Peter Seale's weblog

Thursday, March 18, 2010 3:54:58 AM UTC 

Hello! I'm Peter and I'm here to present another sweet, sweet linkblog post. I've done this a few times before ([1] [2]). My goal with these linkblog posts (which are becoming a habit) is to expose you to new concepts, point you to useful resources, and wow you with a dazzling laser show. I've pulled together anything tangentially related to software development in the .NET space, salted each link with commentary, and grouped them into sections. I'm not an authority on most of the articles to which I link.

Also you may be noticing that this is the “Q4 2009” edition of the linkblog, and are perhaps concerned that your blog aggregator is some 3-6 months out of date, or that you’ve somehow mistakenly traveled backwards through time. Nope. I refuse to change the post title out of principle. It’s important to stick to your principles.

Community events

• April 30th-May 2nd— http://www.altnethouston.com/ open spaces event. It’s going to be intense! It’s going to be don-your-adult-diapers intense (you won’t want to leave, for any reason)!
• MONTHLY: Virtual ALT.NET at http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet - meetings are held on Wednesday nights American time; for meetings held in your continent's time zone check the website. Ok, admittedly I'm pulling a Morton* by promoting an event I'm not attending (I haven't made the time for it recently, no excuses), but I hold the opinion that these LiveMeeting-based user group events provide more value than than the local .NET user group meeting. What's also valuable is that Virtual ALT.NET meetings are recorded and posted for on-demand viewing.
  *ask him about it
• Um, hmm, I guess it’s a little late to post a notice? February 26th-28th - Los Techies' Fiesta - open spaces event in Austin, Texas - I've paid the down payment and am making my monthly payments toward the exorbitant* registration fee, and am looking forward to attending. This will not necessarily be an "ALT.NET event"; instead, the three areas of focus are Sharpening the Saw, Multi-platform, and Selling quality as a feature. This will be a good one. I'd like to rally early support for a 3 hour plus-long coding dojo, also I'd like to rally support for someone else to run said dojo.
  *yes I'm joking about the price
• Houston Ruby meetup - it exists, believe it.
• PyHou - it exists, believe it.
• TXJS – I only know that this upcoming weekend conference exists, and that the “JS” stands for JavaScript.
• Meta: Running an Event on the Cheap - by Jim Holmes, who has done this very thing. Practical advice gleaned from his experience.

Online video lectures, screencasts and workshops, or: Why conferences are useless as a learning vehicle - okay, admittedly I haven't made the time to watch any of these, but I think that, if I ever WERE to make the time, this is where I'd start. I'm almost making this list as a to-do for myself—hey Peter, check these out later! Also to be clear, I don't think conferences are useless, they’re just relatively useless…for learning things. The point here isn't to hate on conferences, instead it's to say hey! Here's all these conference feeds with hundreds of session videos. We're to the point where I can say "hundreds." This is new. We weren't able to say “hundreds of free conference videos” just a few years ago.

• Virtual ALT.NET recordings - some dynamite in-depth sessions can be found here.
• Summer of NHibernate - 14 screencasts taking you through NHibernate. This was the summer of 2008.
• Norwegian Developer's Conference videos [visit links below]. Tracks include Connected Systems, Enterprise Applications, General Development, Test Driven Development, Software Engineering, Parallel Programming:
  • Day 1
  • Day 2
  • Day 3
• Øredev 2009 videos (incomplete; more are available each week) - videos for the Agile and Mobile (Mobile meaning Android+iPhone, not Windows Mobile) tracks.
• Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference (PDC) videos - there's something close to 100 high-definition quality session videos recorded here, so even if you're uninterested in 95% of what you see, you'll still find something you DO like.
• http://www.asp.net/learn/ - quality videos targeting ASP.NET. And, specifically…
• the MVC storefront series of videos by Rob Conery - wherein he tackles abstract concepts by example via the storefront application. I think this is a great approach to learning; it's mixes the abstract and the practical. Okay, I'll be honest, I just watched the one video on BDD and liked it, so I’m kind of extrapolating. But I like the idea of the approach, and am interested to see more.
• http://www.tekpub.com/ - Rob Conery has opened a predominantly for-pay screencast service. There are some free videos here, but the idea is that by charging for his videos he can invest more time editing and can hire better quality guests. I'll state for the record that if you have the time and need to learn about a subject he covers, this is totally worth whatever pittance you have to pay. With all that said, I haven't bought any of his screencasts yet. Yes, I'm "pulling a Morton*" again.
  *see above
• Presentations hosted on InfoQ [right sidebar]

Learning – surprisingly similar advice from different worlds: advice from a SharePoint MVP and advice from the guy who just blogged about his slide whistle.

