Shawn Weisfeld is a software developer that specializes in building applications and websites with .NET technologies. He created UserGroup.TV as a means to share valuable free content for the developer community. The UserGroup.TV site is currently hosted on our Multi-site Cloud Hosting plan. UserGroup.TV is home to over 400 hours of recorded developer presentations from 42 different groups and 215 speakers and is growing every day. We talked to Shawn to learn more about his labor of love.
Thanks for talking with us Shawn. Can you share how you got into programming?
I caught the development bug young. As a kid, I toyed around with a bit of programming, however I really did not get serious about it until getting to college and seeing the power that software had to help people get their jobs done. I’ve been developing professionally since about 2000.
What kind of development work do you do?
My interests in programing are wide. I spend most of my time building web applications, but also enjoy developing for the phone and client and you might even catch me playing around with my embedded systems and robots in my free time. If there are curly braces and semi colons, I am there.
How did you get involved with the developer community? What do you do for them?
I have been involved in the developer community for many years as a speaker, presenting at numerous events around the country. I also ran the Orlando .NET User Group for a bit of time before moving out to Texas a few years ago. However UserGroup.TV is my current passion.
Tell us about the UserGroup.TV project.
After attending, organizing and speaking at community events for many years, I found myself at work the following day explaining to my coworkers about the awesome presentation that I watched the night earlier. After a while of this, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could capture the content that is delivered at community events and share it online with the world?” That was when UserGroup.TV was born.
What kind of technology do you use on the site?
The core of the site is a vanilla WordPress install. That said, we have a custom ASP.NET services back end that we use for automation and to deliver the WebAPIs to our mobile applications.
How do you think you benefit from the new Everleap platform?
One of the key advantages over traditional shared hosting or VPS for us is the scaling option. This allows us to run multiple instances of the site on different servers in the Everleap data center, providing better response times during peak loads and eliminating the worries of getting stuck on a box with a “noisy neighbor,” all by toggling a drop down box. I also like the more traditional purchasing model, where I have a fixed set of known costs, and the ability to scale out as much as I need. At the end of the day Everleap provides me the ability to forget about server maintenance and focus on my mission of distributing great content to the developer community.
What does the future hold for UserGroup.TV, and how does Everleap play a part?
The publication of content on UserGroup.TV is manual and I want to move to an automatic process where contributors from all over can upload their own videos as a service to others. I really don’t foresee us growing out of Everleap. In fact, I just got an email from you guys with information about advancements that will give us more head room. So I know that scaling will not be an issue as I continue to grow the UserGroup.TV platform.
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