Getting started with Curah!

I must admit that I had never heard of Curah! from Microsoft until a few weeks ago. Now that I have created my own account and played around with it I can see the potential of it.

Curah! allows you to “Curate the web and share what you know,” according to Microsoft. It is a portal to both share and discover collections of technical content. The premised is simple. You sign in at http://curah.microsoft.com with your Microsoft account and create a profile. Your profile and picture act as a sort of advertisement for your curations. People can look at your background to see if you have knowledge of the areas you are curating.

A curation is designed to target common user questions. It contains a title, description and tags. It also has links to websites, blog posts, videos, infographics, and basically anything else you want to share with others on your topic. You can include whatever you think people will need to learn about the subject. The links can be resources that you used to learn or they can be items you wish you knew about when you were learning your subject.

Curations are easy to create and once they are published become a collection of annotated links available for all to see. Your name remains on the curation. I created three curations easily enough and they were published in no time. I focused on topics I knew well and in the end I built curations on Application Insights, Azure eBooks, and .NET User Groups in Ontario. All of my curations can be seen under my profile.

If you only wish to use the site for technical content research then you do not need an account. You can search for any topic and it will scan curations by description and title. You can also filter curations by their tags.

So, give Curah! a try – either if you are looking to find a resource or if you would like to create your own curations to share your expertise.

Being a Technical Reviewer

I was contacted last month by UK publishing house Packt Publishing about being a Technical Reviewer for their recently-published book WordPress Mobile Applications with PhoneGap (ISBN: 1849519862). I accepted even though I did not know a lot about the subject. However, the whole experience was a learning process for me in terms of both how the publishing world works and about the technologies I was reviewing.

The book is positioned as a way to:

• Discover how we can leverage WordPress as a content management system and serve content to mobile apps by exposing its API
• Learn how to build geolocation mobile applications using WordPress and PhoneGap
• Step-by-step instructions on how you can make use of jQuery and jQuery mobile to provide an interface between WordPress and your PhoneGap app

The reviewing process is pretty straightforward. The chapters are sent to you by email as the book is being written and they are usually in Microsoft Word format. The chapters are early drafts and usually contain typos and formatting errors. Eventually those will be corrected by the book’s editors. Your job is to review the code and text for technical accuracy. You also make sure the chapter structure is logical and easy to follow for readers. Any corrections/clarifications/notes you make are placed in Comment tags as you do not edit the text directly. After you finish your review you then fill out an opinion questionnaire about the chapter you just read. The editors want to know what you would like to see more of, less of, if there were important topics that were missed and your overall score out of 10.

If you are interested in being a Technical Reviewer for Packt you can check out their Reviewing for Packt information page. Although you do not get paid to be a reviewer you will receive acknowledgement on both the “Credits” page and the “About The Reviewers” page where they will include a short biography about you. This is a great promotional tool for you as you can mention your blog/website address and Twitter accounts if you wish. As well, you will receive both a paper copy and an eBook copy of the book you reviewed. You will also get an eBook copy of any other book in their catalogue.

Being a Technical Reviewer is a great way to learn more about a topic and to see how the publishing industry works. It is also a neat way to see how books are put together and you can learn many useful writing tips which will help your writing in other areas including making you a better blogger. It will also especially help if you are interested in writing a technical book in the future. As a Technical Reviewer you will gain a publishing credit and it might just make your book proposal that much more enticing to prospective editors.

Creating a developer’s blog

This post is Day #3 in a series called Personal Branding for Software Developers.

In this next article in my series on personal branding I want to talk about the first item every developer should have in their toolbox – a blog. I say the word blog but what I really mean is a website about your professional life. I will discuss the differences below and why a site is so important.

A professional blog or website allows you talk about all the things you find interesting, frustrating or funny about your profession. This site should be exclusively about your work as a software developer. In trying to project a professional image I would not suddenly take your site about funny cat photos and start promoting it as your professional site. While your colleagues might find this amusing the HR person who Google’s your name will probably not.

So, you know you need a blog/site but you are unsure of where to start. Now because we are software or web developers you think ahhh… I got a leg up on everyone else. I can create my own site. Not so fast. You might be a web developer but how are your design skills? Are they just OK or do they really rock everyone’s world? The role of a web developer has changed over the years and specialization has come to the fore. Designers should definitely develop their own sites. Developers who are design challenged like myself should leave it to the professionals.

If you would rather focus on your site’s content instead of its design then you can use a service like Blogger or WordPress.com. There are also other sites like Squarespace that provide templates to create a personal site.

As with either method there are some trade-offs you need to explore. With a personal site that you create and maintain you can generally have your own domain name. It is still impressive to see JoeSchmo.com as someone’s personal site. You can go there and learn all about them. If you code and maintain your own site it shows people that you have the level of technical proficiency to do these tasks. However you will need to find someplace to host your site. It could be hosted by you or through a third party. Whatever you choose you will need to factor in the cost of the domain plus the hosting fees.

If you use a site like WordPress you can buy your own domain and host it there but more likely you are going to go for the free option. So your domain will be something like YOURNAME.wordpress.com. While this is not a bad thing you do not get the instant name recognition you do with a personal domain. However, where these sites shine is that you get their themes and page layouts to generate a unique UI in a short amount of time. You also get a platform to create new pages and posts quickly. Plus there are lots of plugins like polls, Twitter feeds and word clouds of article tags that you can add to your site to provide an extensive amount of user interaction.

With whatever method you choose you will be providing information about yourself and demonstrating your knowledge about the topic you have chosen to write about. The site can serve as a centre for information about you. You can post a resume or you can share source code of some projects that you worked on. In your blog you can talk about methods or workarounds that you learned to solve certain coding problems. Whatever it is you are writing about the blog serves as a forum where you can establish yourself as an expert. You can demonstrate here that you can learn and that you have a willingness to share your knowledge – an important attribute for team leaders. It also allows you so showcase your skills and shows that you can communicate your thoughts in a professional manner.

However, the site is not just a demonstration of your writing skills. It can also act as a way to promote all of the things you have done on the internet. You can list the websites you have built, the open source projects you have contributed to, the apps you have built and added to mobile marketplaces. You could also list links to your profiles on GitHub, Stack Overflow, CodePlex, etc. You want to demonstrate that you are an active programmer and that you are contributing to the internet.

Finally, when you have your name on your site or blog you start creating an online presence for yourself. The blog and its contents will be indexed by Google. This means when people search your name you will start showing up. You will also start to appear in searches when they look for items related to your field of specialty. This connection can quickly establish you as an expert. With your name now out there you also want to keep people coming back. Thus, content is king. Creating the blog is in some ways the easy part. Maintaining it and coming up with fresh content is going to be the tricky part as time goes by.