Caffeinated Coder

I presented a session on ReSharper at the Kansas City Day of Dot Net conference this last Saturday. Kudos to Lee Brandt for organizing the event, which seemed to be a big success based on the attendance and the number of interesting topics being presented.

A few attendees requested that I post the slide deck, so here it is. It’s in 7-zip format, which only takes a minute to install and beats winzip if you’re not already using it. Most of the session involved me demonstrating the various features of ReSharper through a Test-Driven Development style coding session, so the slide deck won’t be very helpful if you weren’t there or are looking for anything other than a laundry list of features.

If you’ve never seen ReSharper before, you might want to take a few minutes and watch one of these short videos to see the tool in action:

• Ilya Ryzhenkov’s R# Jedi demo
• LosTechie’s FizzBuzz video

For those of you looking for a way to get started or learn a few new features, I recommend first checking out the features page on JetBrains. It does a pretty good job of providing high level descriptions of all the features along with helpful screenshots that will help you grok the basics.

After that you might want to check out Joe White’s 31 Days of ReSharper. He wrote it back during version 2.5, so some of the features have been enhanced since then but I really like how he dug into the nuances of the various features.

I also wrote a few posts on the topic, including my favorites from about a year ago and my recent efforts to break out of my R# rut. I learned a ton of new things as I was preparing for the presentation, so look forward to a few posts in the near future on this tool as well.

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…and I’m not just talking about my recent eBay exploits or that million dollar lottery in Ghana that I keep getting notified about via email.

Jurgen Apello, Dutch blogger extraordinaire, just notified me that I won his $100 Book Contest for my Driving Forces Behind My Coding Compulsion post, which I submitted a couple of weeks ago as an answer to his contest question about what motivates developers to do their job really well.

Somehow his alleged jury members chose me as the winner. I suspect that either I was the only non-fictitious person to enter the contest or else the winner was totally chose by random, but either way I made off with $100 Amazon gift certificate to spend on any of the books featured in his Top 100 Software Engineering Book List that he recently posted.

I decided it was best to indulge in my guilt-free tech book buying frenzy as soon as possible in case he changed his mind.

Here’s what I came up with:

My Choices

$100 isn’t very much money when it comes to tech books, but I stretched it out by shopping in the used book section.

6 Robert C. Martin
Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns and Practices

This Uncle Bob book has been recommended to me so many times that it was the first one I thought to look for on the list. I didn’t know there was an updated C# version until I poked around some more on Amazon.

19 Andrew Hunt, David Thomas
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

This is one of those books that I read several chapters over several lunch hours at the bookstore, but never got around to buying. I figured it was only fair that I finally throw some royalty love their way.

42 Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck
Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit

I’ve been hearing about this from Alt.NET bloggers like David Laribee for quite a while so I figured I should find out what all the fuss is about.

If Only I Had More Money to Spend…

These books were close runner-ups.

2 Elisabeth Freeman, etc.
Head First Design Patterns – I’ve heard high praise for this book, but it’s hard to get too excited about design patterns after all the blogosphere backlash related to their overuse and misapplication.

16 Donald E. Knuth
The Art of Computer Programming, The, Volumes 1-3 Boxed Set (2nd Edition) – I figured I would do my part to jump on the Back-To-Basics bandwagon.

18 Jeffrey Friedl
Mastering Regular Expressions – I desperately need to improve my RegEx-fu, but I ultimately decided that I could limp by with the help of the most amazing Expresso tool for now.

74 Michael Nygard
Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software – Ayende has talked this book up quite a few times, so it remains on my ‘Books I should eventually buy and possibly even read’ list.

Current Bookshelf Favorites

I already had several of the books on his list, but these three are my favorites and the ones I would most recommend. They’ve easily had the biggest positive influence on my career as a developer.

1 Steve McConnell
Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

10 Martin Fowler
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code 

58 Michael Feathers
Working Effectively with Legacy Code

The one book I really wished was on the list was Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans, but beggars can’t be choosers.

** UPDATE: I just got the full list from Jurgen, which contained the last 25 books on his list. It turns out that Eric Evan’s book was number 89. That’s what I get for being impatient and picking my books too soon.

Thanks again to Jurgen for his most excellent prize.

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My deepest apologies.

I just noticed that I inadvertently spammed everyone subscribed via feedburner with a half dozen del.icio.us feed entries.

The rogue link barrage began when I activated the Feedburner LinkSplicer feature under the false assumption that I would be able to filter saved links based on tags as well as control the start date. Instead Feedburner set forth on an apparently irreversible course of spitting out crap from the last several weeks that I tagged because I eventually might want to read them, not because I thought they were particularly good.

Feedburner has some amazing traffic analysis features, but this particular feature is a usability nightmare. Not only were there no configuration options available, but there was no posted information about how it would work and no way to reverse it after it happened.

