Humans” talk for a lot of different user groups and Day of .NETs. It’s a talk that’s been met with great success and acclaim. It’s point is to help the attendees grow in their careers as much as they do in their technology space. It’s a great session and I wish that I had thought of it first. Brian, very unfortunately, got sick at the last minute and couldn’t make it so I pitched in and gave his talk. It was a lot of fun. As Dan Rigsby points out in his blog post, I wasn’t as polished as Brian was but I did a decent job. I really need to hire Dan to come take notes in all of my presentations – check out the notes he took in mine and then go read the rest of his posts, like the ArcReady post and so on.

Since it’s my presentation – I don’t feel bad pasting Dan’s notes here (The sub bullets are from me in this post):

• Mentoring: Always have a mentor.  In fact get 3+. Josh attended the toastmaster’s club to find speaking mentors
• I’ll add here that this is the #1 tip that you can take away.
• Manage your Career: You are your business.  Your employer just happens to be the person paying you to do your job right now.
• That quote was from Dianne Marsh
• Creativity: Like myself Josh doesn’t have a CS degree and it does give us a creative edge because we think outside of the box.  This is true for everyone.  Stay creative and think in other ways.  Keep a log or use something like OneNote or a notepad.
• I use personal WIKIs. Got that tip from Jim Holmes (no relation but I’d claim him if I could)
• Brain Storming: Josh asked the question, “If you have an infinite supply of bricks, how would you raise money for your user group, school, or church”.  The audience threw out some of the standard responses, but
• 3 Illegal Topics to Talk About: Sex, Politics, and Religion – don’t talk about these at work, just don’t do it, unless the setting is totally appropriate.
• AMEN!
• Don’t Assume all People Above you are Idiots: Sometimes they aren’t the smartest people, but there is a reason they have their position.  They are bringing something to the table and at the very least have power and control.
• Communication Skills: Communicate like a human, not like an alien.  Know your audience: geek talk is ok only if all people are geeks.
• Know when to say “I don’t know”: It’s ok not to know everything, and if you give wrong answers, you lose all respect.  Don’t be an encyclopedia, be the index.
• Ask Open Ended Questions: If people just answer Yes/No you never really learn much
• Don’t Take Reactions Personally: People don’t always mean what you think.  Especially in things like emails.  Some people come off more rigid than others as well.
• Be an Active Listener: Don’t have distractions, ask smart questions, don’t multi-task in your head.  Take what a person says and rephrase it back to them, and if they can confirm that, then you can answer the question.  Also avoid filler words, enjoy the silence.
• Take Notes: Notes don’t have to be a distraction, but write down things as much as you can.
• Tape Yourself: learn to find the filler words in your presentations and how you can improve yourself.
• Avoid Bad Language:  There is no need for it.
• Integrity & Honesty:  always tell the truth and remember that its hard to get respect back.
• Everything you know today will be obsolete in 2 years: which is true from a technology standpoint, but soft skills will always be with you.  So eat like a bird and poop like an elephant.

Again, thank’s Dan for those great notes.

After that, I did my Architecting for the RIA which morphed into a best practices talk. It was the first time that I’ve done that talk, but I really dig it so you should expect to see it more often. I’ll get the slides posted relatively soon.

Michael Eaton did a walk-through of LightReader which is a Silverlight RSS Aggregator that he and I are working on. To date I’ve given a lot of architectural advice, but I’m planning to spend some time digging in and helping build out the skinning and so on over the next couple of weeks. Feel free to pitch in.

It was great to see all the enthusiasm in the past couple of Day of .NETs that I’ve been to. I love this community and how it’s grown over the past 6 years that I’ve been active in it. (Wow, has it really been 6 years????)

A while back I posted about Scott Hanselman‘s 32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking post. At some point later, I created a slide deck to tell the story. Since then, I’ve given the presentation a few places and Scott even borrowed the deck to do a presentation to a number of the Developer Evangelists in the US.

Anyway, here’s the deck that I created…

| View | Upload your own

See the original post at 32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking by Scott Hanselman

Ok, that’s a lie – I already moved my feed a LONG (not quite a year ago) time ago.

My new feed is http://rss.joshholmes.com/joshholmes.

But in an effort not to disrupt everyone, I’ve left my old RSS feed in place. This is not hard to do but unfortunately, those that are still subscribed to the old feed make it difficult to leverage some of the reasons that I moved the feed in the first place.

