Participating in the open source community and becoming an avid code reader were two themes in my six month roadmap to becoming a better developer. I made progress in both of these areas in the last few days by downloading and exploring the source code for WatiN, an open source library that I have used [...]
Browsing Posts in Continuous Improvement
One month ago, I joined the epic struggle of Justice Gray (a.k.a. ”Justin the Metrosexual”) to “change the world” by publically sharing my roadmap to becoming a better developer. Justice’s own dubious plan involved reading one developer book a week for six months while presumably trying to prevent his brains ooze out of multiple orifices, a truly remarkable [...]
I just heard about Justice Gray‘s blog challenge from the latest episode of Hanselminutes while running today. Although I think his plan to read one developer book a week for the next six months is rather insane, I agree with the premise that setting specific goals publicly is probably the best way to hold yourself accountable. Here are [...]
This is a follow-up to my original post about cognitive traps that hinder learning and stunt professional growth. Information junk food refers to any information gathering activity that prematurely satisfies your hunger to learn and provides fleeting emotional pleasure in lieu of actual intellectual nourishment. Some information junk foods to avoid: Fattening Abstractions – There is great power in naming things, which is why it is an integral [...]
If you’re crazy enough to run marathons for fun like me, you are probably familiar with a concept called cross-training. This slightly counter-intuitive approach asserts that you can actually increase your performance in your chosen sport by doing it less frequently and supplementing it instead with complementary activities. In other words, you will run faster [...]
Jeff Atwood recently wrote a blog post on Informavores that uses a food foraging metaphor to describe typical web usage behavior. According to this analogy, the ultra short attention span of most web users is not due to laziness or cultural ADD, but has more to do with an innate survival instinct that leads us [...]
I’ve noticed my geek ego being aggravated a few times lately so I figured I’d better work on a more effective personal implementation of IHumbleProgrammer. My current implementation seems to be leading to errors in my thought process and even causing my learning to hang. Please excuse the VB.NET, poor formatting, and lack of a valid unit [...]
