I'm Rob Conery. I help self-taught programmers overcome doubt and build their career.

I work at Microsoft as a Developer Advocate and I am fortunate to get invited to speak at global conferences from time to time. I have been working in the technology field full time since 1998 as a DBA and then a web developer.

I co-founded a company with my friend, Dave Nielsen, and we went on to build a consulting company that did some pretty innovating stuff, for the time. I built one of the very first ecommerce applications — selling laser discs for Pioneer electronics. I also helped create one of the very first intranet portals at a telecom giant in a project worth well over $1M.

That experience led to a call from Scott Guthrie, who recruited me to work for his ASP.NET team. They were creating a new framework called ASP.NET MVC, and thought I might be able to contribute a few things for the community. In 2006 I joined as a contractor and soon after, a full-time blue badge.

In the fall of 2009 I founded Tekpub.com with my friend James Avery. It was an instant success and for the next five years we produced videos ranging from iPhone development to database administration. In 2015 we were acquired by Pluralsight.

In 2016 I published The Imposter's Handbook, a book for self-taught programmers covering all the CS fundamentals you'd learn in a degree program. It was a massive success — 3,824 copies sold in the first 24 hours and nearly 30,000 copies total.