SyntaxHighlighter setup

Monday, May 20, 2013

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

Sunday, February 3, 2013

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.