August 2007 - Blake Niemyjski

Today was my last day at Telligent as many of you already know. During this internship I learned many things that one can never learn by watching the television or going to college. Here are a few things I learned from some certain individuals:

• How to act in a corporate environment (I would like to see college teach that!)
• How to express my ideas in a more appealing way.
• Keep my desk nailed and chained to the floor.

 I have compiled a list of reasons why I recommend anyone to work at Telligent:

1)      The people at Telligent have no EGO. So feel free to go up to any employee and ask them a question or if they would like to play a game of ping pong.

2)      You will never have to write a line of java, vb6 + exchange ;). Except maybe in really RARE cases.

3)      You are not a number! Each day of work is a new day filled with endless possibilities of how you can change the company in one form or another.

4)      Work on super cool projects using the latest technologies. Still working on .Net 1.1? Telligent works with the latest technologies like Silverlight^TM!

5)      Have you ever needed a book right now, and didn't want to wait for it to arrive at your door? Telligent has its own library, and heck while you are looking you might find a book that was written by someone who actually works at Telligent.

6)      Why work in a cubicle when you can have your own office.  The down side to this is you might lose your desk every once in a while ;).

7)      Does your current work place offer free food twice a week and free drinks + beer? I didn't think so.

8)      Lunch and learns. Once in a while you might have an urge to learn something new. Telligent lets its employees teach each other over a catered in dinner.

9)      Game night. Feel free to pwn your coworkers in a game of counter-strike: source or DOD: Source. For those of you who are not into FPS games, you can always find a game of WOW being played.

10)   Telligent, the name says it all. A .Net developer s dream job. Every day you could be working on a awesome product for a Fortune 500 company.

For the record I want to let all Telligent Employees that how much I appreciated meeting every one of you. You all are very unique, but have one thing in common; you are all very intelligent.  Thanks for having me here this summer and enjoy my Tellicast. It should be airing in about three weeks.

To those that I was around every day, your day should go a lot smoother now that you don't have to put up with me.

 A special thanks goes to Delia for everything that she has done for us over the summer (like fixing our air conditioning, and taking us grocery shopping) thanks, mom. For people that hauled me to the .Net User Groups thanks a bunch :D. To Bill Robertson, I really enjoyed pair programming with a senior developer and all the things that you taught me.  To the few (you know who you are), for those great conversations. To the Interns down putt putt ally, have fun working on reporting and school, if you have a question feel free to ask me.  To my bosses who I asked many SQL questions and generic questions too.  To Jason Alexander and Rob Howard; for giving me the chance to come down here this summer and work under your wing. To anyone I forgot, And finally to my roommate Adam who had to put up with me through all the jokes.

To keep track of me I will either be blogging on this site or windowscoding.com :) 

Thanks

Blake Niemyjski
 

Lately back home the flooding has been pretty terrible, in 3 days I will be flying back home to all this flooding. However Last night, I received two phone calls from my brother and dad, informing me that a tornado had taken out our shop and garage and had also hit the addition onto our house.  I was pretty bummed about this whole situation until I found out that my 1967 Barracuda was flattened.  Now I am devastated :\.

"Over the last year we've seen several people report having performance problems when using F5 to run/debug ASP.NET 2.0 applications using Visual Studio 2005.  The problem in theses cases typically wasn't with building the project, but rather that it sometimes took the debugger a really long time to hit the first breakpoint once it attached to the application (45+ seconds and longer sometimes).

Background on the Issue

The particular bug fixed in this hotfix was surprisingly difficult to track down.  The slowdown issue occurred when breakpoints were set in multiple source files in the same project that had the same short file names (for example: two default.aspx.cs files) and which were organized in a certain directory structure pattern on disk.  The patch fixes this issue and should prevent the debugger from pausing when trying to load the web project's assembly symbols in this case" (  Public Hotfix Patch Available for VS 2005 F5 Debugging Performance Issue with ASP.NET ).

Download Hotfix ( here )

Read ( Hotfix KB )

This coming Saturday I'm leaving on a jet plane to head back to good ole' Wisconsin. I'm going to miss everything about Telligent, a lot. It became my extended family. I have truly learned a lot about Telligent like:

• How to act in a corporate environment
• How many great employees there are
• How everyone is really intelligent
  
• Anyone can tap into another's knowledge

During this past week, my fellow interns, who I work with daily, have started to head back to class. Although they aren't fully leaving Telligent like me for the school year, they are now working part-time during the week when they have off from school.  I hope the Community Server Enterprise Reporting really advances throughout the school year. Heck, next summer when I come back, we could be working on version three! Now that would be pretty cool.

In news back home, there has been extreme flooding. Dams are ready to give out, mudslides moving a house off a bluff onto HWY 35 (US HWY that runs next to the Mississippi River), a train derailed, and roads closed and towns have been evacuated. Yes, this all sounds pretty crazy, but go read about it yourself here and here.

During the past week we had a hack-a-thon event at Telligent headquarters.  At the beginning of the week, I kept hearing small snippets of Graffiti. So I asked Jason Alexander what it was, and even though he was secretive about it. All he said is that it's a CMS solution.

During our hack-a-thon, Graffiti was shown off to all the Telligenti who were in town, most of us had no clue that Graffiti even existed. You might ask what Graffiti is? Graffiti is a very lightweight platform where any user can create a new theme or widget very easily. From here they can rearrange the whole layout of their site with a few easy clicks.

Seeing how everything you could think of was so easy to do in Graffiti, Ken and I decided that Graffiti needed an installer that anyone could use. If anyone can create a theme easily and configure Graffiti easily, then they should be able to install Graffiti without picking up a manual.

I'm sure everyone will hear about Graffiti in the near future so keep on the lookout.

During last week when all the remote Telligenti were in the office, we had the first ever Telligent hack-a-thon.  The target of this coding event was to add any feature you thought Graffiti (A new CMS solution) should have. The hack-a-thon at first, was only going to be one prize, which went to the best hacked submission for Graffiti. However, after more than 15 great submissions, Telligent decided the top three submissions would get an 8gig IPhone.

Believe it or not, to my absolute amazement, Ken and I actually won the iPhone.  Ken and I choose to build a graphical web installer. During the development of the installer, we talked about what we would do if we won first place. We said that if we did get first place, we would split the cash.

I would like to say to everyone that contributed to the hack-a-thon, you did a spectacular job and all our contributions to Graffiti are awesome.

I would also like to thank anyone who voted for me.  I didn’t think I would have a chance of winning. Thanks for proving me wrong.
 

Yesterday, Telligent had a hack-a-thon; and I'm very happy that they let an intern participate. I ended up staying up all night and implementing a project with the amazing markup and designer extordinare Ken Hanson.

I feel like the project that Ken and I developed was pretty solid and cool, However there are many brilliant minds that work at Telligent and most of them had their own projects.  Some projects were pretty spectactular, so only time will tell who will win an 8gig Iphone.

Also during a presentation today, I saw that a fellow Telligenti hasn't been reading my blog ;). Because if he was then he would of seen my post about how flash can steal your screen!