Brain Food 6-30-2007

• Rhino on Rails - Steve Yegge ported Rails to JavaScript.  I knew Stevey was brilliant, but...good lord.
• Writing Maintainable Code - InfoQ has a great roundup of a debate going on between several prominent bloggers in the .NET community regarding maintainability.
• The Skynet Compute Cloud: I think there is a world market for maybe Five Computers - Scott Hanselman makes a fascinating observation about how the adoption of things like Amazon S3 and EC2, and Google Apps is taking us full-circle back to the notion of computation and storage being done by a select few.
• Mitch Kapor's Foxmarks To Leap Into Search World - The creator of Lotus 1-2-3 is working on a search engine that taps into the bookmarks managed by his company's popular Firefox extension, Foxmarks.  This is such a great idea.  Say goodbye to search spam.
• Rumors of Software Engineering's Death are Greatly Exaggerated - Steve McConnell tears apart various arguments that software engineering is not "real" engineering.  I had heard these arguments before and was starting to believe them, but McConnell has brought me back with his impeccable logic.

Supporting Open Source .NET Projects

Get on over to Coding Horror and let Jeff Atwood know which open source .NET project you think deserves some money.  (hint, hint)

Brain Food 6-24-2007

Another hodgepodge of links today.

• C#: Uninitialized instance variables - I remember hearing early on in my experience with C# that variables were automatically initialized.  For some reason this issue popped into my head again recently, and I just had to look it up.  It turns out the issue is a bit more complicated.
• wordUnit: A Document Testing Framework - Document-Driven Documentation is the wave of the future!
• The Things That Pass For Simple I Can't Understand - I've always subscribed to the KISS principle, but determining the simplest thing to do is often very complicated.
• SubSonic: Some Clarifications - Rob Conery has assured the community that SubSonic is not going away...ever.  All I can say is: Thank god!
• Asshole-Driven Development - A great listing of some hilarious (and sadly accurate) software engineering methodologies.  The ones that were most recognizable to me were the Get Me Promoted Methodology (GMPM), Shovel-Driven Development (SDD), and No Customer Left Behind Development (NCLBD).  Make sure to read the comments.
• Creating My Own Personal Hell - A great post about the pitfalls of being the sole developer at a company.  After finding myself in this position in my first job out of college (although it was definitely not as bad as the one portrayed in this post), I vowed that I would never take another job at a company without an established team of developers.

The List

This list is a loosely defined catchall for the various things related to software development, in no particular order, that I want to grok at some point in the future.

I'll be revisiting this list and adding new interesting things as I come across them.

• The Castle Project (MonoRail in particular)
  
• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• Erlang
• F#
• Scheme
• Object-oriented analysis & design
• Unit testing
• Test-driven development
• Functional programming
• Emacs
• Macs/OS X
• Design patterns
• REST
• Software management
• Interaction design
• Software architecture
• Setting up and maintaining a website on my own domain
• Firefox extension development

Updated 1/25/2008

Steve Yegge's Back!

Stevey!  Where the hell have you been, man?  Don't ever leave us like that again!  You had me worried half to death!

Brain Food 6-10-2007

My brain's been all over the place lately.

• Close and Dispose ... The using Statement - I had no idea the using statement in C# could do this.  It's exciting to know that even after working with a language for several years it can still surprise you.
• The 411: Stored Procedures, Views, and ORM - Rob Conery is quickly becoming one of my favorite people in the dev world.  He's funny, down-to-earth, sharp, and utterly pragmatic.
• The Faint Signals of Concurrency - The issue of concurrent programming has been on my radar since my realization of where this whole multi-core movement was going to take our industry.  In particular, I've been following the Erlang community a bit, and it's on my list of things to dive into at a later date.
• Firefox Tip: Paste multiple lines to input boxes - Thank god for Lifehacker.  This one's been driving me nuts.

Brain Food 6-3-2007

My brain has been on a Ruby/ORM/Editors track lately.

• RubyConf*MI - Who knew there was a Ruby conference in my very own backyard? It's not clear from the website if they're putting one on in 2007. I checked out the schedule from 2006, and it looked pretty worthwhile.
• SubSonic - The SubSonic team just launched a new project site. It's certainly a lot nicer than their old CodePlex lair. I'm actually trying to use SubSonic on an app at work now, and I have to echo the sentiment that their docs do suck. (SubSonic is still awesome, though.)
• Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? - This is a talk by Windows programming guru Charles Petzold. I originally heard of this a while back, but just got around to reading it yesterday. I hesitated to read it for a while because I figured it was just some guy bashing Microsoft, but after reading it I can say that it's totally different from what I expected. This guy has been around the Microsoft dev world from day one, and he's full of insight. If you're a .NET developer like myself, this talk will seriously alter the way you view Visual Studio.