For this I am awarding Feedburner an honorary Caffeinated Codey Shoddy-As-Hell Feature Award. For shame…

What makes this even more frustrating to me is that I have serious reservations about publishing delicious links to my feed in the first place.

When it comes to link recommendations, most people clearly prefer the more democratic approach offered by sites like Reddit or Dzone. Those that don’t are probably just too busy drowning in a sea of unread RSS feeds to care and will probably hate me for making them feel even more guilty over shit that they don’t have time to read. If nothing else, I didn’t want to risk burying my legitimate content under a mess of entries that most people will probably just view as spam.

So why did I do it?

I blame it on Reg Braithwaite. His delicious posts have been my single best source for ‘off-the-beaten path’, top-notch posts over the last couple of years and therefore has given me the unrealistic expectation that I can do it in a way that people will like rather than in a way that more closely resembles an ‘Enlarge-Your-Penis’ spammer (not that some of you don’t like those as well).

How am I going to do this?

I make the following three promises.

1. I won’t ever publish more than three links on any given day or three days in a given week. Most of the time I will probably publish far fewer. I see anything more than that as a blogger simply leaving a breadcrumb trail of their internet surfing habits, which is not what I want to do. I’ve actually set up a second delicious account for my blog so I can still use my primary one for my ancillary TO DO reading list along with a holding bin for potential candidates to publish. I promise I’ll only publish ones that I think are must-reads.
2. I won’t ever publish a link without commentary. I doubt I’ll be able to resist the urge to be a sarcastic rat bastard at times, but otherwise I’ll just try to explain in a few quick sentences why I liked the post so much.
3. I’ll eventually use these delicious posts for future Caffeinated Codey posts, a series which I am considering resurrecting from the dead if only so I won’t have to take out a restraining order on Justice or D’Arcy, who are obviously still lusting after the chance to receive more of these coveted awards.

Hopefully, you’ll like this added addition to my blog. If not, please let me know. I’ll probably tell you to go screw yourself, but at least we’ll all feel better afterwards…

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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 for those of you who can’t immediately think of any award-worthy material to recognize.

Here’s a screenshot from the header of Obie Fernandez’s new blog. It’s got that I’m-too-sexy-for-this-blog look about it that reeks of a professional photographer following him around for an hour shouting “Now… give me your best Antonio Banderas look…Jes…Perfecto!…”. It’s not technically a post, but surely this is deserving of some brutally creative award (sorry Obie, it’s just too easy…).

If you prefer focusing on something that was intentionally funny, you can always look to D’Arcy Lussier’s epic “What Justice Gray Means to me” guest post for inspiration. Any post that includes such paint.net atrocities as this one certainly deserves an award of some sort.

Of course, you can also pick a post from January with actual technical merit and slap on an award name and description as an afterthought. That’s usually my preferred method and probably the most deserving of your attention given this month’s prize.

Whichever way you choose, happy judging!

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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.

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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 every other function in R#, this refactoring magically made things better by offering me a couple of free licenses to give away. It even spit out the following FAQ section to answer all of your pressing questions.

FAQ

1. Why would the good people of JetBrains possibly trust you with something as valuable as the coveted 4.0 licenses? - I told them my name was Jeff Atwood.
2. What if I already have v3.0? - Continue to curse VS2008 for a few more months until R# 4.0 comes out and then brag to your friends about getting a free upgrade.
3. What if I don’t currently have a copy of R#? – Download version 3.1 and get a free upgrade when 4.0 comes out (last I heard at the end of 1Q).
4. What if I already have my R# needs satisfied? – Then you can get a free copy of DotTraceProfiler ($500 value). I haven’t tried this one yet, but it looks incredibly cool and useful and it was made by Jetbrains so I’m excited.
5. What if I have a technical sugar daddy who buys all my licenses for me, no questions asked? – First give me your email so I can send you my resume. Next, go for the “swag” option. There has been a hint of potential R# swag, which means that you might be able to make your friends jealous with an R# Jedi coffee mug or some other such marketing treasure.
6. Which body parts/organs do I need to sell in order to win? – Absolutely none. All you have to do is put on your Caffeinated Codey judge hat and pick a post in January that you liked. Then think of a creative award name, write 2-3 sentences of witty commentary about it, and send it to me (rt_ball@yahoo.com) by EOD on January 28th. If I choose to publish it as one of the 10 awards, then you will win.
7. What if there are so many good submissions that you publish more than one guest submission? - In that case, the submission which gets the most votes in the 5 day polldady vote that follows will win.
8. What can I do to make my submission more likely to be chosen? – Review prior award posts to get a feel for the general tone of my commentary. Make your commentary humorous (although this is not strictly required). It would also help to send a funny, semi-relevant photo to go with it. Of course you can also start sucking up to me as much as possible.
9. Is there any other way to win this great prize? – I will be including a poll at the end of the January 2008 Caffeinated Codey post and the author of the post with the most votes after 5 days will also win a free license.