I moved it for a number of reasons

• Allows me to do a little bit better job of statistics and the like (it’s actually being hosted by another service that does that for me)
• Allows me to change out my blog engine or host with relative transparency
• Allows me to do some interesting things with caching or offloading to a separate server
• And I’m sure that there are other good reasons as well

Do me a favor, if you get a chance and move your RSS subscription if you’re still subscribed to the old feed.

BTW – for those of you who are still subscribed to the old feed – Thanks for sticking with me this long!

As stated, I’m addicted to twitter. There are still a ton of my friends and co-workers that don’t get it. I saw this on Giovanni Gallucci‘s blog. It does a better job of explaining twitter than most things that I’ve seen.

There’s not really anything else to add other than – man I wish I had the time and talent to do videos like this.

It’s been a long time coming but I finally decided to put a few ads on my blog. Basically, I’m hoping to make enough money to cover hosting.

I’ve thought about doing this for a while and have held out until for for a number of reasons.

A large part of it is that I don’t want to look like Nascar. I’ve been trying to figure out what the right mix is and how much real estate I should devote to it.

One of the huge blocking issues has been that I didn’t have any control over the ads that some company might be posting on my we site. I’m joining the Lounge by Infozerk because it’s run by James Avery, a guy that I trust, and his ads are targeted at a particular developer segmentation and they are screened personally by him. That’s a combination that I like.

The other thing that I like a lot about the Lounge is that I’m in a “room” with a lot of other developers with similar topics and thoughts. This is a great set of guys that includes Jim Holmes (no relation but I’d be proud to claim him), Steven Harman (Fellow geek and ALT.NET enthusiast), Michael Eaton (Great speaker and consultant from Michigan) and so on. This means that we can get together and decide not to allow a particular advertiser. That’s cool. It also means that these advertisers are able to look at the set of people that they are sponsoring and make intelligent decisions about their audience and if they are the right fit. I like that as well. It’s also good because I’m basically in a room with a lot of my blogroll…

Quick summary:

• Payment will cover my hosting costs at least
• The advertisers are carefully screened and are all companies that I’m happy to support on my blog
• The network is carefully screened and consists of many people I respect in the development community
• James Avery is running it and will make sure the other three continue to be true

Now, to be honest, I’m not in the “big boy room” with Haack, Jon Galloway and the like but I’m in with good company.

All in all, I think that the Lounge is a good fit for me. High quality advertisers and high quality publishers associated with it.

James posted about it at Lounge Update : Infozerk Inc.

<update>The original post had Hanselman in it but Avery pointed out that Hanselman is not advertising through the Lounge so he’s not one of the guys in the “big boy room” at the Lounge either. I should have done the update post rather than an edit – and Hanselman has rightly called me out on that in email.</update>

Topic: Principles of Software + Services: Design, Development and Deployment

Abstract: The move to service-orientation is well underway, both inside enterprises, ISV’s and on the Internet. What role does traditional software play in a world of on-line services? In particular, how is Microsoft approaching the combination of software plus services? This presentation provides an overview of this area, giving an introduction to and a perspective on this emerging combination.

Bio: David Chappell is Principal of Chappell & Associates (www.davidchappell.com) in San Francisco, California. David has been the keynote speaker for dozens of conferences and events in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. His popular seminars have been attended by tens of thousands of developers, architects, and decision makers in forty countries. David’s books have been translated into ten languages and used regularly in courses at MIT, ETH Zurich, and many other universities. In his consulting practice, he has helped clients such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Stanford University, and Target Corporation adopt new technologies, market new products, train their sales staffs, and create business plans.

Who Should Attend?

Anyone responsible for application architecture, software design,  setting technology direction or those responsible for testing and implementing SaaS systems.   

Southfield, MI

May 13, 2008 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Microsoft Corporation
1000 Town Center, Suite 1930
Southfield, MI 48075

Register

Witty is a free, open source Twitter client for Windows Vista and XP powered by the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
Project Name: Witty
Project site: http://code.google.com/p/wittytwitter/
Language(s): C#, WPF
License: New BSD License
Source Host: Google code
Documentation: FAQ
Discussion Group: WittyTwitter
Owner: Alan Le

I have a stated and known addition to Twitter. And I’ve tried a LOT of different clients for it. Check out http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps for a huge list of apps that are out there. I started out using SMS but that became overwhelming pretty quickly. I have used Twadget, TeleTwitter, TwittIt, Twitter-Sync (Yahoo Messenger client), Twhirl and Snitter.

