Caffeinated Coder

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 the most votes.

Although I will continue to churn out the monthly Caffeinated Codey series and present my favorite posts each month with the usual healthy dose of sarcasm and humor, I wanted to take a slightly more serious approach when it came to doling out prizes for this contest. So, I decided to focus on recognizing solid technical writing from lesser known bloggers (as opposed to just the ones that are easy to make fun of from the more popular bloggers).

In order to accomplish this goal, I set an upper limit for myself with regards to a blog’s technorati score (less than 40) and chose 4 posts from January based on the merits of the technical writing. The post with the most votes by Friday (see poll at the bottom) will be awarded the free license from Jetbrains, the makers of ReSharper, IntelliJ, TeamCity, and DotTrace Profiler.

Here are the four that I’ve chosen for the month of January.

1. Lisp: The Golden Age Isn’t Coming Back, Let’s Welcome a Bright Future by Peter Christensen - With all the hype of a new language but 50 years history behind it, LISP presents unique challenges to a language newbie. Peter provides great details on the history of the language and the current landscape of the community as well as some interesting insights into what you can expect if you decide to jump in and learn it.
2. Programming languages in CS education by Chuck Hoffman - The direction and value of computer science degrees was a popular meme this month. Chuck disagrees with the popular stance that Java doesn’t have value as a starter language and offers some valid counter points regarding the value of library reuse and scripting languages.
3. On Blub by Horatio Alger. Horatio discusses blub theory, the driving force behind any good language debate. He offers a dizzying critical tour of languages along with sound criteria for how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a language for a particular task.
4. Software Development in the Mines of Moria by Marc from Kickin’ in the Darkness - Marc attempts to counter-balance the “shiny new toy” syndrome in technology by reminding us that all the current legacy projects that make us cringe started out by using the latest and greatest technology. He points out that it logically follows that our our current favorite, life-changing framework will also eventually run out of steam and be looked upon with the similar disdain.

Vote here on the post you think is the best (NOTE: if you don’t see the embedded poll below, then your RSS Reader is blocking it and you’ll have to go to the website to vote).

Voting will close on Thursday night at midnight. I’ll announce the winner on Friday.

Happy reading.

 Subscribe in a reader