Darren Ferguon - Weblog
Monday, August 25, 2008
Umbraco certified professional
After 10 years in the web development business I finally have my first certification. The week before last I headed off to Copenhagen and attended the level two course. Happily I passed the certification test!
I’d toyed with the idea of getting certified for some time but delayed due to the cost. After the announcement of umbraco.tv at codegarden my idea was to wait and take certification via this route to keep the costs down. I’d always been slightly dubious about certifications and considered them to be a venue stream for the product vendors.
In a moment of assertive decision making I decided to go ahead and book based on the following:
- Umbraco is a great product. I’m happy to support it financially.
- I quite like Copenhagen and wanted to go back.
- I can’t be a constant sceptic on certification programs without ever having experienced one.
I made the right choice! The venue was great (excellent lunches), the course was concise and well structured - though In typical Umbraco style Niels constantly stressed that we could ask as many questions as we like which opened things up and allowed us to get exactly what we wanted out of the course as well as covering the essentials.
I went into the course considering myself a bit of a "know it all" but was pleasantly surprised to discover a number of new tricks and tips, my favourite being livewriter support out of the box in Umbraco 3.x .
Backing up the Umbraco claim of being "the friendly CMS" we were taken out for dinner and got some good social time with Per, Niels and the other participants. Niels even got a round of beers in! I also had the pleasure of chewing the fat with David Conlisk who was also on the course. David has taken the leap into freelancing full time something I hope to do at some point soon so we had plenty of ideas about processes, costing etc to bounce off one another.
So in summary I’m entirely positive. If you have a couple of years of Umbraco under your belt you may find some of the level 2 course material quite simplistic, but trust me you’ll gain much more and if you are getting ahead of the examples provided Niels is smart enough to realise this and set you some additional tasks to get you thinking.
There always has to be a negative right? Well yes. Upon arrival at the much hyped CabInn I was told that they only had a room with "No electricity and water". Luckily I walked down the road to the Mariott and although they were full the friendly Concierge hooked me up at Hotel 27 which I’d highly recommend.
So to sign off, I’m certified now. Get in touch for packages, XSLT and all your Umbraco needs! If you are dithering on booking your training, I highly recommend you bite the bullet and do it.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Six Firefox plugins that make my life easier
Everyone knows about Firebug right? If not and you are a web developer, you are missing out and making your life much harder!
Yslow is an add-on for firebug that analyses the download time of a webpage and gives you tips on how to improve. Test results are graded A-F and displayed in a very simple format. You can click on each test which takes you to a Yahoo page explaining the test in detail and the steps that can be taken to get a better grade and ultimately better page performance.
Foxmarks synchronises your bookmarks to/from a remote server. Excellent if you use several different computers on a day to day basis.
Google reader notifier – An unobtrusive widget that displays the number of unread items in your Google reader account. Rolling over the notifier shows you the feeds that have unread items and clicking launches Google reader. This is a great time saver as it removes my temptation to check if there are any new posts in my reader every 5-10 minutes which obviously interrupts my productivity.
Twitterfox – A Twitter client that sits in your browser bar displaying the number of unread Tweets. Clicking the icon opens up the UI overlaying the current web page that you are browsing. The UI allows you to do all the basic updating/replying operations that you’d expect. A lot of people would argue that twitter is a waste of time during a working day but I frequently us it for crowd sourcing solutions to the technical problems that I am having.
What are your favourite Firefox plugins?