Scott Hanselman '03

Hanselman

Zen and the Art of Software Evangelism

By Marc Covert

In eight years of traveling the world as a software evangelist (no quotation marks, it's an official title) Scott Hanselman '03 has earned a reputation for wowing software developers with his live presentations to some 150,000 audience members at last count as far away as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (twice); Casablanca, Morocco; and Munich, Germany. He's traveled all over the United States, taking the stage as part of Microsoft or Intel or Compaq-sponsored "road shows." These often tough-to-impress audiences consistently rate Hanselman's presentations at or near the top of the heap; his 2002 presentations at the Microsoft TechEd in Kuala Lumpur landed him the distinction of being "highest audience-rated speaker of conference."

And that's not even his day job. Hanselman, a 2003 graduate of Oregon Tech's software engineering program, is currently chief architect at Corillian, a Portland-based online financial services company, a position he has held since 2001. Add to this his position as an adjunct professor at Oregon Tech in Portland, Ore., his two technical books (with a third underway on ASP.NET 2.0) as a collaborating author for Wrox Press, his wildly popular blog (www.computerzen.com), which attracts about 30,000 page views per day, and, since August 2001, his status as a happily married man, and it becomes hard to understand how he does it all in the same 24-hour days allotted to the rest of us.

Hanselman does it all in defiance of a one-word mantra he's heard since starting out in the software business in 1989: Specialize.  "That's the word you hear over and over in this business. And I just can't do it. I'm like a Swiss Army knife; I just have to do a little bit of everything," he explains. "Get a group of computer people together and you'll hear, 'Are you a database person? Are you a user-interface person? Do you write compo entry? What exactly do you do?' I just refuse to do that, although I've already specialized in the sense that I'm a Microsoft guy -- but I spent two years working at Nike doing Java. So it's kind of like saying I was a Rabbi and a priest -- I can speak to both sides."

High .NET Worth

So how does he enthrall audiences when speaking on highly technical, potentially deadly-dull subjects like "The Zen of .NET," "It's the WORLDWIDE Web: Internationalizing ASP.NET," or "Learning to Love WSDL"?

"Whether Scott is communicating his ideas in small gatherings of geeks at a restaurant or to thousands of attendees at large venues like Microsoft TechEd, he gets his point across in a special way," says Chris Goldfarb, who runs the Portland-area International .NET Association (INETA). "He sprinkles his talks liberally with a good dose of humor and sidebar treats, but never fails to stay on track and ensure the listener has total understanding of the big picture. More than once I've walked away from a conversation with Scott anxious -- no, desperate -- to flip open my laptop and start cranking away code. There are only a few legitimate rock-star speakers in the technical world, and Scott is at the top of that list."

"I can personally attest to the fact that Scott is a hard act to follow," adds Corillian co-worker Patrick Cauldwell, who also participates in speaker tours for software companies. "When I first met him he was actually doing standup at open mike night at a Portland comedy club. I think Scott excels at public speaking because not only is he knowledgeable and excited about the subject, but he really loves getting up in front of a crowd, and it shows."

Scott accepts such compliments graciously but is quick to dismiss the idea that he is a "rock star" or "celebrity." He even has to think back for a while to remember how it all started. "I did my first presentations eight years ago at a web-developers conference called DevDays in Portland; they hold them each year at the Convention Center. I volunteered (it's a very small thing, there's one in every large city), so it's harmless for them to give someone a try. They do surveys at every one of these shows and people were more effusive about my style; it's a little more silly than the average speaker's style -- I'm not afraid to say certain things. So those kinds of speaker evaluations got handed around and I started to get a reputation."

Three Weddings, One Bride

One fringe benefit of the road shows -- which Scott does without charging speakers fees -- was a recent side trip to Zimbabwe and South Africa to visit his in-laws; his wife Mollar ("Mo" for short) is a native of Zimbabwe. "We went to Morocco on this trip to speak to the North African Developers Conference, where I gave a talk on internationalizing web sites -- showing folks how to write code that deals with the right-to-left issues of Arabic script, the funky dates of the Thai Buddhist Calendar, or how to deal with languages like Ethiopian Amharic that have no official support in Windows," he explains. "I had to give the talk in English, as my French sucks, so they had a U.N. translator doing real-time translation with headphones for the audience. I used Google as a verb (I googled you) and they didnt get it, so I suggested Jai vous Googl (pronounced Goog-lay) and they found the idea of using a proper noun as a verb to be quite entertaining. For the rest of the week the attendees would stop me and say Jai vous Googl!"

Even his wedding(s) required some serious mileage: "Mo and I actually got married three times, first in October 2000 in a park in Delaware. It was a justice-of-the-peace ceremony and we forgot to bring any witnesses, so we had to grab two joggers and they were our witnesses. We then got married the following August at McMenamins Edgefield in Portland, those are the pictures you can see on my blog; then we went to Zimbabwe, did a bride price, killed a goat, and got married again."

Scott's refusal to specialize does come at a price. "I am exhausted," he says. "I am utterly spent. My hands hurt from carpal tunnel, I think that's something that people dont realize, and when you type a hundred words a minute for ten years, you pay. Im already retired 20 percent; I don't work Fridays and I took a pay cut to do it, but I need the time to work on my book. Let me put it this way: it burns you out. I've done a lot in a very short amount of time. I do not know how these 30-year guys who used to work on punch cards can do it. I just don't know. Who has the patience? More power to them for doing it, but that is unbelievable to me."

Computer Zen

He puts a lot of time into his blog, but that time comes late at night, "after Mo falls asleep on the couch." Scott considers it time well spent. "The blog is as much for me as it is for anyone else," he says. "It's like being able to Google my own diary; its a record of my own existence. It's great to be able to see how my writing style has evolved over the years. And hopefully its useful for others and plays a role in problem-solving in the international community."

So what does the future hold? "Oh, Im going to retire as soon as possible," he says wistfully. "I've been exploring the idea of teaching engineering at Portland Community College or maybe teaching high school. I might keep up the road shows if I could be someone like Anthony Robbins, the motivational speaker, but with Powerpoint, going around and telling people, 'computers aren't so hard, don't be a wimp,' That's my whole computer Zen philosophy in a nutshell, the basic idea is that computer people are way too uptight. I would much rather spend my time thinking about the philosophy behind the technology and just looking the other stuff up. So the Zen is a way of characterizing to people, Just chill, shut up, relax, and drink it all in without getting mired in the details."

Hanselman received the 2004 Young Professional Achievement Award from the Oregon Tech Alumni Association. Marc Covert is associate editor of

 

Portland

Portland magazine at the University of Portland and a regular contributer to Oregon Tech magazine.