Group items tagged

"But even in today's SW industry, there does not seem to be much of an expectation from SW professionals that we should have the 'capability/tools to build our own tools' that do much of the project work for us. I am not talking about the simple automation, things like rename/refactor or autocorrect, or intellisense and all that, I am talking about the kind of automation and tooling that writes or deploys software for us and saves hours, days and weeks of our time from handcrafting software solutions from scratch again."

"Some of my favorite blog posts that I've read in the last several years focus on the subject of developer turnover, and I think that these provide an excellent backdrop for this subject. The oldest one that I'll list, by Bruce Webster, is called "The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea Effect," and it coins an excellent term for a phenomenon with which we're all probably vaguely aware on either a conscious or subconscious level. The "Dead Sea Effect" is a description of some organizations' tendency to be so focused on retention that they inadvertently retain mediocre talent while driving better talent away"

"One of the things I like most about working in software development is the fact the for the most part you get to work with fairly intelligent people. I've always wondered why so many smart people manage their career so poorly."

"LinkedIn has just passed 175 million registered users and is widely recognized to be the most successful business-oriented social media networking site in the world. So why haven't more people - especially IT pros -  figured out how to maximize its features and make it a tool that effectively builds relationships with their peers and attracts appropriate employment options?"

The Microsoft .NET platform, originally introduced in 2002, is mature and it provides developers with great options for creating software that can meet the requirements of any project. With many options, though, it can be difficult for today's .NET developer to choose the correct .NET technologies for a project. Addressing this problem, Telerik has assembled its senior technical leaders to produce the Microsoft Platform Guidance 2012. This document attempts to provide prescriptive guidance for .NET developers trying to determine the best .NET technologies to use for specific software challenges.

"When you really boil it down to its implementation, FizzBuzz is something of an irritating program. I'm not sure how much the author of the problem really thought about FizzBuzz, but it turns out it's difficult to express well with the tools available to most imperative programming languages and easy to express using functional patterns available in Haskell and ML."

"[..] I'm going to assert that something similar exists with regard to motivation, and examine six timeframes: minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years."

"Consider the following method signatures: IEnumerable Process(List input); IList Process(IEnumerable input); Of the two, which is the better choice? Write down your answer."

"A better way is to use a BlockingCollection and have your threads communicate via message classes."

"Our Engineering team has a great term called Technical Debt, which is the accumulation of coding shortcuts and operational inefficiencies over the years in the name of getting product out the door faster that weighs on the company's code base like debt weighs on a balance sheet."

"Despite IDisposable having only a single method named Dispose to implement, it is commonly implemented incorrectly. After reading this blog post it should be clear how and when to implement IDisposable, as well as how to ensure that resources are properly disposed when bad things happen (also knows as exceptions)."

"If you're afraid to look at your To-Do list, it's not working.  Your To-Do list should inspire you. One of the things that happens a lot with To-Do lists is they can get overwhelming.  It's easy to pile on more things.  Eventually, you're afraid to even look at your To-Do list.   What once started out as a great list of things to make happen, has now became a laundry list of things that hurts more than it helps."

This article takes a closer than normal look at everyone's favourite data structure - the .NET dictionary. There are quite a lot of different dictionaries classes in .NET these days, so I'm going to explore how they work, what their differences are and where to use them.

Here's a short overview of four major user interface patterns in their original form, put together and illustrated. A bit of information is added to patterns (with notes to highlight these additions) to show a slightly different viewpoint and different ideas.

If you are using the Entity Framework (EF), then you need to understand the best practices for improving its performance, or you will suffer the consequences!

Which is faster, QueryLightBulbFrobStatusEx() or __WGetBulbFrobberState2()? Hold it right there, buddy. Before answering that question I must give you my standard six-part rant about why I probably cannot sensibly answer questions that begin "which is faster".

"Does your company let you work from wherever you want? If it doesn't, it may be watching as progress passes it by. The next generation of working doesn't require a desk."

"I've done a number of talks on Productivity in the past. Lots of folks ask me what my tips are for being productive. I've taken all those tips as well as tips from Kathy Sierra, Stephen Covey, David Allen, The Pomodoro Technique and many more and aggregated them into a system that works well for me. I talk about how to effectively handle large amounts email, sorting your personal data stream, how to conserve your keystrokes, the "one email rule" that you need to be effective"

"Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions."