Free Software and Books for Unemployed Developers (thanks to Microsoft MVPs!)

Written by belle
Posted July 15, 2010 at 11:10 pm

Arnie Rowland just sent me an email informing me about this great give-back-to-the-community initiative. Many MVPs, including Arnie Rowland, Denny Cherry, Bill Graziano, Bill Simser, Paul Turley (whose sessions I attended last SQLPASS 2009)

Here is a quote from Arnie’s blog post :

“We are inviting unemployed or underemployed developers to propose a software project for a non-profit agency, school, or church.

The idea is that we will provide a package of the latest software, tools, and training resources to help you improve your skills, get up to date with current technologies, gain practical experience, potentially earn a recommendation for your efforts, and in general, enjoy the feeling of accomplishing something useful for others.

We are not giving out a ‘free lunch’, just supporting your efforts to personally gain from your own ‘sweat equity’.

The software, books, training and development tools are valued at over $15,000!

I think this is an excellent initiative, and will definitely help motivate developers to improve their skills and their toolsets. Think about it. If you’re an aspiring developer, you can also get the chance to have hands on practical experience – at the same time having the chance to get geeky feel-good goodies! C’mon, free books? Who can refuse that? (not me. I always have room in my bookshelf for free books. @BrentO (twitter | blog), by the way, I will need your autograph in my SQL Server Internals and Troubleshooting book. I will bring it in November!

So here’s what you need to do:
1. If you’re unemployed or underemployed, start looking for a non-profit project (see requirements in Arnie’s blog), and join.
2. If you’re neither unemployed nor underemployed – help spread the word.
3. If you’re neither unemployed nor underemployed – and you’re an MVP – sponsor ?
4. If you’re not interested, or you don’t care – just spread the word too. You’ll earn brownie points – somewhere.

Details are in Arnie’s blog: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/arnie_rowland/archive/2010/07/02/there-will-be-no-free-lunch-just-great-feelings-of-accomplishment.aspx

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Free Software and Books for Unemployed Developers (thanks to Microsoft MVPs!), 10.0 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

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