December 2015 – Stephen Haunts { Freelance Trainer and Writer }

2015 is nearly at an end. Christmas is but a distant memory and in a few days it will be another year. I thought I would take some time just to reflect on the past year as it has certainly been very busy for me, but as busy as it has been, it has also been a lot of fun.

Even though I have done a lot of writing and course production, which I will cover in a moment, I am also still employed as a permanent member of staff at Boots UK, and my day job has certainly been busy with Me and my Team delivering a lot of functionality and value to our healthcare business. But Me being Me, I am never satisfied with just having a regular day job and where I get my real career satisfaction is with my extra-curricular activities. So what have I managed to achieve this year.

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays

December 23, 2015December 23, 2015 Stephen Haunts Leave a comment

I think I am just about done for this year and am looking forward to a little downtime to recharge. I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas, or a Happy Holiday season if you don’t celebrate Christmas.

It has bee a great and very busy year, I don’t think I could have packed more into this year if I tried, so thank you all all my readers of this blog and my books, also also subscribers who have watched my courses over at Pluralsight.

I have lots planned for next year, so stay tuned.

Commentary/Cryptography

Talking at NDC London

December 23, 2015 Stephen Haunts Leave a comment

In January I will be attending the NDC conference in London and doing a talk on Cryptography in .NET. This talk will be on Thursday 14th January at 4.20pm. I am really excited to be doing this talk as it is my first major conference.

Cryptography in .NET is a subject I am very passionate about and have been teaching developers about all this year at user groups, and also with my book from syncfusion called “Cryptography in .NET Succinctly” and my course on the same subject, “Practical Cryptography in .NET” over at Pluralsight.

NDC London - Stephen Haunts - Cryptography in .NET — NDC London – Stephen Haunts – Cryptography in .NET

On Friday 15th January, I will also be at the Pluralsight stand at 1pm and 4pm to talk about authoring for Pluralsight. If you are interested in hearing about what it takes to develop courses for Pluralsight and are at NDC, then please come along and I will be happy to answer your questions.

I will also be hanging around the Usergroups and Community stand at the conference promoting the idea of attending and running user group.

If you are at NDC, then please pop along and say hello.

Career/Commentary/Leadership

Different Perspectives : Developer to Manager

December 23, 2015 Stephen Haunts Leave a comment

Recently a company called Plan.IO, which is a company that produces online project management software wrote a blog article about becoming a manager from a software developer background.

I was interviewed as part of this article and provided one of the perspectives out of 3. It’s an interesting ready, so I recommend heading over there. It is a subject I care a lot about as it is a jump I made my self. I wrote an article on this very subject back in 2014, and it was also the subject of my first Pluralsight course called Developer to Manager.