Blogs and Podcasts: How I stay on top of new stuff in the development world

I was asked the other day by a colleague how I keep up with everything going on in the software development world.  A lot of people use Twitter for this but so far for me I still find podcasts via my iPod and blogs via Google Reader and more recently Feedly to fit really well in my life.  Here is my list of each, edited down to just the techie items.  I am mostly a .NET webdeveloper so except where I mention otherwise that is where most of these focus.

Podcasts (in no particular order)

• Hanselminutes: Scott Haselman's excellent geek interview show. 
• Herding Code: Four smart and funny devs talk about software development, typically with guests.  
• The Changelog: Open source software discussion show.  Mostly Linux focused but great show and entertaining.
• .NET Rocks: Perhaps the original .NET developers podcast.  Still excellent.
• This Developers Life: More about the culture of Geek than about tech.  I love this show.
• Deep Fried Bytes: "Deep Fried Bytes is an audio talk show with a Southern flavor"
• The Stack Exchange Podcast: Interesting discussion by the folks that run StackOverflow.com..kind of rambling at times but entertaining and informative.
• Yet Another Podcast: Hosted by Jesse Liberty (the guy who wrote the C# book with the big bird on it, so basically the guy who taught me how to code in C#).
• The Tablet Show: Mobile developement show by the guys that do the .NET Rocks show.
• JavaScript Jabber: A small panel of javascript devs talking about modern WebDev.  Has bit of a Rails slant but hey, javascript is javascript.
• The Javascript Show: Jason Seifer and Peter Cooper discuss the latest news in Javascript development.

 Blogs

The ones I read consistently...

•  IrisClasson.com
• Ayende @ Rahien
• Coding Horror
• JohnPapa.net  
• Jon Galloway
• Jon Skeet: Coding Blog 
• OdeToCode.com K. Scott Allen
• Knock Me Out
• Rob Conerys Blog
• you've been HAACKED  
• Scott Hanselman 
• ScottGu's Blog  

And the long list of blogs I read when I have time...

• .dcw
• Ajaxian 
• All about Microsoft Blog 
• amazedsaint's #tech journal 
• amitpatelit 
• Bart's Software Cookbook  
• beefycode
• Kamranicus - The Virtual Home of Kamran Ayub 
• Brian Sullivan  
• Bug squash 
• Code rant
• Daydreaming Crocus 
• Denver Developer 
• Developer's productivity 
• Devlicio.us
• Elegant Code 
• ely.blog: { } 
• Encosia 
• Enonic Labs  
• Eventually Consistent  
• Eric Lippert's Blog: While at Microsoft After Microsoft
• fiplab's blog  
• FunctionSource Posts
• Global Nerdy 
• groovyPost
• Hadi Hariri's Blog 
• Brendan Eich (you know...the guy who created javascript) Harmony of Dreams Come True 
• Ian Mercer 
• InfoQ 
• Jason Dentler.com
• Jeffrey Palermo 
• Jenkins.NET 
• Karl Seguin 
• Kashif's Lab 
• Keith Hill's Blog 
• LINQ to Fail 
• Los Techies
• Maarten Balliauw {blog} 
• mabbled 
• Making the Complex Simple 
• Matt Hidinger
• Mira Javora Blog 
• Monologue 
• Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog
• myNoSQL
• Palermo4.com
• Sarah Taraporewalla's Technical Ramblings
• Shay Levy 
• She blogs! - The Real Katie 
• Siim Viikman's blog  
• Snail in a Turtleneck 
• Steve Sanderson’s blog 
• Tales from the Evil Empire 
• Technical Jargon 
• The "Tech. Arch" 
• The CSS Ninja 
• The Daly Bytes 
• The Datachix Blog 
• The MongoDB NoSQL Database Blog
• The Mozilla Blog
• Thoughts.Ramblings.Code 
• Tim Barrass 
• Tobi + C# = T# 
• Web 2.0 
• Web Design by Rachael L Moore 
• Where's Lou 
• Windows PowerShell Blog 
• xavierdecoster.com 
• { geekdave }

Netflix' House of Cards

Just watched the first two episodes of the new "House of Cards".....um Wow.  It's like the Sith version of  The West Wing.  Soooooo good.

Picking my battles

I am lead developer on several projects that use outside developers.  While in theory maybe I should be able to say my projects use margin width of 2 not the default 4 and whatever other little particulars I have about formatting source.  But as I have to review more code commits I think this is just another eaxample of what Jimmy Boggard was saying in Tabs versus spaces: Spaces won. It is just not worth my time to keep reviewing commits and try and figure out which changes are real and which are not...I have better things to worry about than horizontal whitespace differences or trying to get other people to change their settings.

So today I will change my tab setting to 4 and move on to important issues like vertical whitespace and brace placement.

Windows 8 and PostgreSQL

I recently upgraded to Windows 8 Professional on my main development machine and was having trouble getting PostgreSQL installed.  The official installer would pop up some very strange dialogs and just sit.  Finally I tried the Chocolatey installer at http://chocolatey.org/packages/postgresql and success!  I hope that saves someone the headache I had yesterday.

ASP.NET MVC 4 Single Page Application Presentation

ASP.NET MVC 4 (now in beta), along with Knockout, adds support for creating Single Page Applications more easily.  Steven Sanderson, the creator of Knockout did a really great presentation on creating such an application and it is amazing how much of the typical boilerplate coding is removed from the process.  He also goes into some great tips on making web apps have a more "Native" experience on the iPad.  I highly recommend watching it (link)

Tools Update: Ditto Clipboard Manager

One of my favorite tools is the Ditto Clipboard Manager. This is an open source tool that is basically copy/paste the way that it should have been done in Windows to begin with.

The long and the short is that it keeps your clipboard contents back as many entries as you want (I store the last 500 entries).  You access them by the key stroke Ctrl+` (this is configurable) and it looks like this:

Ditto Clips dialog

The team just released a new version. Get it here

MongoDB Webinar this week: Schema Design Principles & Practice

I saw a similar talk at MongoBoulder earlier this month and found it really useful.

10gen - MongoDB Events - MongoDB Schema Design Principles & Practice