• Why I'm an obsessive learner - summarized by "Obsessive learning isn't about being a super geek; it's about discipline and investing in yourself and staying focused on the areas where you want to stay "essential". I'm not sure what to say about this except that discipline is important. Duh, I know, but just keep it in mind before you add yet another technical book to your ever-growing, never-diminishing book queue or spend all your time on easy listening, edutainment podcasts. All's well and good, and some things make learning easier than others, but for the most part there are no shortcuts—it comes down to discipline.
• The secret sauce - I find it interesting that Mauro (link immediately above) and Dave Laribee are in violent agreement on the importance of discipline. "Learning and discipline are the two halves of continuous improvement. In short: live what you learn, act on your new knowledge and skill."

News about news aggregators - today's trend is filtering the news aggregators themselves -  aggregating the aggregators, meta-aggregating, so to speak. Which makes the following a meta-aggregators list of  of sorts. This is me showing restraint. I'd make a joke here, but I'm not going to. Meta-aggregators list. We could have a discussion about the meta-aggregators list. But we won't.

• Hacker Hacker News - filtering out the politics/lifestyle/news/everything-that-is-not-programming from news.ycombinator.com. Unfortunately whoever was running this, stopped.
• The Left Fold - weekly digest of actual programming articles found on programming.reddit.com, with a smattering of commentary.
• coding.reddit.com - with a strict policy of programming-related discussions. This community might even survive!

Object-oriented development and composability

• The problem with OOL is not the OO - an interesting perspective that separates OOP concepts from OO language constructs. A lot of us (me) have been exposed only to OOP concepts through Java/C#/C++ and are blind to such issues. Or maybe this guy is crazy and hallucinating, I can't tell. At times I think I should shut down the news aggregators entirely and just pretend articles like this don't exist, because reading these "everything you know about X is wrong" articles contribute greatly to code paralysis.
  • Counter-[counter-]arguments at Reddit – it’s entirely possible the original poster is just a crank with a blog.

Test-driven development, unit testing, automated testing - this category is the catch-all for posts agonizing over the nitty-gritty details of effective unit testing. Because effective unit testing isn't a skill that spontaneously appears in your brain the first time you reference NUnit.Framework.dll in Visual Studio. Anyway. As a result of my fumbling experience, I have found the following links completely and absolutely fascinating! I'm not crazy! These things are dy-no-mite, particularly because they go over arguments I've witnessed at coding dojos or arguments I've had with myself. This stuff is fascinating; I'm not crazy!

• A recent conversation about MSpec practices - at some point I attempted to follow DRY in my test project, just to see what happens. MSpec supports DRY because it allows you to inherit contexts via class inheritance. But, Aaron talks here about his preference for limiting the use of contexts unless absolutely necessary. In this post his advice tends to grow closer to "classicist TDD" advice. There are nuances. Also I'll use the word "nuance" in every link to follow.

Agile/Post-Agile - note I define Post-Agile as coming to grips with the reality of failed Agile, and attempting to learn from these failures.

• How to piss off your pair - pair programming anti-patterns, collected on the original C2 wiki from the collective experience. If you're a cynic, you'll read this as a list of reasons why pair programming is worthless. If you're just trying to improve, this is a good (and hilarious) way to avoid problems. Example anti-pattern:
  Complain before your partner does something wrong. Create elaborate theories about their failings. Never forgive, never forget.

Procedural graphics

• Escherization - code to help you tessellate anything, including portraits of MC Escher himself (or: Escherizing Escher, or: meta-Escherizing).
  

Hilarity, or links I couldn't fit into any other category

• Abject-oriented programming - have you ever heard someone attempt to struggle through answering an interview question they have no idea how to answer? Where they keep digging themselves deeper into the hole? E.g. "Modularity: A modular program is one that is divided into separate files that share a common header comment block." Let the hilarity ensue!
• Releasing psake v1.00 and psake v2.00 - PSake is the PowerShell build tool. It’s easier to learn how to do something in PowerShell than to fumble around with the NAnt and NAnt Contrib and all the XML-ness. It’s not that hard to try out PSake, so if you’re experiencing ANY pain with NAnt and MSBuild, go for it. Perhaps the best way to learn is to look at others' scripts:
• Ayende's psake script - Ayende used the Boo Build System previously
• JP Boodhoo's psake script - in a bit of irony, JP uses Rake now.