Reminder about 2013 Ceil Silver Ambassador

The Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund raises money from the VFP community to bring a developer to the Southwest Fox conference as an ambassador for the developers in his or her country. This gives the recipient the opportunity to meet and share experiences with developers attending Southwest Fox and gives other attendees the opportunity to learn about VFP development in the recipient's country.

We are looking for nominations from the VFP community for the 2013 recipient. To nominate someone you think deserves to be selected, please email their name and a brief list of their contributions to the VFP community to ambassadorfund@swfox.net. Names must be submitted no later than May 31, 2013.

In addition, we are looking for donations to allow us to pay for the travel costs for the ambassador. We urge you to consider donating any amount you see fit, small or large, to this fund. See http://www.swfox.net/ambassador.aspx for details. 100% of donated money goes to the travel costs for the ambassador. Not a single penny is used to cover administrative costs. All time managing the fund and working through the selection process is donated. No one is paid for their time.

Southwest Fox 2013 Registration Now Open

Geek Gatherings LLC has officially opened registration for Southwest Fox 2013! The developer conference will be held October 17-20, 2013 at the SanTan Elegante Conference and Reception Center, the same great location as last year. Last year was a huge success.

Super-Saver Registration, which saves you $125, is available only through June 30th, so don't wait. Head over to the registration Web site today: http://geekgatherings.com/Registration

Registration fees are the same as last year! More details are available on the conference's registration page.

Southwest Fox 2013 Speakers and Sessions Announced

Speakers and sessions for Southwest Fox 2013 have been announced. Like we try to do every year, we have a couple of new speakers this year: Hank Fay and David Giard.

You may notice that rather than having separate speaker pages for Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ (a conference held concurrently with Southwest Fox), we’ve combined them into one. The reason for that is some sessions apply to both conferences, such as Tamar Granor’s Office 365: An IT Department for Small Businesses session and David Giard’s How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love jQuery session.

Some of the sessions I’m personally looking forward to are:

• Rick Borup’s Multi-Track Development Strategies in DVCS session. The past couple of years, Rick did killer sessions on Mercurial, so I’m looking forward to moving to the next level.
• Hank’s Moving VFP Applications to the Cloud Using Lianja session. I don’t know much about Lianja so I want to see what it’s about.
• Eric Selje’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Continuous Integration and VFP session. CI is another topic I don’t know much about so I’m expecting Eric to enlighten me.
• Andrew MacNeill’s Crushing the User's Experience: Building the Right (and Wrong) UI session. As you may know, UI is a subject near to my heart, so I’d like to hear Andrew’s take on it.

I’m very excited by this year’s lineup and think you will be too. Registration opens in a couple of weeks. See you in October!