Caffeinated Coder

A Grande, Triple Shot, Non-Fat Core Dump by Russell Ball

Browsing Posts published in January, 2008

Due to the writer’s strike, the normal panel of Caffeinated Codey judges are out picketing on some Hollywood street corner. Luckily, I found a worthy Canadian scab who was willing to cross the picket lines. It is none other than the cultural icon, himself, Justice Gray. For Greatest post in Caffeinated Coder history award…Russell Ball [...]

Blogging communities like GeeksWithBlogs offer the advantage of a pre-established readership, free hosting, and no hassles when it comes to setting up and maintaining your blog. Unfortunately, you also give up a lot of control when you become part of a large blogging community and ultimately miss out on the basic joys of tinkering. For [...]

Just a reminder, I’ll be accepting guest Caffeinated Codey submissions until midnight on Wednesday. Just email it to me at rt_ball@yahoo.com. If I pick it for Friday’s Caffeinated Codey post, then you’ll win a free ReSharper 4.0 license. See here for full details. I’m feeling generous, so I’ll even offer up a few inspirational freebies [...]

I just read an interesting article called Inside MySpace.com. With 40 billion page hits a month (which they reached just three short years after launching), MySpace is currently living on the scalability frontier and thus offers unique insights into what kind of architecture and hardware it takes to service such massive demands. Here are ten [...]

I just got an email from a reader letting me know that the comment page was throwing an error. After delivering a brutal caning to everyone on the QA staff, I fixed it. Sorry about that… Many thanks to Christopher Boyle for bringing this to my attention.

This is the sequel to my Seven Things I Did Right in 2007 post. Now I am going to cover the “Stop Doing” and “Start Doing” categories of my agile retrospective format. What I want to start doing in 2008 Become a Committer on an Open Source Project- I took a few steps towards open [...]

Reflector has and will continue to be one of the coolest, most useful development tools around. However, when it comes to demystifying .NET framework classes, there is a new game in town. Here’s a glimpse into what a method in the System.URI .NET framework class looks like using Reflector. Not bad…but here is what it [...]

A friend of mine whose wife is an elementary school teacher just sent this to me. You just can’t teach that kind of literal thinking in Computer Science programs. Yet another piece of evidence to support the claim that programmers are born, not made.

So there I was, wondering how I was going to reward the winners of the January 2008 Caffeinated Codeys. I was just about to give up hope and begin sobbing like a little girl when I suddenly remembered the obscure “contest sponsorship refactoring” (Alt + c + s + desperate email plea) in ReSharper. Like [...]

I know this is rather late in January to be doing this, but I’ve been rather distracted with the blog migration and this was one of several posts that’s been languishing in a half-finished state in my drafts folder for the last several weeks. Instead of doing the typical new year’s resolution list full of [...]