Roy Osherove

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MVP Recommendation: James Crowley

For what it's worth, I'd like to take this stage and recommend someone who I think is worthy of an MVP title.
Have you ever been to DeveloperFusion.Com? It's a site dedicated to tutorials and information about programming, including .Net and other MS technologies (and non-MS as well).
You'd be surprised to know that the site is run by a 19 year old student, James Crowley.
Developer fusion has been around for several years in one form or another (it used to be called vbWeb).
The site is entirely built by James, on his free time and has over 17,000 registered users.
It contains newsgroups, articles and anyone can submit an article and get it published (after a review by James).
I found out about james a few days ago when he asked me for permission to republish some of my articles there.
In my mind, James is truly one of those people who help the community in many ways and deserves the MVP title.
 
Here's a short chat \interview I had with him (published with permission):
 

 How long have you been doing DevFusion?

 the site's been around in some form for a few years.... but i haven't had time to write many articles in the last year

 But you've been the one to make it come to life?

 yup :) i'm basically spending most of my time editing them at the mo - hence coming back to the content management thing so i actually get time to do some writing again!

 Do you get paid for your work?

 it started off as a site called vb web .... which was basically when i was learning VB ... so i just wrote up stuff that i learned

 well... my time is starting to pay off now, as we're getting money from advertising

 who's "we"?

 sorry. bad habit.  we, as in "Developer Fusion Ltd". which is just me :P

do you have a personal blog?

 at the moment, my personal web site amounts to http://www.developerfusion.com/profile/1 ... and i don't think my life is interesting enough to have a blog at the moment ;)

 where do you work?

 I don't - that's the thing. I’m still studying for my degree!

 You're 19?

 i'm afraid so...

 how many registered users do you have?

 registered... not as many as I’d like. I think its around 17,000  but that's dating back a while now, so they're not necessarily active

 but according to the stats at the moment, we're getting around 60K page views a day.

 So you wrote the whole site engine from scratch (as with vb web)?

 Yeah. started out as static HTML - then moved to asp, then php (don't ask...), then asp.net

 Lovely.

 and now i need to redo it properly!

 but it works pretty well from the front end..... only i see the sticky tape and glue holding it together!

 What's the thing in Developer fusion you're most proud of, community wise?

I don't know if there's anything in particular, but when I first started out with VB Web, I was amazed at the number of people who emailed me saying thanks for writing the article on xxx ... i've still got a print out of some of them on my wall. that's what encouraged me to keep going

 now, its really cool, especially on the forums - there's so many ppl around willing to help

 just one look at http://www.developerfusion.com/members/ranking.aspx shows that really

 How did you get advertisers?

 just started on various advertising networks  then, as the traffic increased, i've had emails from various ppl offering.... and we came to an agreement with maximum asp so that we get free hosting, in exchange for their ad  which was great, because that basically meant i didn't have to worry that i would actually be losing money on the site and as i was a student, i obviously couldn't really afford to do that!

 What language to you program in?

 if I get a choice, i'm generally choosing C# at the moment.  I obviously did an awful lot of VB programming b4 - http://www.developerspad.com/ was one of my pain conquests  but again, i haven't had enough time to get it past beta :S

 Do you help in the newsgroups as well?

 that's one thing i have to admit I haven't done yet, but not for any particular reason which is something I should probably do!

 

Thanks for all your hard work, James.