SyntaxHighlighter setup

Monday, December 26, 2011

Charles Babbage's birthday: The computer age that didn't quite happen

Today is the 220th birthday of Charles Babbage, the man who designed, but didn't implement, what would have been the first general purpose programmable computer in the mid-1800's!!

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

On the client-side

I have been writing rich web applications for 5 plus years and have gotten pretty good at it (and getting better all the time I hope). I am entirely satisfied with the sort of interfaces and functionality that I can achieve combining server-side code with client-side javascript, HTML and CSS, except for one tiny little complaint; client-side code takes forever!  Compared with the productivity that I can achieve writing the server-side code, the level of effort that goes into writing the client-side code is daunting.

I am committed to changing that in a significant way.  There are some very interesting tools emerging in this regard; some of the ones currently attracting my attention are:
  • CoffeeScript: a very interesting language that compiles down to readable and efficient javascript.
  • LessCss: Css with the basic programming structures that geeks expect.  Again compiles down to CSS.
and other similar stuff. More to come.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

The Internet Plan

Mary has written and published a book, "The Internet Plan", which is a workbook for guiding business owners and managers to develop a plan for their online presence that is aligned with their goals. 

I got to assist with the technical editing and I think it is a really useful guide for non-geeks to make sense of what they need and want to do on the internet.  Check it out!

(I promise I will write about things other than books)

Monday, June 13, 2011

C# in Depth, Second Edition

I am slowly reading (I have it on my tablet which I carry everywhere) Jon Skeet's "C# in Depth, Second Edition" from Manning Press and am oddly enough really enjoying it.  Besides clearly being a master of the subject, Jon has a style that makes what could be a really dry subject engaging, like a good mental puzzle or a good popular press treatment of physics.

He goes "In Depth" in to the ins and outs of the C# language and how it has evolved over the last 10 years and gives a very deep grounding into how lamdas and delegates, LINQ and much more work.

I am not sure if every C# developer needs to know the language at the level that it is presented here, but I do know that a candidate I interviewed last week would have gotten a yes vote from me if she had a strong grasp of just this sort of material.