Recently I gave a “brown bag lunch” presentation on Web Accessibility. For those not familiar with the term, it refers to an informal business gathering at lunchtime where everyone brings their own lunch (thus the reference to brown bag) and one person gives a short presentation followed by a discussion as everyone eats their meal. I have participated in and presented at many of these over the years and they are a fun, casual way to learn and connect with your team.

The audience for this were fellow members of World HeadQuarters, a co-working space in Appleton I joined a few months back. In this case, the presentation was virtual as the space is not open these days. That being said, it was as close as you can get to the in-person experience with about a half dozen online participants.

A Broad Topic In Short Time

How do you talk about Web Accessibility in about 10 minutes, and to an audience that this may be completely new to them? This was my challenge, and I gladly accepted it. I decided to keep it at a high level, not getting into too much jargon while giving the audience information and takeaways for them to explore more on their own.

I’d like to share my presentation here. While there is no recording of me actually giving it, the slides I prepared provide the essentials. The slides are embedded below for viewing from SlideShare, and you can access a PDF of it here.

I welcome any feedback, as well as if this was useful to you. As I look back in on it, I can think of changes and refinements to it, like anything you review after the fact. It was also a great opportunity for me to keep my presentation skills sharp.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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A timeout for a little self-promotion as I am proud to announce I am now a Certified ScrumMaster® or CSM. Last week I took a 2-day course and over the weekend I passed the exam from the Scrum Alliance to become a CSM.

What is a CSM?

A CSM is a practitioner of the Scrum. With its origins in software development, Scrum is “framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.” The Scrum Master facilitates the Scrum and is one of 3 roles on a Scrum team. The team delivers software, or whatever the work product is, in an iterative approach over periods of time called sprints, where a sprint can last a few weeks to a month.

There is much more to Scrum, and I will be writing more about it in the future. A good guide to Scrum is called simply The Scrum Guide by the co-creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, and you can read it at ScrumGuides.org. The definition of Scrum quoted above comes from The Scrum Guide. Among the myriad of books out there on Scrum is Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Sutherland that I previously read and wrote takeaways about.

Now what?

One thing that was clear to me from the course is that Scrum is a framework you must actively participate in to gain your expertise. I will be taking a two-prong approach to this. For my job, I will be discussing Scrum with leadership. As well, I will be using Scrum in my personal life to manage my multiple activities and projects.

Just the Beginning

I am excited for this certification. The course and test were a tremendous learning opportunity, and I look forward to continued learning to maintain the certification. Of course more importantly is applying what I learned and honing my skills in Scrum. Special thanks to my instructor Mike Stuedemann and my classmates Ibrahim, Nelia, Nicole and Rod for a fun and engaging learning experience.

Certified ScrumMaster® is a certification mark of Scrum Alliance, Inc. Any unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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I am thrilled to announce a networking event for people who work in the tech and creative fields in Northeast Wisconsin. Introducing dMorning.

What is dMorning?

The idea behind dMorning is relatively simple – informal networking before the busy workday starts, with no set rules and no agenda. Since I moved to the Fox Valley last year, I have been looking for something like this, as I work in the Web and I am looking to meet people who work in similar fields in the area.

I hosted a variety of meetups when I lived in Chicago – some very specific and others more general – and have found the latter to be more interesting and worthwhile. A casual gathering of people to talk about what they are working on, sharing stories and bouncing ideas off each other… this is something I have wanted to restart for a while, and why not here? My plan is for this to be a monthly event.

The next dMorning will be on Friday, October 19 beginning at 7:30 am at All Seasons Coffeehouse in Appleton, conveniently located off I-41 at Wisconsin Avenue. I say it ends at 9:30 am, but anyone can stay longer. There is no cost for dMorning; you just pay for any beverages or food you purchase from this locally-owned business.

What’s in a name?

So why did I call this dMorning? As I sought out a name for this event, I didn’t want to pick something too limiting. On the Web site at dMorning.com there are some ideas of what the “d” can stand for.

Hope to see you there!

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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After recently re-reading my post about “retiring” my New England Patriots fan Web site GoPats.com, I realized that with its shutdown, I also took down the last remaining Web site I built using ColdFusion Web technology.

For those of you who are not technical – no fear, as this is not a technical post, rather one about a journey and choices made along the way – good and bad – and where I am today. So you don’t have to tune out just yet!

You Never Forget Your First Web Scripting Language

When I saw the very first graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic, shortly after it launched in 1993, I was hooked, and realized this is where I needed my career in technology to go – creating Web sites. Up to that point I was creating reports and screens on mainframe computers and there was nothing exciting about a black screen with white letters. So the playing and experimenting I did with Web sites – including GoPats.com – led to my first Web job a few years later.