What are you waiting for? Load those RSS readers and let the sarcastic commentary flow…

By the way, much thanks to Illya and Eugenia from Jetbrains for their help and sponsorship.

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Yes, it’s true. I’ve packed my bags and am moving to a new location.

For those of you with RSS Readers, please change your feed subscriptions to use my new feedburner location. I do not plan to do any new posts on GeeksWithBlogs with the possible exception of a few redirection reminders.

For the rest of you, you can see my shiny new blog on caffeinatedCoder.com. It may not look like it, but I’ve spent quite a few late nights over the past few weeks dusting off my PHP and CSS skills so that I could get my new WordPress blog up and running. With thousands of plugins and themes to choose from, my blog tinkering days have just begun but you can see the”good enough” version here.

I want to thank Jeff Julian and John Alexander for letting me try my hand at blogging on GeeksWithBlogs over the last six months. I’ve had a great time and have appreciated feeling part of a large, healthy blogging community.

I also want to give a special thanks to Max Pool at codesqueeze for all the help and advice he has given me over the last several weeks. I met Max at the Alt.NET conference in Austin this past year and was impressed with his passion for blogging and his deep knowledge of the black arts of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and internet marketing.

He’s given me dozens of resource links and plugin suggestions and I’ve used his site as an inspiration while I was setting up my new blog. For a good demonstration of his expertise and some practical tips on how to increase traffic to your blog, check out his Blog Setup: 40 Practical Tips.

In conclusion, GeeksWithBlogs…it’s not you..it’s me. I just think we should start seeing other people…

So long and hope to see everyone at the new location,

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The 2007 Caffeinated Codey Showdown is officially over and the votes have been tallied.

Despite an early lead by the Canadian contingent (Justice Gray and D’Arcy Lussier), Rory Blyth rallied the troops and surged ahead to win both the Best Blog Humor and Most Fun with Multimedia categories in a landslide. Justice still dominated in the Best Post Title category and the anonymous ALT.NET Pursefight blogger edged out Fake Steve Jobs to claim the title for Best Technical Satire.

Congratulations to the winners! I will email Justice and Rory their Despair.com gift certifcates shortly. Unfortunately, I don’ know who the ALT.NET Pursefight blogger is, so I’m going to have to hold on to this award for now until the secret identity is finally revealed.

Lessons Learned from this Inaugural Contest

1. I like the idea of rewarding bloggers for their creativity with novelty gifts. I am going to try to do this on a monthly basis by including a poll at the end of each Caffeinated Codey award post and then giving an actual prize to the blogger with the most votes. I would also like to open up at least one slot each month for a submission from a guest Caffeinated Codey judge and award them a prize as well.
2. Rory, the “independent web-based community writer“, doesn’t like being called a blogger, having his last name spelled incorrectly, or being publicly associated with any of his former techie cohorts for fear of being made fun of by his new writer friends. I apologized to him for so carelessly misplacing that ‘e’ at the end of his last name, but I fear that I am now on the Rory’s poopie list and have given up hope of ever making a cameo appearance in his creation story. I just know I would have made a great Sandwich henchman…
3. Although my contest probably had a better voter turn-out than most local political elections, it was kind of sad to see the votes tallies struggling to make double digits for the first several days. Luckily, Rory’s minions swept in and nudged the vote tally up to a slightly more respectable number. The good news is that there is nowhere to go but up in terms of readership.
4. “Integrity gets in the way of selling out.” When you are busy rallying the minions, don’t distract them with choices. If all else fails, threaten them with death by pulmonary embolism via excessively long and boring posts. These are all sound pieces of advice dispensed by our resident “independent web-based community writer”. I know that I personally will take them all to heart if I ever decide to run for public office or engage in any other equally shady undertaking,

A Call To Action

1. Do you want to be a guest Caffeinated Codey judge? Just pick a post from this month that you like, come up with a silly award name, add a touch of sarcastic commentary, and send it to me. If I publish it in the January 2008 Caffeinated Codey post, then I’ll throw some swag your way.
2. I got no love from Despair.com in my quest to attain contest sponsorship. Although I’ve had some encouraging conversations with people from Jetbrains, I am still looking for sponsors to supply prizes for future contests. If you know anyone with swag bestowing powers, please send me an email with their contact info so I can start begging them for free stuff.

Thanks again to all the nominees for producing such amusing content.

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My official “homage to Justice Gray” guest blog post has just been published. Besides providing me with some of the most fun I’ve had in blogging yet, this post also inspired me to finally learn some basic photo editing skills (beyond just cropping and resizing) so that I could provide some appropriate visual aids to go with the post.

