70-480 Certification

Today I received my Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Specialist, code 70-480 Microsoft certification. Best of all it was absolutely free, and still is if you get to work now. I thought it would be useful to some of you if I shared some of the resources I used.

Channel 9’s Jump Start series is a very good introduction, although I wouldn’t say it is enough. It doesn’t cover JavaScript objects, inheritance, WebSockets, Geolocation and some other topics. Another helpful resource is Chris’s blog post that tries to provide links for each measured skill defined in the exams description.

In my opinion the best way to prepare, and the one that helped me the most is Pluralsight’s HTML5 content. I recommend the following courses:

• HTML5 Fundamentals
• HTML5 Advanced Topics
• Using HTML5 and CSS3
• JavaScript for C# Developers
• CSS3

I would not promise that you will ace the exam if you go through all these resources, but if you also have some experience with your own applications you have a pretty good chance.

As a side note ( maybe I should have used the <aside> element for this 🙂 ) I already got to put my new knowledge to good use. You know how there’s sometimes that YouTube music video that you would like to listen to over and over? Unfortunately YouTube does not provide a way to automatically restart the video when finished. As luck would have it however, YouTube does use the HTML5 video element. You can open up the browsers developer tools, look up the video element (of course you need a browser that supports the new HTML5 Media API) and add a loop=”loop” attribute. This will bend YouTube to your will.

Hope this gives some of you the push you need to get out there and get certified.

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ITCamp 2012

I had the great opportunity to be a Speaker at ITCamp 2012. Met lots of interesting people like Lino Tadros, Tim Huckaby and Raffaele Rialdi. Hope to see them soon at other conferences. I thank all the attendees of my talk.

My slide deck from the talk can be found below.

Building single page, modular html5 applications for PC and Mobile

View more PowerPoint from Lorant Domokos

First Post

Hey.

I never liked blogs where someone just yaps about anything and everything, so I really don’t want to become one of them. I created this blog for two simple reasons:

1. In the software development field anyone who is someone has to have a well-managed personal brand. Scott Hanselman convinced me of this. Also, applying for a job is not what it used to be. Your resume nowadays is only a small part of the image you are presenting to a possible employer. There is a huge amount of information available on you on the internet and a modern-day employer knows how to take advantage of it. It is an arms race…you also have to be able to manage that information, present it in such a way that it reflects good on you.
2. I love to learn new stuff, to experiment with technology and learn to use what I learned according to best practices. All of this gives you even more joy when you share it with someone else and see their eyes light up. That is why I joined the MSP program and started this blog.

Everything you do can be done so that it respects the absolute minimal requirements or it can be done properly. This applies in two ways to this post.

I could have written a simple “Hello World!” post but that would have been somewhat meaningless. I wanted to share something valuable from the get-go. Also I could have made a blog that has the bare minimum functionality, but I chose to make it as functional and as well crafted as I could for a beginner. Here is where these two points converge: I looked around for a blog post about blogging and found a really interesting one that I want to share with you by Scott Hanselman.

Scott is a guru of sorts and I really like his view on things. He inspires me am probably a whole lot of other people. There is much to learn from him. I believe that there are 4 types of people around:

• people that just talk rubbish
• people that everyone gathers around an listens to when they talk
• people that when they open their mouth should be immediately recorded
• people whose words should be etched in stone because recordings are not permanent enough

Scott might just be one of the 4th kind, but he sure as hell is at least one of the 3rd.

But to the point now. The advice I followed to create my blog together with the motivation, and recommend everyone else to at least consider, can be found at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/FoundVideoSocialNetworkingForDevelopersAndMakingYourBlogSuckLess.aspx as recorded talks or http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BlogInteresting32WaysToKeepYourBlogFromSucking.aspx as a post. I also found this more recent Channel9 (also a great resource to learn) video: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/kreekman/TechDays-2010-Making-your-blog-suck-less. There is much to learn from these resources for us dev folks.

Hope this first post wasn’t to bad. Please comment on it and rate. I will try to follow the pointers you give me.

And so I got the stone rolling…where will it lead?