Johnny Halife’s Blog

On July 25th Dr. Randy Pausch PhD, lost the fight against the Pancreatic Cancer. The brilliant mind behind "The Last Lecture" was 47 years old. Before leaving Randy left an amazing legacy on the "Last Lecture".

The "Last Lecture" has even more hits than the all time famous "Stay foolish, stay young" talk given by Steve Jobs at Stanford university. The talk is about achieving your childhood dreams, about how to live your life in order to always have fun.

The talk began with "What would you say if you knew you were going to die and had a chance to sum up everything that was most important to you?" and after that all his wisdom got revealed.

I knew his lecture since it was recommended on the Wired magazine that I love, those sitting around saw me almost crying while I was watching it. It’s a lesson learnt by one of the most gifted people I ever seen.

Besides all the fashion and post-mortem merchandising that will appear now that he is gone, I sincerely recommend you to go to YouTube.com and watch the video.  Also the Carnegie Mellon Univesity set up a memorial page for Dr. Pausch and a great article about his legacy.

I’ve shared it couple of months ago on our internal distribution lists, but now I’m doing it publicly so everyone can learn something from one of the greatest minds of the 21st Century.

thanks,
~johnny

Folks, I know I promised to start posting about other things after my last post of Tech Ed but something showed up on my inbox yesterday’s morning and I didn’t want to miss the chance of sharing this with you.

After the whole keynote revolution, we had time to take one-and-only-one picture with the big boss. The guy that was announcing his retirement that day, William Henry Gates III a.k.a Bill Gates.

This was one of those childhood dreams that become true at some point of my life and I’m still amazed of thinking that he was there and even better I was there.

No more comments, ladies and gentlemen… the picture

thanks,
~johnny

Hi everybody! I was interviewed by Leandro Doeyo for Channel8, the online digital-lifestyle students community. The interview is for a new segment on the site called Real Students Stories.

During the interview I’ve shared a little bit of my life, my background and how did I get to work at Microsoft. I hope you enjoy.

Real student stories. Johnny from Argentina…

thanks,
~johnny

Hi pals, first of all Happy 2008 to everybody, it's been a more than a month since I last posted. Now I'll take some time to told where I've been and a true life story.

Where I've been?

At Redmond, on Junuary 3rd I flew to Redmond, WA, USA to help on the shipping of Web Client Software Factory. These two weeks working on Patterns & Practices were great, I found a great team that is working hard to get a new factory with many new features to help you creating responsive, modular and well-designed web applications.

I won't spend more time talking about the factory, you just have to go to Blaine's (PM) blog or Mike's (DEV-LEAD) blog to follow up the project status.

I didn't come alone, I shared this trip with Mariano and Ezequiel who also worked on Patterns & Practices projects.

My true story

I got introduced to Computer's Science by my grandpa. He didn't know anything about it, but when I was a little child he thought it was the future. When I was 8, he bought me my first PC. I spent most of the time playing around with MSPaint, Sokoban, Prince of Persia and that kind of stuff. He thought I was wasting my time, so he paid me a my own instructor to teach me what to do with the PC.

About 3 months later, I was a DOS expert, and I used to do my own application launchers, and that kind of things. Until I discovered QBasic , Logo and Pascal. They were the coolest languages at that time.

I grew up and he insisted me to finish college (that I'm currently doing well), and to keep on studying. He served me as an inspiration of a continuous learning experience, while he was 63, he paid a professor for him to teach how to master MS-Word (before that he had never used a computer) and till he got really sick, he continued studying computers.

Besides this geekie background, when I was a little child he always dreamed to take me on vacations to New York City (that was our dream together). Then with time, we knew that part of our family were divided, when they came from Europe, and they were living on NYC.  When he knew this, he arranged all the trip, and stuff needed to make our dream come true. Sadly, he got blind, and very sick and we couldn't make.

Today (19-Jan-2007), I'm leaving Redmond to take my vacations on New York city. It's like all my dreams becoming true at the same time. I've worked in the place I was dreamed to work, going on vacations where I always dreamed to go. But today also is the first anniversary of my grandpa's death. I'm finishing this story (that went out of my normal way of posting), with tears in my eyes, connecting the dots (as it started). These are my conclusions, that with 22 years I can made about life:

Work hard, do your best for those you love or that thing that you really want to accomplish and you will turn dreams into facts. I wanted to be right now with him, but we don't manage life and I can't since he passed away but I know that he would be very proud and very happy for his elder (and unique boy) grandson.

Present is the seed for the future. If you wanna be or wanna do something and you are all the time snoozing your dreams, they will never come true. If you do your best today, having in mind the vision you want for the feature things will happen. Doesn't matter when, doesn't matter how, doesn't even matter life or dead.

As I learnt today, looking back in to my own life, I recognize the work done by somebody who loved me more than life, and how that effort impacted my whole life but also today.

Enough!

I don't wanna turn this blog in kindda Digital Soap Opera, but this might be helpful for others to realize that sometimes to understand where and why we are here, we should take a look at the past.

Feel free to comment,

thanks,
~johnny

PS. As I said I'm going on vacations, so if you try to reach me you will probably can't, and if you know how, please don't do it :). I might be posting pictures and things that I'll see on NYC.

Hi Everybody, after the Code Camp @ Buenos Aires, I’ve packaged my stuff and came to Santiago del Estero. Here the Santiago del Estero National University (UNSE) is holding a technology conference for 3 days (29, 30, and 31 of October). This conference is called JUITECE (Jornadas Universitarias de Informática, Tecnologia, Electronica y Ciencias de la Educación).

