I’ve spent much of my free time over the last few weeks learning Ruby on Rails and thought I would record a few first impressions for anyone else who is thinking of dipping their toes in the RoR waters any time soon. First…My Motivations Curiosity – I’ve made a few snide remarks about Ruby over [...]
Browsing Posts published in February, 2008
In case this post rides a reddit or Dzone wave, let me start out by saying that I am both from the United States and a .NET developer. Now on to my regularly scheduled point… I’m fairly certain that most people would agree that Microsoft as a company is despised by a sizable segment of [...]
I recently came across an excellent blog post via Dzone from Ben Watson called 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Developers. He lists humility, love of learning, detail-orientedness, adaptability, and passion as the most important traits that a developer can have in order to be effective at their job and provides some well written insight into [...]
I’ve been noticing my interest in non-Microsoft languages has been on the rise lately. I’ve been actively playing with Ruby and PHP and have been blog surfing for information on functional languages like Lisp and Erlang. I guess that’s why I suddenly became curious about the current popularity ratings of programming languages and started to [...]
Every since I learned that the most important characteristic of people who become experts is that they continue to learn throughout their careers at the same pace they did when they were beginners, I have found it helpful to do regular mental inventories of new things I’ve recently learned as a way to keep myself [...]
Congratulations to Peter Christensen for winning my first-ever Battle of the Technorati-Challenged contest with his excellent post Lisp: The Golden Age Isn’t Coming Back, Let’s Welcome a Bright Future. Without the support of Rory’s minions, the voting turnout was about what you would expect for Municipal elections for the Assistant Sanitation Engineer (a.k.a Janitor in [...]
Keeping track of my passwords has been a nagging problem for me for a long time, but I only recently got around to doing something about it. I’m ashamed to admit it, but up until now I’ve relied on a few popular but extremely insecure strategies to manage my various online identities. Reusing passwords – [...]
I mentioned at the end of my last post that I decided to take a slightly different approach for my contest that JetBrains was gracious enough to sponsor. I had originally planned on having readers vote for their favorite Caffeinated Codey award and then giving the prize license to the author of the post with [...]