Many thanks to my lovely wife for sharing some of her image manipulation prowess with me and to the creator of paint.net for providing such an awesome free tool. I apologize in advance to all future victims of my new multi-media skills. Your safest bet is to quickly do a google image search and promptly remove any photos of yourself that you find floating around on the internet. Consider yourself forewarned.

I also wanted to thank Justice for encouraging me to write the guest post and for producing such entertaining content on his blog. To get inspiration for this post, I went back and read many of his older posts that I had never seen before because I only started subscribing to it this year. I found a plethora of truly excellent content that I linked to in my guest post.

By the way, if you’ve never tried historical blog spelunking before (reading all or many of the posts from a single blogger in one sitting), I highly recommend it. It gives you a unique appreciation of the writer and person that you just don’t get when you are bouncing back and forth between a hundred different writers every day.

With any luck I will totally dominate on his contest and perhaps even earn one of his coveted “Potential Friend of Justice Gray” certificates that he offered Martin Fowler.

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The regular panel of judges used to select the monthly Caffeinated Codey winners are all far too hung over to competently decide the overall winners for the year, so I’ve decided to let the nominees fight it out pollDaddy style and then actually award the survivors real prizes for a change.

Rules

I have selected 4 categories with 5 nominees per category. All the nominees were either previous Caffeinated Codey winners or else featured in one of my review posts this year. For now, all of the categories revolve around humor, but perhaps if I can secure some proper sponsorship then I will do a second iteration that is slightly more technically focused.

In order to choose your favorites, click on the Vote link next to each category below. I apologize for not embedding the polls directly in this page, but the Jeff Julian and Subtext project team were wise enough to prevent me from entering script tags in the source page, so I had to settle for low tech polldaddy links instead.
The nominees with the most votes in each category as of 8 am on January 10th will be declared the official winners and receive full bragging rights for the entire year. But that’s not all…

Prizes

The four lucky winners will also each receive gift certificates to one of my favorite shopping destinations, Despair, Inc. I’m not sure about the exact amount of the certificates yet because I am trying to get some official sponsorship from this most excellent site, but if all else fails I’ll at least hook the winners up with the cheap-bastard $10 gift cards so they buy cool stuff like this.

Ok, enough with the chit-chat. Let the games begin.

…and the Nominees are…

Best Blog Post Title [VOTE]

1. Evan Hoff for Off-the-Shelf RAD is for Pimps, Hookers, and Johns–not Marriage [Sept CC]
2. Justice Gray for Javascript raped my dog, and other falsehoods. [Sept CC]
3. Roy Osherove for Do you like Boobs? [Sept CC]
4. Ben Sheirman for Don’t Make Squirrel Burgers [Oct CC]
5. Max Pool for Don’t Unit Test? Start Counting Your “Oh Shits!” [Nov CC]

Best Technical Satire [VOTE]

1. Philipp Lenssen for What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft? [Nov CC]
2. Sean Hederman for Review: Windows XP. [Dec CC]
3. Anonymous author for Alt.NET Pursefight round-up for 20 December [Dec CC]
4. Fake Steve Jobs for (Daniel Lyons) Breakfast with an Apple lawyer [Dec CC]
5. Justin Etheredge for The Programmer Dress Code [Dec CC]

Most Fun with Multi-Media [VOTE]

1. Justice Gray for Audio highlights of .NET Rocks with Jeffrey Palermo & the MS MVC [Audio: Dec CC]
2. D’Arcy Lussier’s for If Book Publishers Were Smart 2 [Photo (Book Cover): Aug CC]
3. Rory Blythe for Neopoleon Goes YouTube – The Neopoleon Thanksgiving Special [Video: Nov Post]
4. Anonymous Alt.NET pursefight authors for Weekend round-up for 22-23 December: Alt.Netcracker Edition [Photo (Oren & Laribee dancing nutcracker suite): Dec CC]
5. Russell Ball for Scott Guthrie Gets an Image Makeover [Video: Oct post] – Sorry, I just couldn’t resist slipping this one in.

Best Blog Humor [VOTE]

1. Scott Hanselman for Caught in the Act [July CC]
2. Justice Gray for What DevTeach 2007 is missing at DevTeach 2007 [Aug CC]
3. Eric Sink for What Microsoft Doesn’t Want You to Know about WPF [Aug CC]
4. Mark Miller for My Last VSLive Session Ever? [Oct CC]
5. Rory Blythe for A New Religion – A Neopoleon Religion [Nov post]

I hope everyone enjoys rereading these nominations as much as I did.

A special thanks to all the bloggers who were nominated for helping to lighten up a sometimes overly serious profession. Good luck to you.

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