I started my day at the Buenos Aires airport where I spent 3 hours more than expected since my flight was delayed. At 12:30pm I flew to Santiago del Estereo and I’ve arrived at 2:30pm.

Once I was completed settled, I went to the university where I was anxious to see the conference about Virtualization my friend, Mario Montalvetti, was presenting. The conference was great, he started from the history of Virtualization and then moved across all the types of virtualization that exist and also the upcoming products (like Microsoft Softgrid).

After Mario’s track, it was time for me to present Microsoft PopFly. The conference went very good, I started describing the Web 2.0 Ecosystem and then the mashups that you can create using Microsoft PopFly.

Also this journey was another great opportunity to spend some time with those guys passionate about technology and help them on User Groups creation. I’m very happy with the commitment, and passion these people have on their personal/group development.

After visiting the university I had time to sightsee Santiago del Estero city which is getting nicer day by day. I took some pictures, and have a cool dinner with the people here. We had problem, an unexpected storm left the city without lights for a while and the streets underwater. I almost had to swim to back get to the hotel.

Now it’s time to go back, I’m preparing my stuff to fly back to Buenos Aires. My plane is leaving in a couple of hours. Hope to come back soon.

Thanks,
~johnny

On October 24t we held the Microsoft Code Camp - Buenos Aires 2007. The event was really good, there were lots of people and of course the speakers were great.

Code Camp was a great opportunity for students to get involved on our daily work, during the event they could see the work done by our user groups, two of the best industry speakers (Alejandro G. Jack and Andrés Aguiar), a WPF Guru like Paulo Arancibia, and also had time to win an X-Box  360°.

I’m really happy with our first Code Camp, I think it’s the first of lots of events where UG and MSPs will be able to expose what they do and what they’ve been working on.

I hope all the assistants have left with a sensation that for the next Code Camp they can be on the other side (as presenters) since this event was thought by students for students.

About my track, you can get DinnerNow source code from http://www.dinnernow.net and start playing around with the bits.

Finally, I want to thank all the people that made this event possible: Southworks Team, Microsoft Argentina Faculty Contact Center, ASPSOFT, Andrés Aguiar (Infragistics), All the MSP (Microsoft Student Partners), and of course to my Track partner Augusto Alvarez.

And remember….

Technology is a journey… enjoy the ride

Thanks,
~johnny

We’re getting closer to the Microsoft Argentina Code Camp to be held on Oct. 24th at UADE (Universidad Argentina de la Empresa).

This event is *completely free* and it will be the coolest event this year targeted for Students considering the topics to be discussed and the involved technologies . We’ll speak about: XNA (games development), Silverlight, WPF, Robotics, Software Architecture among others.

We will show the most interesting tools and technologies shown by Students for Students. The event won’t be pure theory, most of our content is designed to be interactive demos. Also we’re going to provide resources trying to encourage students to get involved and up on speed faster than they think.

You can go now and register at: http://www.microsoft.com/argentina/codecamp/

Agenda

Meeting the speakers

Behind: Pablo Michelis - MS Argentina. Bottom from RtoL: Damián Galletini and me

Behind: Pablo Michelis - MS Argentina. Bottom from RtoL: Damián Galletini and me

thanks,
~johnny

On September 13th of 2006, Mariano Szklanny and I traveled for the first time to Redmond. Where we worked on Web Client Software Factory, it was an amazing experience from the personal and professional side. I think it was a life-time opportunity, and we took most out of it.

As I did when I came back, thanks to everybody who made this trip possible and those who held us and made us feel like home: Southworks Team (specially Alex Jack and Matías Woloski), Tim Osborn, Eugenio Pace, Diego Dagum,  P&P WCSF Team, and many more.

Here is a summary of memories from our stay

thanks,
~johnny

Finally I’m at home, the trip was amazing. Such kind of experiences are the ones that you’ll remember for your life time. I really enjoyed my time there at Santiago del Estero.

Today, I’m getting to back to office to keep working on Building Automation so stay tuned on this same channel cause a post about it is comming soon….

thanks a lot,
~johnny

Today was our second day at Santiago del Estero, where we're doing a couple of conferences about latest technologies DinnerNow.net , Windows Server 2008 (formerly code-named “Windows Longohorn Server”) and Windows Vista.

My conference was about DinnerNow.net, the sample application I've been working on last months. Ale Ponicke showed Windows Vista and a couple of cool technologies (Photosynth, Windows Live Maps).

Also I'd chance to see other local User Groups that are starting up on development topics. I'd a great time with this guys, when I'm back in the future I'm sure I'll see results and great things from them when I'm back again.

The conference was great, was the last one of this tour at Santiago del Estero. Again I want to say thank you!, to everyboday who made this trip possible. Starting with the GENTI & .netSgo user groups and their teachers (Mario and Aldo).

This has been cool, now it's time to head back, going home will be great. Before going back I'll have lunch with people of UCSE (Catholic University of Santiago del Estero) at Rio Hondo.

Then we will be travelling to Tucumán where Alejandro and I will be taking the airplane to Buenos Aires.

This has been another amazing experience, we came here to teach about technology but we learnt lot of things about the people here and their lifes. So personally I'm really happy with this kind of experiences.

see you on the next post,
~johnny