IPad

     Today Apple announced their next offering: IPad. From what it seems, this is going to be the real competitor to Kindle DX, and Amazon even has to do some catch-up in a field which until now they were leading.
     The IPad has some serious downsides,  maybe the best outcome is Amazon releasing a cheaper/better Kindle soon?
     IPad is interesting, but I still favor a netbook/PC + e-Reader, a lot more openness and possibilities.

Building my own website

    I've started to read Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 , the first chapter is free. After working with Web Forms for a short period (a year and a half) the MVC framework seems like a breeze of fresh air. I don't really understand the whole debate on Web Forms vs. MVC, it's pretty clear which one is cleaner, more robust and easy to use. And no, the lack of controls is not a minus, the web is based on HTML and JavaScript served through HTTP, then why bury all those inside a bunch of web controls when we can use HTML directly?
   Giving the fact that at work I will continue working with Web Forms for the next year I think, I need to start some home project to learn Asp.Net MVC. I'm thinking for some time at creating my own website, so this seems to be a great opportunity to do something useful while learning. I know that there are a bunch of blogging engines for .NET, but I think I will do it from scratch anyway.
   I wonder how soon I will have something usable...

Books

    Not sure how, but this year I managed to have enough time to read a couple of books:

1.  Test Driven Development by Example - this is a great introductory book for TDD, what I enjoyed the most about it was the easy writing style and the small jokes throughout the book, see the comment regarding Singleton pattern :) Reading this book made me feel that I can somehow absorb author's knowledge and experience about code quality and design even if this wasn't the main purpose of the book.
2. Refactoring: Improving the design of existing code - well, this is the best book related to programming I've read so far, a book which I will reread each year. The 4th chapter, related to Code Smells is really great and succeeds at naming almost all smells found in a bad code. Reading this book you realize how many times you sort of felt that the code is "smelling", but you didn't know how to make it clean and how to tackle the problem. This is a must read for every programmer, I guarantee that it will change how you look at coding.
   
3. Working Effectively with Legacy Code - a great book by Michael Feathers, sort of complementary to Refactoring by Fowler. This book is about "safe" refactoring s, how can you find the sensing points  and how to introduce tests in a legacy code base. Giving the fact that 80-90% of the time we are working with a legacy code base, sometimes we even write "legacy code", this is a must read for every programmer, at least once :)
   
4. Clean Code  - great book by Uncle Bob, this contains his amendments about how clean code should look like. Even if you don't have to agree with him on all of his rules, certainly our lives would be much easier if all the programmers would follow 80-90% of the rules. Giving the fact that the definition for "clean code" is not set in stone yet, the most important thing is to try create clean and beautiful code, code that we will be proud of or at least not embarrassed in the future :)
   

     This list contains only the books I managed finishing, seems that I'm really good at reading books half-way, I have 4 or 5 books waiting to be finished, but that is not gonna happen soon :)

     I've started reading Coders at Work, this is a really good book, managed to read the first 4 chapters in a couple of hours, recommended for all programmers interested about how great programmers work and think. This is great for boosting motivation and morale :)

    Read and Code with Passion,

    Adrian

Crazy year

    Looking back at the last couple of months I realized that this was indeed a crazy year:

• - we found that we are going to have a daughter
• - we decided to buy our first house even if the economics are crazy
• - decided that I want a safer job and acted accordingly
• - decided that safe jobs are not for me and acted accordingly
  

    I left my previous job because I wanted somenthing stable for the next period when our daughter will be born, but found rather quickly that "safe" and "stable" means boring, and boring definitely is not for me.
   Given this I decided to return to work for Macadamian, which was the company I really enjoyed working for, great people and interesting projects.
   It's not easy to recognize that you don't like boring jobs, but I read an article which made me decide what to do, this is a quote form it:

"If you find yourself stuck in a place that’s killing your innate passion for technology, by all means, move the hell on!" - Gustavo Duarte

    I hope that JP won't be mad by stoling his line, but you should really "Develop with Passion".

Why hero coding is bad

      Seems that hero coders are a breed not really respected by their peers, but pretty loved by the project managers... Why? Well, because they are the ones called to save the day when the s..t hits the fan but they are dark and grumpy with their colleagues(this is not always true... :) ).
      We all want to be(come) those mythical geeks that by raising their eyebrows are inverting the bits create monumental masterpieces which makes the world tremble, but unfortunately hero coding is not the answer, at least not for me. Hero coding is more like a drug for programmers, which once tasted is hard to give up on, it's like a drug because we have our big egos and who doesn't want to feel irreplaceable and important to the people around them, to be the ones called to pull insane amount of time and work for that ugly feature never finished and always late?
      As a geek wannabe, hero coding seems to be the answer for quickly becoming a good and respected developer but after doing it for a couple of months and being forced to stop for a couple of weeks, looking back at what I achieved in that time doesn't look too good, and this is not because programming 16 hours a day is not cool, but because hero coding favours an environment in which some important things are lost: code quality, self esteem, each short-cut looks appealing and you quickly forgot things which are important for you: sucking less each year , improve your skills and be near the ones you love.
     Hero coding is followed by a pretty ugly burnout period, which is quite depressing...
     By writing this, does it mean that I'm an uber geek programmer shouting his ego? No, it means that I acknowledge that I have a problem and I must get rid of it...
Until next time, be good...

P.S. "Hi, my name is Adrian and I'm a hero coding addict..."

Google did it again

Well, right now I'm quite speachless, the inovation brought by google with Google Wave is astonishing.

If you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, watch this.

If you see me walking around in circles, probably I'm searching for the wave...

Spawning a new process

After a lot of planning and applying all sorts of design patterns, we finally got it right. We are proud to announce that a new process is going to be spawned somewhere around mid October. Until then I’ll show you a demo of her in all it’s glory.

I will do my best to make an uber geek from her… :) Welcome to this world my daughter and I’m already proud of you. Now I will go and buy a shotgun to keep all the boys away :)