Witty, however, has been one that have kept my eye on for quite a while. It’s an open source project being worked on by Alan Le, Jon Galloway, Scott Koon, Keith Elder and a couple of other good guys.

It’s written in C# and WPF. It’s been a pleasure to watch it going from fairly rough to slick, stable and usable. The guys have gone back through the original and done a ton of refactoring and error handling to get it to the point that it is now.

Witty includes the following functionality: (from the project site)

• View recent Twitter statuses from the people you follow (auto-refreshing)
• View recent replies to you
• View a specific user’s timeline
• Update your twitter status
• View and respond to Direct Messages
• Links will open in the user’s default browser

Keith Elder hosts a ClickOnce installer that will keep you up to date as they continue to make updates and improvements. This is my preferred way to install it because it ensures that I’m up to date and it’s usually a very stable build. Unfortunately, the extra skins that are supposed to come with it don’t ship in the ClickOnce installer. There’s a bug in the skinning and they don’t load right. Alan Le is working on it and is refactoring the skinning to load the URI (uniform resource indicator) from an embedded resource file rather than individual files. Good advice from this article – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970069.aspx.

Licensed under the New BSD License, you are allowed to take the source and/or binaries and redistribute as long as you retain the copyright.

Feel free to jump in and discuss on the google group or

Witty Twitter 0.1.8.3 Published

Mel Grubb read my post on Public Speaking and Movement onstage and inspired me to write this post with his comments.

“I think a good background in stagecraft could benefit a lot of public speakers. Simple things like basic blocking, “cheating” your face toward the audience, finding and eliminating your particular “tics” or problem words, etc. Speakers who say “basically” more than once every five minutes drive me up a wall.  ‘Essentially’ is even worse.” – Mel Grubb in comments and email.

He struck another of my nerves. I was on a conference call just yesterday with people that will go unnamed partly because I don’t want to call out anyone (don’t worry it’s no one local) and partly because I can’t remember who was talking or what they were talking about because I was so distracted. I IMed with Larry Clarkin about it and this is a snip of the conversation.

Josh Holmes‎‎:
I’m really hoping that he’ll really use the word really to really make a really good point soon.

‎‎Larry Clarkin‎‎:
really?

‎‎Josh Holmes‎‎:
Really really…

My wife actually reminded me of a story from a class that she took where the professor used Um and Ah non-stop. There was at least one lecture where they focused on counting the number of Um and Ah’s that he used rather than listening to the presentation.

The primary reason that speakers fall back on these type of words is that they are used to fill the air while the speaker is constructing the next sentence in their head. Even though most speakers are terrified of it, Silence is still ok. Some call it Golden. There’s a huge difference between dead air and silence. Dead air is when nobody is saying or thinking anything. Silence is when it’s quiet.

In addition to my background in theatre, I was a member of a ToastMasters International for 4 years. In fact, I was president of my chapter for a year. As an organization, they have a great curriculum for teaching people the basics of speaking. While we, including me, have been obsessed with the format of the slide deck, they have been continuing to educate great speakers by focusing on delivery and real speech writing. There’s a series of talks that you have to give. Some of these are using props. Some are very serious and dramatic. Others are humorous speeches. Side note – I actually took second in a regional humorous speech competition with a speech about the plight of the thumbless in America.

One of the components of a Toastmaster meeting is an “Ah Counter”. This is a person who sits in the back of the room and listens for filler or crutch words. When they hear these, they take a note and they ring a bell. It’s the most aggravating thing in the world! The first talk that I did there, despite my background in theatre, sounded like a parade.

“Um, ah, so it’s like, um, well, you know a thing that you, ah, might basically find in, um, your, ah, backyard” – Josh Holmes in one of his first public speeches.

You might think I’m joking but you’ve done it too! There were more filler words in my talk than content. When I realized that it was astounding. After a while, you start consciously weeding out those filler words. You will be at lunch somewhere and be ringing that bell yourself inside your head. At some point later, you have eliminated most of them from your vocabulary. Unfortunately, I’ve slipped in the 9 years that I’ve been away from ToastMasters International. I’ve started noticing that I’ll start repeating words in my speech pattern. I’ve started answering questions with “Sooo, the answer to that question is…”. I have got to stop! It’s annoying me. I can’t imagine what it’s doing to you listening to me.

