Rion.IO

Family++; Quiet Around Here.

Rion Williams -

As you may have noticed, things have been a bit quite over the past few months on here but I can honestly say that life itself has not been. I’ve been performing a very delicate balancing act between work, community things and most important of all, my personal life.

I’ll preface this with the fact that I have had very little sleep, so bear with me if I begin to ramble.

Family++;

My wife and I are expecting our first child in May, so I have been hustling and bustling to roll out the latest changes to our house prior to the baby’s coming release. There were lots of bug fixes, major re-factoring and architectural changes and I am sure that all of these will be thoroughly run through their paces in the coming months. I’m incredibly excited at the opportunity to be a parent and I look forward to all of the challenges, joys and literal “oh shit” moments that I have to look forward to.

Career++;

My day job has kept me quite busy as well. We have been working on wrapping up quite a few projects at my company and preparing for releases across a wide variety of new clients. We have been digging into all sorts of new things within our testing environments such as Visual Studio 2015, .NET 5 and other bleeding-edge technologies, so it’s a really exciting time.

Constantly learning, evolving and challenging yourself is a sure fire way to not get left behind in our extraordinarily fast-paced field and having an employer that is willing to take those risks and plunges with you is something to cherish.

Community++;

While it’s something that I really enjoy, blogging can be time consuming. Hours of picking a topic, developing some interesting and useful things to say about it and then wrapping everything together and clicking “Publish”; it’s tough. I’ve spent the majority of my time over at the ASP.NET Forums as usual. I suppose the thing that keeps drawing me back is the instant gratification (i.e. user asks question, I answer question, everybody wins), the community and overall the format of the forums.

A few other community-related things that may have pulled me away from here :

  • Microsoft MVP PGI Events – These events are one of the biggest perks of the Microsoft MVP program. They provide opportunities for developers to interact with Microsoft teams and see many of the things that they are working on and providing feedback. If you are an MVP and you aren’t taking advantage of these, I would highly encourage you to.
  • Guest Articles – I’ve been approached by a few magazines, publishers and other blogs to write a few articles regarding .NET and development in general and I thought I would mix things up and accept a few. Much like writing a blog post, these are likely to be seen by a much larger audience and thus, require quite a bit more bandwidth allocation on my part.
  • Mentoring – While this usually doesn’t take too much out of my time, I’ve taken on a handful of developers as a mentor and I provide assistance and advice whenever I can. Sometimes its a few hours a month, sometimes it can be more than that in a week, but it’s not about the time, it’s about making a difference.

What Next?

I have quite a few articles for the site waiting in the wings and some that have yet to be written, but I’ll get them out eventually. You might also notice a few changes around the site as well, as WordPress on Azure is turning out to be quite a bit more unwieldy than I once thought. If you have any suggestions or recommendations for a blog platform, I’m always all ears.

Anyways, thanks for reading.