Colinizer: taking up residence in your tech brain

Hi.  I’m Colin Melia.

I’d like to get in your head and give you something to think about think.  Sometimes you may not like what I write, but that’s OK because you can stop reading at will, …. or you can think about what I wrote and whether it matters. These days, I’m writing mostly about Silverlight, C++, HTML 5, Windows Phone for the Client, Azure in Cloud and Business Intelligence…

I may write about Microsoft technologies quite a bit in fact: I live and breath Microsoft stuff including the latest version of everything; I architect/develop for Windows on desktop, server, in the cloud and on mobile device doing stuff that there isn’t a kid-proof SDK for yet, using everything from C++ and .NET; I’m not anti-unix, anti-linux or anti-mac; I just don’t have the head space (really?) to fit it all in and even if I did (OK I do), I wouldn’t be able to do anything useful with it (except some cross-platform stuff or write reviews that don’t matter) but I served my time with them* before making Windows my thing.

Personally I’m:

• British but now living on the other side of the puddle, accent intact;

• a parent;

• a technology geek sucking up information like a sponge;

• a cinemia movie lover, never eating popcorn, and not afraid to tell people to shut up in theatres;

• a network/Internet TV watcher, recording everything so I can watch it when I want without giving up 33% of the time to commercials which I am immune to anyway (unless it’s for other TV or movies, then I’ll listen);

• a fan of fantasy and sci-fi, but not enough to go to a convention, yet;

• a gadget hoarder, and I keep the boxes;

• learning new things every day and looking at ways to apply it;

• constantly discovering (but no longer surprised about) how totally naive we all are about each other around the world.

Professionally I am or have been:

• a Microsoft Regional Director

• a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Silverlight

• a CTO for 13+ years;

• a Company Director for several companies for 19+ years;

• a Software Architect for 14+ years;

• a professional Software Developer for 19 years + the 11 years poking around before that;

• a professional Speaker & Trainer

• a convergent technology innovator and trend analyst, having built award winning software and Internet-hosted enterprise solutions used around the globe by well-known customers such a HP, IBM, Ford, Nortel, JWT, Abbey, O2 & GE;

• a creator of a popular consumer Internet video community.

• The professional bio:

Colin Melia is a Microsoft Regional Director and Microsoft MVP for Silverlight known as an architect, trainer, speaker and author with deep and broad knowledge of the latest Microsoft technologies, proven problem solving skills, hands-on solution creation ingenuity and the ability to communicate rich and complex ideas.

He speaks regularly with his British accent at conferences, events and code camps for Microsoft and community organisations as well as being a college academic advisor.

In the summer of 2010 he developed and delivered the first Windows Phone 7 boot camp tour in North America, training dozens of developers and companies across Canada at Microsoft offices.

His recent articles and reference cards have been featured on Mobile Developer Magazine & DZone and he regularly posts on his blog.

Colin has decades of hands-on experience in areas of rich UI with WPF/Silverlight & C++, cloud development with Azure and BI with SQL Server, along with in-depth knowledge of core technologies such as .NET, OData, WCF, WF, LINQ and WIF. He has developed award-winning simulation technology with rich UI, cloud-based learning portals and workflow-driven BI systems.  He also created the first streaming video community site with Windows Media.

He has worked in the finance, telecoms, e-learning, Internet communications and gaming industries, with his business solutions recently in use at major league companies world-wide.

Definitions that are part of my life philosophy:

• Knowledgeable: knowing stuff

• Intelligent: able to discern the difference between stuff

• Wise: knowing if stuff matters, which is not the same as knowing what stuff matters as that may require knowing lots of stuff unnecessarily (which would not be wise) versus knowing if a specific thing under consideration matters – got that? …and does it matter?

Credit to: Robert Scoble for inspiring the format of the blog name.

Contact:

If you’d like to contact me then email me using colinizer<theATsymbol>live.com.

*I did run Linux on a PC for a few years and before that in 1990 wrote both a chat client-server ("king of sockets") system for Unix on an IBM RS6000 running with VT-52 terminals and Sun workstations (wooo), and a bloody brilliant "man" command-line replacement with a path caching service and client that made it useable.  I also ported a Mac arcade game to Windows in C++.  Prior to all that I had a Sinclair ZX81, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Sinclair Z88, BBC Electron, Amstrad x68 PC. Sir Clive Sinclair was bloody clever: if he brought out the C5 now people may listen… OK, only an idiot would drive it in UK traffic but he was miles ahead and a visionary.  If you didn’t understand much of this then you’ll now realise while it was a footnote.