Captain Sullenberger was reported to give that simple instruction to the passengers of the US Airways flight that ended up in the Hudson river last week. Pilots as a rule are pretty cool under pressure. I am a pilot and I think I am. Such straight forward advice--Brace for impact! is probably the only thing worth saying in a crisis. The simplicity and clarity of "brace for impact" works on other levels too, so I am adopting it as my mantra for 2009.
My name is Paul Kimmel, and I am now a technical evangelist for Developer Express, Inc. Evangelist responsibilities are ultimately about bringing product awareness to customers, creating impact. My job is ultimately about finding unique, interesting, and compelling ways to elevate awareness of DevExpress' ASP.NET and Winforms controls and great developer tools like Refactor and CodeRush. My first "deliverable" will be something our ASP.NET programmers have been asking for, and if all goes well the unveiling will happen this Summer.
Right now I am sitting at the Luxor in Las Vegas and experiencing the DevExpress team work diligently on ways to improve your developer experience. We are clearing up huge feature request lists, exploring new product evolutions like controls for WPF, Mark Miller is internally evangelizing CodeRush and planning on going to the MVP summit in Seattle, and I am shoring up my knowledge of our product offerings by watching TV.devexpress.com and writing a lot of code samples..
Blogs, whitepapers, software, WPF, Silverlight, and marketing strategies don't represent a crisis of the immediate sort, and compared to an impending plane crash, improving software and the customer experience moves at a glacial speed but move it does. So, pick up your copy of CodeRush and our 60+ free controls--Download. Compare. Decide!--and get cozy in your favorite programming Zen-place and contemplate bracing for impact.