For years, I have traveled around giving talks on development technologies, methodologies and practices at user groups and conferences. It was very gratifying to be recognized for these efforts even once. The fact that the recognition was renewed twice was surprising, to me at least. I have no plans to stop doing what I’ve been doing. I continue to receive positive feedback from receptive audiences, and I enjoy meeting new people at my talks.

I am not disenchanted with the MVP program. It has it’s flaws, but in general, I find it to be a beneficial program for the technology community using Microsoft products. The vast majority of MVPs that I know are intelligent, dedicated, generous people of high character. The few exceptions do not negate the contributions of these fine people.

My decision not to seek renewal springs from my own, internal value barometer. As I contemplated compiling a list of my contributions over the past year, I asked myself why I wanted to be renewed. I realized that the only reasons I had to seek a renewed MVP award was to stroke my ego, and receive free stuff. My ego is stroked by the implied status of the MVP award and as a MVP, I recieve a full MSDN subscription, and free licenses for many tools from third party vendors.

While status and free stuff are nice, they aren’t reason enough for me to continue to pursue a MVP award. The truth is, I haven’t been particularly engaged as a MVP over the past year. I did not attend the MVP summit in 2011. I have not been contributing to, or even reading the insider mailing lists that I’m subscribed to. I haven’t been delivering feedback to my product team in any way.

Given my level of disengagement with the program and my admittedly shallow motivations, I decided it would be disengenuous to re-apply. I may frequently be a f**k-up, but I doubt people that truly know me would accuse me of being a phony.

Thanks to everyone that helped get me into the MVP program. Thank you to everyone at Microsoft that keeps the MVP program running. Thank you to the Visual C# team for valuing what I do. I hope that someone coming up in the community can take my spot in the MVP program and benefit as much as I have from the opportunities that it provides.

++Alan

Since then, I have formed a corporation and worked as a freelance software developer. Along the way, I joined the Entrepreneurs Of Knoxville (EoK) in order to associate with like minded people. Last week, I mentioned to the organizer that I’d like to give a presentation at a future meeting. A few days later, the speaker for this week canceled and I got tapped to fill in.

I’m thrilled to get to share some ideas beyond the field of software development. I read widely in the areas of business, productivity and personal development and I have endeavored to apply the best ideas directly in my life and business. Tomorrow I’ll be sharing some very useful ideas from an unlikely source.

My talk tomorrow is titled Seven Lessons in Personal Marketing I Learned From Pickup Artists. While the source of the information might imply some freakiness, the content is solid, i assure you. I’ll be sharing the useful ideas and techniques I’ve learned from studying the material of a variety of dating coaches. The fist step in finding a mate is making friends and making friends is how I’ve found new business for years now. Here’s the abstract:

Seven Lessons in Personal Marketing I Learned From Pickup Artists

A few years ago, I stumbled on a mention of something called the seduction community in a talk by Merlin Mann (http://bit.ly/euAAJD). After a few Google searches, I found the book The Game by Neil Strauss and read it. The book tells the story of how Strauss, a writer, became involved in the seduction community and what he learned there. What he found was a bunch of nerds that used a left brain approach to courtship and in the process uncovered a series of repeatable approaches to social dynamics based on a rich set of principles of human behavior and motivation.

I quickly saw the applicability of these routines and principles beyond the realm of attracting a mate. I’ve studied the books and recordings of the professional instructors of this material and now I want to share what I found to be of greatest value. I applied these principles to my professional networking activities with pleasant success and look forward to sharing these ideas with you.

If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll come out and join me. If you can’t make it, the video will be posted online with the rest of the EoK meetings. I’ll post an update when it is available.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be facilitating an Open Space at Code PaLOUsa in the Seelbach Hilton Hotel in downtown Louisville, KY on March 4 and 5, 2011.

We will have the opening circle on Friday afternoon during the session block before Douglas Crockford’s keynote from 4:05 to 5:10 pm. The open space will run all day Saturday in parallel to the conference tracks.

This is the first year for this cross platform developer event in Louisville and I am delighted to be involved. I look forward to interacting with all the attendees and I’m eager to discover what unexpected insights they provide me.