Travis Swicegood

MTS07 - VP Keynote - Sanjay Parthasarathy, CVP of Developer and Platform Evangelism

Published On
March 27 2007
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Travis Swicegood

He's been around since 95 - as "an evangelist for Windows 3.0". The issue he's working on the most and trying to "up the level" in is software design. Something he says we're in the Stone Ages with.

He's mentioned Channel 9 quite a bit. They have property in Second Life for evangelism and had a Vista launch there.

Best quote: "I won't argue that we've made your life harder, but we did it for the right reasons."

From Duncan Buell: "Make so Ben's mother can install it" :-) He apparently tells his students to document their code to the point that their mother can understand what it's doing.

One of his contentions is that users will drive technology instead of technology driving users. Based on what I've seen in apps in the PHP community, he is correct. phpBB's success can only be explained by a user driven model. WordPress was not the best blog software (some would still argue that it still isn't) for a long time, but it filled the explicit need people had.

A stat he threw out - 2 million people around the world identify themselves as "professional coders" while over 100 million identify themselves as "non-professional coders".

About

Travis Swicegood is a professional programmer and owner of Domain51, a web development company with a focus on non-profits, NGOs, and online activists. He doesn't change the world, he supports those who do.

He has personal a focus on web applications, performance, and stability; is author of Pragmatic Version Control using Git; and working on his second book. He has been using PHP; since '99 and still remembers how revolutionary PHP 4 was, but can't remember why. He's a TDD, open-source, and open government advocate—sometimes called a zealot—and lurker on many an open-source project mailing list when not learning other programming; languages; for fun, exploring his surroundings on bike, or tasting his latest kitchen and home-brew creations.

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