I recently sat for the DEV401 certification exam at DreamForce ’09 and passed.

The nice thing about it is I sat for the test on Tuesday and on Wednesday at DreamForce they had these boards printed up standing in the heaviest-traveled area of the show floor.

DreamForce '09 - My name amongst those who passed cert exams

My name amongst those who passed cert exams

This is my “Certificate of Completion” from Lynda.com for sitting through the course titled, “Creating a First Web Site with DreamWeaver CS4.”

I successfully navigated my first year at DreamForce (the annual Salesforce.com event of the year).

I had heard that you can get any one of 100,001 things from DreamForce, so my objective was to go and learn as much as I could about VisualForce and Apex. I’m certain I succeeded in reaching that goal.

Monday was a 14 hour day that included registration, the big keynote from the Salesforce.com CEO, session after session of learning, a two-hour hack-athon on the new Force.com Sites technology and ended with a Foo Fighters concert.

I’ve completed an instructor-led course on the introductory topics in C#. The application of choice was, of course, Visual Studio 2005.

This fits nicely with my SQL Server 2005 course and adds ASP.NET programming to my skill set.

I’ve completed an instructor-led class on MS SQL Server 2005.

So far this class has turned out to be quite timely. We are discussing a web application that shows power consumption data stored, of course, in a SQL database. We have only discussed this app being available on our company intranet. But I expect that it will public as the app expands in scope. At that time, I’ll be sure to post an example.

Things I have learned so far:

Owning a Business

Do you remember when you were in grade school english class and the teacher made you start every class with writing a journal entry based on a prompt? There is one entry in particular that I found when going through one of my old journals where I detail a business plan for sports memorabilia (e.g. baseball cards, autographed helmets, authentic jerseys, etc.). To own and operate my own business has been a part of me for a very long time. I like business, but am limited by my own intelligence and I constantly get frustrated by my own ambition and desires. e.g. my ambition far exceeds my intelligence.

I can not count the number of MS Project plans I have created. Some seem to go on for hundreds and hundreds of tasks and some seem to get the job done in less than 50.

I’ve realized, though, that many times people just want the comfort of knowing that a file exists. Furthermore, the people that want that comfort are inevitably the people that end up deviating from the plan or making changes.