Community

Picture of Barret Blake speaking at Stir Trek developer conference 2025

The Importance of Community

I was listening to Taylor Dessyn’s Guidance Counselor 2.0 and he was talking to Clark Sell about a bunch of things, including the importance of community and getting involved. And it spurred in me some thoughts.

mentorship

Wednesday, May 28, 2025 | 7 minutes Read

KCDC 2024 Slidedeck

For those who are interested, here’s the slidedeck from my KCDC 2024 talk “What’s new in EF Core 8” Whats-New-In-EF-8

Friday, June 28, 2024 | 1 minute Read

Slides from CincyDeliver

For those who attended my talk on Soft Skills for Developers at CincyDeliver last Friday, here’s the slide deck. When I get some spare time, I plan to rework the talk a little and record it for YouTube, but that’s a few weeks off. Soft Skills - Cincy Deliver

cincydeliver

Monday, July 31, 2023 | 1 minute Read

My New Job

I haven’t posted in a few weeks, and there’s a reason for that. I recently changed jobs. It was a long journey, and I’ll go in to that here in this post. But the last few weeks were focused on wrapping up my work with my old employer and getting ramped up with my new employer. And with all of the recent layoffs in tech, I thought it might be of some value to others for me to post about my own job search journey. Maybe it will be of some help to you.

Friday, February 17, 2023 | 17 minutes Read

The Employee Right to Privacy

I’ve seen a lot of posts on social media in recent months where people are complaining about their companies spying on them and what they’re doing on their employer-issued equipment and accounts. I want to put this in as plain a statement as possible. ANYTHING you do on employer-issued equipment or using employer-issued accounts is, at the very least, subject to monitoring by your employer. And at worst, belongs to your employer.

Tuesday, September 13, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

The Ethics of Being a Software Developer

There’s a lot of pain in the world right now. In nations where freedom exists, the rights and privileges of their citizens are eroding away. The world is changing. Freedom is under attack from every corner and by every means possible, be it war, oppression, apathy, or the destruction of rights by those who have been entrusted to uphold and sustain those rights. As technologists, we have a duty and responsibility to evaluate our roles in those changes.

Wednesday, July 6, 2022 | 11 minutes Read

My Being Fired/Laid Off Horror Stories

So I saw a tweet in my stream a couple of days ago that got me thinking a bit about my own job history, especially in tech. First “real” job. Mostly research. Acted as office receptionist. I was replaced by a bell. I made the bell business cards on my last day. https://t.co/Jztrw4kEFG — emily freeman 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@editingemily) June 15, 2022 For the most part, every job I’ve ever left has been on my own terms. It might be for a better opportunity. It might be because I was fed up with the state of the company I was working at. But almost always I left when I decided it was time to go…. with 4 exceptions.

Thursday, June 16, 2022 | 9 minutes Read

Communication: The Missing Skill

Please note for the record that I am not a communications expert. Everything I say here is based on 30 years (20 in tech) of professional experience, nearly half of that in various leadership positions. There’s a giant elephant in the room. It’s huge, enormous even. It’s quite possibly the biggest flaw in the development community. And it really doesn’t get enough attention. Take the following real exchange taken from an email chain:

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 | 9 minutes Read

Contributing to the Community

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken the opportunity to participate in a number of “coffee chats” with some who are just getting started in the developer community. They come from all over the place: Ohio, North Carolina, Nigeria, Panama, South Africa, India. But they all share a common desire to join the developer community. I’m grateful to be a tiny part of their learning process and I wanted to share just a little bit about my experiences so far.

Tuesday, March 15, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

Developer Stockholm Syndrome

Developers seem to have an irrational love/hate relationship with programming languages. We tend to love the languages we use on a regular basis. And we seem to hate languages we don’t or no longer use. I’ve come to refer to this as Developer Stockholm Syndrome. As a quick aside before we get into the main content, there is endless debate about what constitutes a programming language. For example, many will say SQL is not a programming language. I say it is. Regardless, this post is about languages and language-adjacent entities and I use the term “programming language” to include them all.

Thursday, January 10, 2019 | 9 minutes Read

My Advice: Finding a Developer Job

Note: This is all my opinion. It has no basis in scientific theory or groundbreaking research on job searches. It is based solely on my own personal experiences hunting for jobs over the years, as well as experiences related to me by other people in the tech community that I know personally. It’s a highly limited subset, being mainly restricted to the central Ohio area. You have been warned. It’s a great time to be in the tech industry in general. Unemployment is down in most areas in the tech sector. You have the advantage. Use it. As with all things, times change. There were times it wasn’t good to be in tech. Those times will likely come again. But for now, you’ve got it good. If you’re not happy where you’re at right now, do something about it. Go and find a new job.

Wednesday, October 17, 2018 | 21 minutes Read

Devs: Are you giving back, or only taking?

A couple of weeks ago I attended my favorite annual developers’ conference: Stir Trek. The reasons I like Stir Trek are many. It’s a fantastically run conference. It’s entirely a volunteer, non-profit effort. Over its history I have only missed two Stir Trek events. This year, as the time for Stir Trek registration approached, I made a decision. I was going to attend, as usual. This time I intended to do something more. The dev community has been good time. I thought it time to give back more.

Wednesday, May 16, 2018 | 7 minutes Read