I hope that you’ll take this to heart and start listening to yourself speak. First, look for a ToastMasters’ club near you with their handy meeting locator. There are 10 clubs within 20 miles of my house and I live in the sticks. If you can’t get to ToastMasters, or really even if you can, you should tape your sessions and review them. Watch for movement, speech and more. Make notes and practice with those notes in hand.

This will help you be a better speaker. Even if it’s not obvious to you, two things will happen. First, you’ll be able to say more in less time and second, people will focus on your message rather than your quirks.

Movement when speaking is very important.

“Acting is, therefore, the process of illustrating the dramatic action – through activity. Activity is the how; action is the what” – Play Directing by Frances Hodges

For those of you who don’t know, I was a theatre major in college. Specifically, I studied directing. I was a decent actor but directing was what I really enjoyed from light design to directing actors and the full blown play. For a ton of reasons, I ended up with an English degree with a minor in Drama and a minor in Communications.

Recently, I was asked to critique a talk by a friend of mine. One of the pieces of feedback that I gave him was that he wanders while speaking. I expressed it as it drove me nuts, but I didn’t really go into detail so I’m going to do that here.

I chose the word wanders for a reason. I started thinking about how I would have directed the talk if it were a play and I was directing him. The blocking (movement that the director lays out for the actor) is very important as it emphasizes the meaning of what’s being said (or not said) at the moment. One of the many exercises that actors and directors go through when preparing with a script is to tear apart the script line by line, sentence by sentence and assign verbs to those lines. Every line in the script has a verb and action.

“If you can sense the action, the verb will come easily to you” – Play Directing by Frances Hodges

Thinking about the first quote – if the action is the what, the action is what you are trying to get the other person (in public speaking this is the audience) to do or feel. The activity (movement) is how you conveying that to the audience. When you are giving a talk, you are typically trying to convince the audience of your ideas and thoughts around the given topic. To do that, you have to be careful about how you convey your thoughts on stage. Think carefully about each thing that you are saying and what you are trying to get the audience to do or feel with that and what verb and activity should go with that. Are you going to threaten the audience? Retreat from the audience? Are you going to ignore, shame, beg, torment, entrance, lead, relax, motivate, berate the audience? These are verbs and you should think about everything that you say in a talk as conveying some verb. Once you understand the Action and Verb, the Activity, read walking or gesture or other visible motion, that you make on stage will become obvious. Each and every activity is there to illustrate the verb to the audience. It’s extraordinarily difficult to motivate an audience while sitting. On the other hand, if you are leaning back against the front of the table, it becomes easier to relax the audience.

The reality is that it’s the same in public speaking. It kills me to see someone walking backwards or sideways or heading back to the podium when they are making a big point. What this says (yells, screams…) to the audience is that they don’t believe in this point because they are retreating from the audience. As this poor soul gets to the podium and finish the point as they get there – right when they put a large obstacle between themselves and the audience. These are not things that the typical audience member will consciously pick up on, but they will on a subconscious level. If they didn’t, directors could go home and actors would wonder aimlessly all over the set. When someone is pacing aimlessly back and forth on stage, they are wandering or lost in thought and pontificating so the audience will automatically start to wander in their thought train as well.

The solution is to block out your session. In other words, choreograph your talk so that your movements match the verbs that you’re trying to convey. I’m not going to pretend that this is easy. Especially since many talks have a decent amount of improvisation in them. The trick is to figure out what your big points are and make sure that you nail those.

One way to get started is to pick two spots that you are allowed to be at in the room. Call them home and away. Home will be placed somewhere in the middle of the stage with easy access to your laptop and your water. Away will be closer to the audience and slightly to the right or left of center of the stage. While you are at home – pretend that you a playing basketball and you have to keep one foot planted. You can move your upper body all that you want to but the lower body has to stay still. Only after you have decided to really make a point will you start moving and it will always be movement the the away spot and it’s the build up to a point. While making your point, plant on the away spot with both feet square to the audience, shoulders back and speak clearly in a loud firm voice. Hold that position for as long as you need to for the point to really sink in. I’ll often make a point and then wait 10 or more seconds for it to sink in. Maybe I’ll even wander back to “home” and take a drink while letting it sink in. And then you slide back home to reset before your next point.

As you get comfortable with that you can start getting fancier and start doing more and more.