A Salute to the Falafel Rock Stars

Posted by: on | Friday, October 05, 2012

Every year, October kicks off a very busy season at Falafel : “Conference Season”. Multiple members of the team travel across the country and around world to share their expertise on a number of technologies. All Falafel Software team members spend their days, and often their nights, helping design and build cutting edge solutions for our customers. Their technical presentations draw from these real world experiences and are assembled, practiced, and presented in what little spare time they have. That’s why we call them “Rock Stars”.

This weekend at Silicon Valley Code Camp, Falafel’s entire team from around the world comes together to both teach and learn.

Rachel Hagerman of Texas and Jonathan Tower of Michigan are .NET verterans, having built multiple solutions with WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET and more. Two years ago, they both made the transition to iOS development working on both customer solutions and our very own EventBoard mobile application. Now they want to help other .NET developers make a smooth transition, explaining iOS development concepts in terms .NET developers can relate to. If you are looking to make the transition, you won’t want to miss the “Introduction to Native iOS Development for .NET Developers” at Silicon Valley Code Camp.

Bary Nusz, our “Tinkerer-in-Chief”, finds a way to connect his computer to every new device he comes across. It is not uncommon for Bary to show up with a new contraption and shout “Hey, you guys have to see this!” And he makes it worth it every time. We’ve see Wii-motes measure fencing thrusts, new Kinect interfaces, and lately lots of uses for the sensors on Windows Phone and Windows 8 Devices. Bary built the Magnetometer for Windows Phone and explained how it works in a series of blog posts, he taught us how to anchor augmented reality object in the real world and at Silicon Valley Code Camp he is going to teach the world how to integrate sensor data from Windows Phone and Windows 8 devices with XNA graphics applications. If you want to see some cool stuff, look for the guy in the big hat at Silicon Valley Code Camp.

Have you ever wondered if what Entity Framework is doing under the hood is really optimal? We haven’t, we have Adam Anderson. Adam is our Master Consultant flying in from Colorado Springs, and as a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer he is one of our most decorated team members. Before meeting Adam, many of us thought our SQL Server development skills could be ranked as 10’s. Now, we are not so sure. To see why, attend his session at Silicon Valley Code Camp on  “Improving the Performance of TPT Mapping in EF”. I guarantee you will learn A LOT.

A hot trend in development recently has been JavaScript. It’s been said that “anything that can be written in JavaScript, will be.” If you haven’t boarded the JavaScript train yet, Noel Rice has the session for you. Noel has been developing, training and writing for two decades. He authors all of the Falafel training materials for both internal and customer consumption, hosts many of our webinars, and has a way with words you will appreciate; breaking complex topics down to bite sized chunks. His most recent publication, JavaScript Nuts and Bolts, has been an outrageously popular JavaScript primer and you'll understand why when you attend his talk at Silicon Valley Code Camp, “JavaScript is All Grown Up Now!” You’ll see how JavaScript is being used as a basis for true rich application frameworks including Sencha Ext JS, Telerik Kendo UI and Microsoft Windows 8.

Not to be outdone, the Falafel management team has doubled down on their speaking engagements this year. With the world going mobile, CEO Lino Tadros and President John Waters, both Microsoft MVPs, have been teaching about what’s to come in the mobile space.

John has already taught an all day Windows Phone Unleashed event in Mountain View, spoken at Windows TechConference Switzerland and DevTeach Vancouver about moving Mango apps to Windows 8 Style applications and mobile architecture, and most recently has been heavy on Windows 8 Development training. Bay area residents may have seen him at 1 of the 2 all day Windows 8 Unleashed events he has led, and if you’ve missed him, you can catch his condensed session at Silicon Valley Code Camp, “Taking full advantage of Windows 8 Modern Style Applications”. John is one of the few individuals you can find who has already published a Windows 8 application to the Windows 8 Store. He is solely responsible for creating the Windows 8 version of EventBoard, which you can download now.

Lino is currently in Bulgaria speaking at the premiere developer conference for Central and Eastern Europe, DevReach. His talks have shown hundreds of developers how to “Develop Windows 8 Style Applications with HTML and JavaScript” and “Why You Should Care About Portable Libraries”, but his world tour is only just beginning. Upon his return he heads straight to Boston to share with the Sitefinity community what he has learned as the leader of the most advanced Sitefinity development team in the world. He will explain what it takes to “Deploy High Performing and Scalable Web Solutions” at Sitefinity and Beyond.  After that, our leader demonstrates what it truly means to be a Falafel Rock Star. With the Windows Phone 8 SDK expected to be released during BUILD at the end of October, Lino will be teaching an 8 hour workshop on Windows Phone 8 Development only days later at DevConnections. (Rock Stars don’t need sleep.) If you can’t make DevConnections, which overlaps with BUILD this year, you can catch the same development workshop at a new conference in December: DevIntersection.

When you attend any event, we know you want to see the best. So every week at Falafel, we give our speakers the stage and a chance to present their sessions internally. The team gets stronger, the speakers get great feedback and the company is sure that when you see the Falafel logo at an event, you know you’ll be hearing from a real development Rock Star.
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