For as much as I did to that point, when I started that job I quickly realized I still had a lot to learn. Another colleague at the small consulting firm I was at realized it too, and reminded me of it consistently! Eventually we would become friends and solid co-workers and even did a successful project that pissed off the president of said firm. And it was this colleague who one day early on in my time there asked me if I knew ColdFusion. I said no. He said that I could learn the basics of ColdFusion in an hour, creating a dynamic Web page that queried information from a database and displayed it in the browser. He also said that if I couldn’t do that in an hour that I was stupid! Needless to say I was able to do what he said and within 60 minutes. For me this was a big event, and got me started on more advanced Web site development.

Armed with this new skill, I wanted to use it, but my firm didn’t have any projects that required ColdFusion. So I sought out such projects elsewhere. As I had recently created a Web site for the Boston Jaycees, a non-profit organization I was involved with, I decided to apply ColdFusion code to it, giving the Board the ability to maintain the Web site with ease, and not requiring any HTML or any other coding knowledge. For 1997, this was rather unique. I then applied similar code to GoPats.com and some other personal Web projects, as well as some freelance Web projects I had taken on, work that would expand and eventually lead me to starting my own Web consulting business.

Becoming Web Multilingual

In 1996, as I started working for that small consulting firm, Microsoft didn’t have a Web strategy. By the following year it did, combining its Web browser and scripting language with some of its marketing genius. It was in 1997, when working on a project for a client using Microsoft’s client-server (e.g. PC-based) Visual Basic language, they asked me if I knew anything about the Web. I said yes, and they gave me a Microsoft Web server and its Web applications as part of my responsibility. Only one small thing, I didn’t know anything running a Web server or the language – Active Server Pages (ASP) – the applications were in. This has been a recurring theme throughout my career, but I digress. With the purchase of a few books and some guidance of a summer intern about 10 years my junior, I quickly got up to speed in developing Web pages and Web business applications for the client. Life was good.

All along, however, I was still working with ColdFusion – I had several sites using the technology, plus ColdFusion’s owner, Allaire, was in the Boston area and it had a good user group. There was, however, the beginnings of a change in the landscape. ColdFusion, for all of its ease of use and power, was a commercial product and to run it on one Web server cost somewhere over US$1,000. Microsoft’s Web server and ASP were free. There were other open-source (also free) Web scripting languages I was aware of, like Perl and PHP, though I was not using those at the time. Over time Allaire was acquired by Macromedia who was later acquired by Adobe. Though Web sites written in ColdFusion continued to work just fine even to this day, the Web language fell out of favor for many and they felt it was time to move onto other tools.

For myself, when I started my Web consulting business in 2004, I too was looking at other options, including other programming languages as well as packaged software instead of custom developed applications. This research was done along with the ColdFusion and ASP I was working with for my clients. All of my sites were powered by a content management system (CMS), going all the way back to my first Jaycees site. As time went on I continued to enhance and perfect my own CMS, but at the same time other CMS products came out that allowed me to do what I did best for clients, without the need for developing the CMS itself. Over time I migrated sites to these new platforms, but GoPats.com kept running just fine under ColdFusion.

All Good Things...

As I discussed back when I was doing some major digital spring cleaning and closed down some Web sites, GoPats.com was the last one to go. As updates to the site declined, the cost of Web hosting did not, and is was a cost savings as well. Where I had mixed emotions about this, simplifying the number of languages I was working with and needing to keep up on was also a time savings with all else I have going on in my life now.

So, “ciao, ColdFusion!” It was fun, and we had some great times. Where we may not see each other again anytime soon, we will always have the memories of the pioneering days of the World Wide Web.

Deconstructing Working With ColdFusion

As I said early on, this was not a technical discussion, rather one of choices. We make a lot of them through life and at the time, a good choice may not necessarily be the best one down the road. Though I didn’t choose ColdFusion initially, it worked well for me and I did make decisions about working with it or not over time, until I eventually decided it was not one to continue with. The technology continued to work right up until the end, and I know there is still ColdFusion code working very well today, and you can’t ask for more than that.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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With great anticipation I am pleased to announce a networking event for people who work in the tech and creative fields in Northeast Wisconsin. Introducing dMorning.

So what is dMorning?

The idea behind dMorning is relatively simple - informal networking before the busy workday starts, with no set rules and no agenda. Since I moved to the Fox Valley of Wisconsin this past summer, I have been looking for something like this, as I work in the Web and I am looking to meet people who work in similar fields in my new home area.

In the past I have hosted a variety of meetups where I used to live in Chicago – some specific and some general – and I have found the latter to be more interesting. A casual gathering of people to talk about what they are working on, sharing stories and bouncing ideas off each other… this is something I have wanted to restart for a while, and why not here? My plan is for this to be a monthly event.

The first dMorning will be on Friday, November 17 at 7:30 am at All Seasons Coffeehouse in Appleton, which is conveniently located off I-41 at Wisconsin Avenue. I only say it goes until 9:30 am as that is likely as long as I will be there. There is no cost for dMorning, you only have to pay for any beverages or food you purchase from this locally-owned business.

What’s in a name?

You may be wondering about the name, dMorning. As I sought out a name for this, I didn’t want to pick something limiting. On the Web site at dMorning.com there are some ideas of what the “d” could stand for.

Hope to see you there!

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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