A few of the Black Ninja’s will be headed down to various conferences this year to build up a bit more training and product knowledge in our core competency areas. Professional development is something we believe very strongly in and conferences are an important component to that. We’re looking to socialize and meet some of the key folks in our online community. Anyone interested in speaking with us, look for the people dressed in Black Ninja t-shirts!

SharePoint Conferences 2009 – October 19-22

We do a fair bit of SharePoint consulting and custom development, so this conference is really important to us. It’ll be an opportunity to get familiar with the next version of SharePoint and to meet and greet with the various MVP’s and SharePoint consultants in the community. Part of any future infrastructure and development planning around the SharePoint platform will require an intimate knowledge of what’s coming, so that we can better prepare for these projects. That’s our ultimate goal.

SQL Pass 2009 – November 2 – 5

As with any good web application development, database design and development is big piece of that puzzle. Our db ninja, @sqlbelle, will be headed down to SQL Pass this year to learn everything she can about the latest and greatest in the database world. This event is the single biggest gathering of sql professionals and she’s bound to pick up a few gems here and there. If you’re wondering where you can find her while down there, just look for the section with all the books.

Pragmatic Studio Mastering Ruby and Rails – December 1 – 4

Ruby on Rails is one of our favourite languages and frameworks to work with and we’re really excited to be able to send our rails ninja down to this conference. Having already attended RailsConf this year, he’s very excited to be able to take his rails development to the next level. Our own internal product development is done entirely on rails, so having a guru on board makes it that much more easier!