Rolling.Rolling.Rolling

I have been quite busy recently. Last week, I was in Singapore for the regional New Hire Bootcamp where I get to meet other newbies like me who had joined the company for the past three months. It was a fun trip but rather a tiring one. It was also my first experience in cooking something other than maggi-mee in the team-building activity.

The SGDN guys were kind enough to throw two dinners for me. The first one was with the committee members and the second was with the student community (or what was supposed to be the new Stickies.NET team initially). I would like to thank WeeHyong (my database idol) for picking me up from Changi airport and sending me to the hotel and for giving me a 30 minutes crash-tour of Sentosa Island. It was a shame that it was raining that day. Otherwise, I could have taken some pretty good photographs.

I would also like to thank Alvin Lau for taking the extra effort in organizing the community dinners to allow me to meet-up with so many wonderful developers. The trip was quite hectic for me as I was also in the midst of preparing the content and cooking up the strategy to deliver my workshop back in Malaysia. I was engaged to deliver a workshop on Application and Services Architecture for our customers - which I had conducted yesterday.

Although most of the stuff were my forte, I had problems expressing them in writing like most developers. So, I had took a considerable amount of time in preparing the slides. Initially, I was not motivated by the small number of registrations but I'm glad that we have over-registrations at the last moment.

I had learned a lot from delivering this workshop. Architecture topics are always dry and I had tried my best to inject some fun to it. The idea of a case-study exercise from my colleague was a good one. I'm quite happy to see the attendees applying what they learned in the workshop. Some was quite passionate about their architecture design and concepts during their presentation. Some of the concepts maybe difficult to grasps and I guessed I should have designed some demos instead of just chai-talk. I will definitely do that next time.

Although the workshop is now over, there is still no time for me to rest. I will be sitting for my 071-431: TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - Implementation and Maintenance exam tomorrow and 071-441: PRO: Designing Database Solutions by Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 exam on Monday. I sure hope to atleast pass one of them since there isn't enough time and materials for me to prepare. I've been reading SQL Books Online like nobody's business since I've registered for the exams.

And lastly before I sign-off, I just want to say that my '90-day evaluation period' has expired yesterday and I'm glad that my company has decided to 'purchase the license' for my continuous usage. In simpler English - I have been confirmed. ;)