.NET Foundation Campaign: Shawn Wildermuth
Who am I?
I am a coder, instructor and speaker. This year I was graced with my eighteenth Microsoft MVP. I've written eight books, dozens of articles and over twenty-five courses for Pluralsight. I live and breathe this stuff.
It's been nearly forty years since I got a Vic-20 for Christmas 1980. Since that day, I've been obsessed with code and programming. My first programming job was designing a database for a real estate company back in 1986. It's been in my blood ever since.
When the original .NET Beta was announced, I was skeptical. As a C++ developer, I wasn't ready to have anyone take my pointers away from me. Later that year, I took a class from Keith Brown that convinced me that .NET was my future. Within a year, I would start writing my first book, "Pragmatic ADO.NET".
Since then, I've been building, writing, teaching, and speaking about .NET. This has included being a part of a handful of Insider programs with Microsoft: ASP.NET, ClientDev, Data, and Silverlight programs.
Recently, I finished my first film called "Hello World". I made the film to highlight my love for this career and try to encourage people of all sorts that this is a great career.
Why I'm Running
I'm passionate about .NET, but it's not the only community that I interact with. I am perplexed by the lack of .NET in non-enterprise environments (e.g. education, startups, etc.). I want to help drive the .NET Foundation to help projects that will help drive that adoption. Furthering the tools and projects that help improve the .NET community and welcome more members in with open arms.
I'm also interested in increasing inclusion and diversity across software development. So, one of my goals in being on the board is to help ensure that the board continues to view inclusion as a priority in building .NET communities. Here is my candidacy interview:
My .NET and Community Contributions
Over the years, I've contributed to the community with a handful of open source projects including:
- pinger: A tool to ping ranges of IP addresses.
- ASP.NET Core Snippets: An extension for VSCode for ASP.NET Core.
- AllReady: Contributed to early builds for .NET Core version.
- PhoneyTools: A handful of tools for building Windows Phone applications.
- travelMap: A wrapper for Google Maps to support showing a map of a series of cities travelled to.
- UseNodeModules: Contributed to project started by K. Scott Allen to enable .NET Core to use NPM dependencies.
- RssSyndication: .NET Core library for building RSS Feeds.
- MetaWeblog: An ASP.NET Core Middleware Component for Implementing MetaWeblog API.
- CoreCodeCamp: An Open Source Website for running small, local development events.
- WilderBlog: My Blog as an ASP.NET Core 3.1 Project.
Speaking and Teaching .NET
I've been speaking and teaching .NET for a long time. I've spoken at User Groups (formerly part of the INETA Speakers' Bureau) and conferences across North America, Europe and Asia. I've run a training company since 2007 which specializes in .NET Training as well as my role as a Pluralsight Author since 2011.
You can see some of my talks from conferences and user groups at my blog: