July 11th is the second anniversary of my Notes in 9’s screencast. It was 2 years ago that I posted my first “official” show to YouTube. That show talked about one of my favorite XPages features – The Repeat Control.
In the last 2 years, I’ve done a bunch of shows and have even been able to get some expert speakers to come on and contribute. Together Notes In 9 has produced 27 shows of the 10 minute or less length, and 8 “Extended Edition” shows. For over 7 and a half hours of free educational content!
Even though I’m simply a customer and not a consultant or business partner, deciding to give back to the community and creating NotesIn9 is by far one of the best professional decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve gained so much more then I’ve given. I’ve learned an incredible amount in the process of creating these shows. I’ve met many wonderful people and gained some really good friends. I’ve gotten the opportunity to speak at great conferences like, IamLUG, MWLug, Tri-State LUG, and even 2 Lotuspheres. I pretty much got an absolute dream job from this screencast and sharing effort. And most recently I’ve been named an IBM Champion.
So if there’s anything I could suggest – it’s that sharing your knowledge is extremely important. I say this all the time to people I meet at LUGS. If you know something, try and take the time to share it. I don’t care how “simple” it might seem. If you took 5 minutes to figure it out… or research something to solve a problem then it’s sharable. Someone out there does NOT know what you just figured out. And if someone posted the solution before? Who cares? That doesn’t mean others can find it. One of the reasons why I created NotesIn9 was because it seemed that even though XPages was new, many of the great bloggers were starting to post some pretty advanced topics and I thought people just starting out were getting left behind. There’s nothing wrong with posting “simple” information.
Where do you share? Anywhere really. If you don’t have a blog there’s the designer wiki and the XPages forum. Heck most established bloggers would likely publish something if you just asked them to. So please – consider sharing what you learn.
Ok – enough of my rambling. Let’s talk about this week. As a celebration of 2 years of NotesIn9. It’s my intention to try and publish a show EVERY day this week. That’s 5 new shows. I’m not sure I can pull it off as I only have 1 “in the can” and the rest are just ideas at this stage. But I’m going to give it a good try.
In closing I want to thank everybody for watching the show and for the feedback! I truly appreciate it.
Dave
