Daily Archives: August 28, 2015

Meet our guest from San Diego, the USA. David McCarter is a Microsoft MVP, developer, architect, consultant, professional code reviewer and interviewer, editor-in-chief of dotNetTips.com., the author of many books.

Dear David, I know you are a very active driver of .NET community in San Diego. You train, you teach students, you conduct .NET Developers Group, and much more. Where do you find so much energy? What are your inspiration sources?
Well, I do not have the same energy as I did in my 20’s, so now it all comes down to setting priorities on what I want to do, including my full-time work. Full-time work always comes first, then comes writing, teaching, speaking, etc.
When I started out as a software engineer, my inspiration were my two children. They inspired me so much that the first few books I wrote were dedicated to them. They have always been my main driving factor in doing the best I can.
My another driving force is helping others with their career. Whether it is writing, teaching or speaking, it is all designed to help others to become the best software engineers they can be. Everyone in this world has a talent and one of mine happens to be software engineering. Therefore, I feel that it is my duty to share it.
I have other talents too. I am an award winning photographer and musician (guitar). When I am not working or helping others, I enjoy these two things the most.

Would you please tell about you career in IT?
I started out in computer support for a large company here in San Diego, California. I actually avoided being a software engineer for a long time since I did not feel it was creative and thought that sitting behind a computer screen for the rest of my working life would be boring. Eventually software engineering sucked me back in and once I discovered it was creative, I set out to make it a career.
Now over twenty years later I am glad I made that choice. One thing that I love about being a software engineer is that I cannot learn everything. While this can be stressful, it is what gets me up in the morning.

What do you like the most about speaking at different events?
The number one thing I like is helping others when I speak at a conference. When I am not speaking, I am usually always talking to other speakers, the organizers and the attendees. I am always interested how companies, software projects and software engineers are different in different parts of the country.

What should NETworkers 2015 expect from your speech?
My session is part four of my conference session series I have titled “Improving code quality… one developer at a time”. In this session, I introduce code contracts in .NET to developers to help make practicing encapsulation easier. Even though most developers claim they practice object-oriented programming, if they are not validating parameters in properties and methods, they are not practicing proper encapsulation.
I will also show how using code contracts will actually make creating good unit tests easy with the new features in Visual Studio 2015.

Why have you decided to come to Ukraine? What are your expectations from Ukraine and Lviv, in particular?
I have always wanted to speak outside of the United States and your conference was the first to ask. I hope this will lead to more speaking overseas. I am looking forward to meeting the developers I know in Ukraine via Skype.
Since I have never been to Europe I am looking forward to sightseeing in Lviv and, hopefully, working in some photography.