My Thoughts on Last Nights Meet-up

The big picture message I got from our conversation with Kathleen is that demand in the IT industry in Chicago continues to be strong for people with skills. The better you are able to demonstrate your skills with sound experience and knowledge the more marketable you will be.

Regarding the Ron and Tom Show.... what can I say! I am so thankful these two guys are active in our group. I only wish I was as inspired as Tom to poke around with XML after seeing Ron give his presentation the last time. I certainly will now, and fortunately I also have some projects on deck that have direct application, so it's both a curiosity as well as an economic need. I learned so much about XML and picked up on a number of other ideas the will be of great benefit to my work.

For those of you reading my "teaser" post, I'll expand...

While Kathleen identified many of the same trends in technologies and products we see being used in the marketplace (PHP, Java, .net, SAP, J.D. Edwards, Oracle, etc.) we are all seeing, it seems to me that it really it boils down to focus on what you want to work on and what you are good at. Like Kathleen said, even for the projects Lyons Consulting staffs, when do you use certain skills?  ..."it depends".

I'm sure the projects they move forward on are ones they know they can staff and their project management and sales people have direct experience with. Deciding what your focus is and understanding your skill set before you go after business (or employment) is key to your success as a consultant or as a full time employed professional. There has to be a need, the prospective client has to be ready and willing to approach filling the need with what you have to offer, and of course the the people you develop a project with have to be able to make a decision and fund the project. This is the basis of selling yourself, if any of this is missing you are probably wasting your time.

What I like about Ron's SimpleXML presentation is that it really does show how simple and straightforward it is to use this AND mix in PHP and CSS to style the file. Ron does a great job of keeping it simple and communicating so that any experience level can understand it. You all know I'm not a coder, my background is more sales and project management, but even I could do this.

Then Mr. Tom comes up showing his work with taking multiple CSV files daily, creating an XML configuration file to be used with a CRON job to process and transform these into XML files, which finally will be used to communicate with their Anesthesia Docs for their operating room schedules. All of this based on the same simpleXML stuff that Ron showed, (extended a bit of course).  WOW!  

I can't say I understood all the coding stuff... but I do get and appreciate the error checking routines he put in as well as the whole process and value this will be for the Hospital. Fun to watch!