Career and Students

This is part 4 of the Agent production system series. Previous: Docker homelab ops. Constellation: the whole agent production map — especially Orchestrator, Eval gates, and Human approval. I am a former Senior Technical Program Manager at Xbox/Microsoft. That sentence is past-tense on purpose — and it still explains how I design agent systems. People hear “TPM” and picture a calendar full of status meetings. At its best, platform TPM work is the opposite of that caricature: critical path, risk, multi-team alignment, and SLA performance under real blast radius. Someone has to know what is actually on the path to “done,” what can kill the ship window, which teams are blocked on which contract, and when a green dashboard is lying. That is the job. ...

My Tech Evangelist colleagues, Joe Raio and Brian Sherwin, have create a great set of video tutorials on how to create your own website using Azure. This is part of Microsoft’s Choose to Code campaign, which guides your middle and high school students through a series of online tutorials walking them through the process of creating and publishing their own website. If you are using Azure Passes, watch this video If you are using DreamSpark, start with this video Course Setup and Azure Activation Building your very first web page with HTML using Visual Studio Online! Let’s learn how to add some style to your page with CSS Make your website mobile friendly using Bootstrap Making your website interactive using JavaScript Learn how to use jQuery to send and receive data Still need Azure? Reach out to me to inquire about BizSpark

If you find some links that you think would be useful, feel free to share! You can always subscribe (or unsubscribe) by clicking on the MailChimp widget on the right-hand side of this page. Here’s a link to the original file. Gaming The Flame In The Flood – Adventure game on Kickstarter Here’s Why We Need Video Games In Every Classroom “How Long To Beat” -> useful site that tells you how long it takes to beat a game Game Dev Reverse engineering Yoda Stories VC / Startups The unexpected and uneven evolution of the startup fundraising market What is the definition of a seed round or an A round? A Couple Of Good Books For Entrepreneurs Seed Round Pricing (Actual data warning!) The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon 25 Angel Investors in New York You Need to Know From board games to beer-making machines: Take a look at the Seattle startup scene Nerdy / Tech 100 Technical Things Non-Technical People Can Learn To Make Their Lives Easier HTML5 PhoneGap Day US 2014, in San Francisco Apache Cordova 4 released

I was at Unity’s Unite conference in Seattle this week, and I learned from their education team that Unity has far cheaper licensing for students, faculty, and schools. In partnership with Studica, Unity has discounted costs. Here’s a link to the page. Also, Autodesk, creators of Maya, 3DS Max, etc., also have FREE versions of their tools for students. Where was this when I was in school, learning Blender? I’m turning back the clock a few years and headed back to my SUNY Oneonta days, so that I can grab some of this stuff. ...

Jennifer Marsman wrote a great post on her MSDN blog about the benefits of BizSpark and how to get started with the program. This step-by-step tutorial can help get you enrolled as well. Perks of the program: http://wootstudio.ca/startups/bizspark.aspx Windows 10 developer accounts (Xbox, Windows) Visual Studio Ultimate licenses Windows licenses (multiple versions) Office 365 developer account $150 / month Azure credits (for each dev on your team, up to 5 total, $750 value) Website hosting, virtual machines, databases, & mobile services Visual Studio Online (Formerly TFS) 90 Days of pluralsight + DigitalTutors training Free marketing support with Microsoft Who qualifies? Actively engaged in development of a software-based app, product, or service that will form a core piece of your current or intended business. (NOTE: you must be building a product! Startups providing consulting services are not eligible.) Your company is privately held, and in business for less than 5 years. Makes less than US $1 million in annual revenue Whether you are a student, startup, or an indie game developer, Microsoft views you as a welcome addition to our startup program. ...

Time: Wednesday August 13 2014 | 4:00pm to 6:00pm Location: City Coho Philly Nexus http://www.citycoho.com/ CityCoHo | Philly Nexus 2401 Walnut St. Suite 102 Philadelphia, PA 19103 Microsoft’s BizSpark is an innovative global program that unites Startups with global entrepreneurial and technology resources in one community, with a common goal of supporting and accelerating the success of a new generation of high-potential Startups. BizSpark is uniquely designed to help Startups engaged in software development to jump-start their business, by: ...

You can download the app from the Windows 8 Store, for free. In my last post, I mentioned that I began using Microsoft’s new Web App Template, to quickly and easily create an app out of my website, while using very little code. Now that my app is finished, I wanted to walk you through the steps, so that you can do the same. In total, it only took me about 2 hours to have my app created from scratch, and in the store! ...

You can find Part 2 of this tutorial, here. I’ve also compiled a list of great apps published with the WAT. On Venture Capitalist Chris Dixon’s blog, he recently highlighted the decline of the mobile web. “People are spending more time on mobile vs desktop, and more of their mobile time using apps, not the web This is a worrisome trend for the web. Mobile is the future. What wins mobile, wins the Internet. Right now, apps are winning and the web is losing. ...

This post is part of 3 week series giving current and aspiring game devs the tools, resources, and advice they need to get started building for Windows. We also have a great video course on [game production basics](http://Game Production Basics) at Microsoft Virtual Academy. Visual Studio Community Edition visual-studio-logo You need an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, to write code for your games. Visual Studio Community edition is FREE from Microsoft, and allows you to use a multitude of languages. ...

I’ve been a huge fan of shmups for as long as I can remember. If it’s good, I’ve played it (and it’s probably Japanese). I wrote my last one in JavaScript using the Impact.js framework, but this time around I wanted to do it in Unity and really test the performance of the engine. When looking for Unity shmup templates, I came across this great set of posts on the Shmup-dev website. One post includes an excellent talk on unity shmup development, with slides and source code to go along with it. It really touches on some of the basics and key points for creating a shmup, including performance considerations. Object pooling is absolutely necessary when creating a high performance game, and the author monoRAIL explains it very neatly for readers. ...