ExpoTech is the premier annual Technology Conference & Exhibition in Palestine orginzed bt PITA – The Palestinian IT association-. I more than happy to join Microsoft team in their university tour this year. The speaking tour will start from 28th November– December 1st. I will speak about “Microsoft LightSwitch 2010 – No Code Apps!”
I will speak at 3 universities:
- Hebron University 29th November
- Khadoori University at Tulkarum 30th November
- Bir Zeit University 1st December
2 of my friends will be joining the tour too: Mohammed Saleh from Jordan and Saed Shela .. the Israelis blocked Ali Nimer –Jordan- from joining us since they didn’t issue a visit permit for him. I wish he could make to Palestine … maybe next year inshallah.
See you there ..
It was been a while since the last time I wrote a blog post. -this post stuck in my drafts for 3 weeks!!- I will try to push myself to blog more often.
Last month May 26th PalDev brought Kiril Vassilve -AerData- to the stage, to talk about his life experience applying Scrum in a distributed team. Kiril has 17 years for experience in Software development industry. He worked with a Palestinian team from Equiom MENA – a software outsourcing house based in Ramallah- for the last 4 years. Equiom as well as an increasing number of the Palestinian IT firms are doing software development outsourcing for customers from US and Europe.It was very good chance for the developers community to hear from a person who was applying Scrum in similar condition for a good amount of time.
It was been a while since I posted in this blog. I will try to release some drafts I never finsihed although they will look out dated but anyway here is a fresh post.
Last week I traveled to Dubai to attend the well known technology conference Microsoft TechEd. I tried to attend last year 2010 but I never got my visa until the conference come to its end. This year I did all arrangements early enough – not so early 
– to make sure to be there. Being there and having the chance to meet and network with more than 2000 attendee and meet many Microsoft insiders face to face was really a nice experience.
Two weeks ago Palestine Scrum user group aka PalDev had its first meeting on 14/12/ 2010. Last September PalDev was been registered as an official Scrum User Group, and in that same month PalDev set a Certified Scrum Master training for 28 person, in collaboration with Jim Coplien and Scrum Alliance.
It was more like a social meeting rather than a technical one, and we chose a calm, lovely and nice restaurant “Diamonds Restaurant” at Ramallah’s center. More than 20 CSMs attended, and we did some guests who was curious to know more about us. For this meeting it was limited one since it was targeting the people who attended the course last September. PalDev will hold open Scrum meetings and activities in the future, finally that’s what PalDev all about, a community based organization which is open for anybody interested.
The meeting was brief .. I did a small speech introducing the goal and the meeting agenda. Then our main speaker Salem Awadallah – Service Delivery Director from Asal- talked about their experience applying Scrum in Asal – a software and outsourcing house in Ramallah- within different teams who works for different clients using various technologies.
Finally, we gave each CSM a copy of Jim Coplien’s new book “Lean Software Architecture”. The audience where so happy and excited and instantly some of them suggested to have a debate in the next meeting to discuss the book content.
Wooof!
Yesterday I went to Bethlehem University to participate in the .NET club launching. I presented about “Become a Better Developer! the 8 Golden Rules”.
I was thrilled to be invited to present in front of students in one of the best universities in Palestine, actually its my second time there, last year I did a 3 hours presentation introducing “ASP.NET Development using C# & VS2008”.
Here is an interview we made with James O.Coplien after the CSM course last month in Ramallah,
Enjoy it!
Two weeks ago I finished the training course required to become a Certified Scrum Master CSM as I mentioned in previous blog post –thanks for Jim O. Coplien-. The last step to become a certified Scrum master is to pass through the CSM evaluation exam which I did last night. In this post I will talk about my experience and what this certificate is all about.
The Certified Scrum Master certificate states that you are good to play the role of Scrum Master which is one of the 3 roles in Scrum. Don’t mistake that you are a master of Scrum!
The last week in Ramallah PalDev in cooperation with Scrum Alliance held a Certified Scrum training CSM by Jim Coplien. The training was one of the best IT events I ever attended in Ramallah. It was sponsored by Scrum Alliance and by Jim Coplien himself who delivered this training almost for free.
Big thanks to Jim Coplien and Jim Cundiff -Scrum Alliance Managing Director-to make this event a reality
PalDev managed the local logistics/arrangements and collected a nominal amount of money from the attendees to cover the expenses, special thanks to Odayy Hazeem, Ayman Awartani and every one who helped to carry this out.
We were a group of 27 developer and project manager from different cities and companies. The combination was great where you people from different backgrounds working for different companies work together in course activities. This the magical chemistry which will ensure the success of any event which includes engaging activities. Originally we had 5 girls listed their names but we ended with 1 girl and the rest canceled.
From what I heard, every person who attended was pleased with the new expertise they had and were feeling a great amounts of energy which Jim forced us to discover in our selves.
This week in Palestine will be a special one. Its a technology week runs by the Palestinian Microsoft communities: PalDev and PSUG user groups. We are hosting two events targeting developers, IT Professionals and students, providing high quality content and world level speakers. Our friends from international communities and user groups are helping us to accomplish this and offer the Palestinian audience with a unique opportunity to learn, discuss and share their thoughts with them.
In this post I will show a quick summary about the events and the people who are helping to make this a reality.
The last couple of days we lived through some unique times in the ASP.NET world. In 17th Sep. at ekoparty Security Conference 2 security researchers Juliano Rizzo @julianor and Thai Duong @thaidn publicly demoed how to carry our attacks of ASP.NET websites exploiting a cryptographic vulnerability.
I was amazing to watch the panic wave moves quickly through Twitter and other social media websites, Microsoft quickly released the Security Advisory (2416728) describing the publicly disclosed vulnerability which affects all the ASP.NET versions. This means that more than 25% of the websites on the earth is exposed for attackers.
What Affected?
A lot!
“In short, you can decrypt cookies, view states, form authentication tickets, membership password, user data, and anything else encrypted using the framework’s API!” stated Juliano Rizzo
