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Monday Interview with Peter Laker aka "XAML guy" the main character of the WikiNinjas

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We're continuing our Monday series, "Interview with a TechNet Wiki Author!" Today's author is XAML GUY. I actually don't need to explain who XAML guy is.. He is ...He is ...

  • He is a Member of the TechNet Wiki Community Council
  • He is a blogger on the Wiki Ninjas blog
  • He is the owner of the weekly Top Contributors blog posts
  • He is the leader of the amazing TechNet Guru contest
  • He is the creator of the TechNet Wiki Windows 8 app
  • He is the creator of the Wiki Crawler Windows Azure Web app
  • He is the creator of the TechNet Guru judging app

After reading this amazing list I could say that there is no need for an interview.. Because XAML Guy is like the Cristiano Ronaldo of the modern football. He is indispensable for our Wiki Ninjas group. We are very fortunate to have him in our team! I want to THANK YOU before everyone Peter! You are a great person and a great contributor! Pete Laker's avatar

Who are you, where are you, and what do you do? What are your specialty technologies?

My name is Peter Laker. You'll find another interview here that covers all the basics.

 

What are your big work projects right now?

During the day (and often into the evening) I am working on various Interior Automation projects for an internationally renowned automation company, like an airport-scale lighting control interface, and an AutoCAD to XAML conversion tool.

What I have been most impressed with lately is the extent to which you can load up a Silverlight or WPF Canvas with tens of thousands of individually controllable objects. And how smoothly you can animate flying in and out of huge AutoCAD style floor plans.

I have also been moving into Windows 8, ASP.Net MVC4 and HTML5 development. XAML is still by far the richest and quickest way to develop most Line of Business applications, where you have control over client machine specifications. However, I clearly see the Mobile/BOYD potential of common denominator JS/HTML5. Welcome back old friends!

 

What are your big Wiki projects right now?

I'd like to highlight the weekly Top Contributions Awards, and Microsoft's TechNet Wiki Guru Awards

 

The weekly round-up of contributions is always fun to do. I wrote a crawler which scans every change over each week.

 

When I started, the crawler was easily able to crawl all the changes and generate a giant DataGrid of results that I manually interrogated for winners. Wiki popularity grew so much, that this ended up taking hours to crawl and then manually write the weekly blog from. The Internet and the website can at times be a little flakey, so I also had to contend with crashes and reruns. 

 

Here is a video I made some time ago of the crawler and the process of collecting the data for the weekly blog - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufaReEg36FE

 

The crawler has now matured into a much more stable database application that can be stopped and restarted at any point.

 

However, I was still spending a lot of my spare time writing the actual blog, off the back of that data. Which was preventing me from moving forwards with any new ideas.

 

So I automated myself, so to speak. I now auto-generate certain portions of the HTML template for the weekly blog, like the most articles and most revisions awards. It saves me heaps of time building the blog post from scratch, cutting, pasting and formatting article titles, names and hyperlinks. This has freed me up to add new features and analytics to the crawler, plus other internal spin-off reporting features, for the Council to monitor, and our Ninja bloggers to blog about.

 

The TechNet Guru Awards have been an amazing experience. It is incredible to see so many high calibre contributions, from so many prominent members of our technical community.

 

Between you and me (and anyone who reads this blog) this is a chance for many high ranking Microsoft technology experts to meet the developers (their users) and get to know some of the regular contributors. This is real ground-to-top contact, between developers and makers of the actual technologies.

 

I am very excited at how many note-worthy MS names we have judging the contributions, and proud to have them involved in this project. I believe it helps to break down the Ivory Tower image that some technology departments portray. Now has never been a better time to make your mark, get your name known in the highest circles of your favoured technology, and even add to your portfolio/cv, with some worthy praise from some very important players.

Forget LinkedIn friend endorsements, get endorsed by someone who actually MADE the technology!!

 

- Ninja Gokan Ozcifci

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2013
    I enjoyed reading this interview. Thanks Gokan and Peter!

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2013
    Wow, what a great interview Gokan. Congratulations Peter.

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2013
    Liked your crawling innovation Pete

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2013
    Peter is not a myth, he's a real person ? :) Thnals for all your work, especially on the crawler, which has to support more and more activities !

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2013
    Thanks Peter for this nice interview.. And please don't shoot me if I say that everybody loves you ! ^^

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2013
    Gokan, wow, I love your bulleted list of all the things Peter is leading or has done! He's had a huge impact on what we do here!

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2013
    Well done Gokan, a great interview. And thank you Peter for improving the weekly crawl, automating the guru judging, etc. etc. The work is much appreciated.

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2013
    Thanks Gokan for this Interview...  Peter's contribution to community is really Incredible and admirable!!!!

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 14, 2013
    Congrats dad :)

  • Anonymous
    January 08, 2014
    Great interview. I was honored merely by reading this interview so I can only imagine what Gokan felt actually doing it first hard with the great and powerful wizard of Microsoft TechNet Wiki, the one, the only Peter Laker aka "XAML guy.

  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2014
    This quote is fantastic: "Forget LinkedIn friend endorsements, get endorsed by someone who actually MADE the technology!!"

  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2014
    You can find the list of authors here: Wiki Ninjas Blog: The Contributors Anyone can join us

  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2014
    This blog is a follow up to our last list of Wiki Ninja Blog Authors: Council Spotlight: Who are the

  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2014
    Congratulations

  • Anonymous
    June 15, 2014
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
    Sorry this

  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2014
    The tool to generate the new winners section (below) had some fresh bugs pop up this week, but I've

  • Anonymous
    July 17, 2014
    thank you

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2014
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
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    August 02, 2014
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    August 30, 2014
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    September 06, 2014
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    September 20, 2014
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    September 27, 2014
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    October 05, 2014
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.



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    November 22, 2014
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    December 22, 2014
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  • Anonymous
    December 23, 2014
    Impressive stuff Peter.

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    January 04, 2015
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week, a day late due

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    January 09, 2016
    Welcome back for the first analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week, for 2016!

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    January 17, 2016
    Contributors

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    January 30, 2016
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    February 06, 2016
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    February 20, 2016
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
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    February 29, 2016
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week, up until Saturday

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    March 06, 2016
    Top Contributors of the Week
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    April 01, 2016
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    April 10, 2016
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    April 18, 2016
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    April 24, 2016
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
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  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2017
    Updated the link to Pete's profile and his avatar image.