Caffeinated Coder

I’m finally recovered from my 10th marathon in New York this last weekend, which means I’m no longer walking down the stairs like a 90 year old man.

Although I was disappointed that there was no prize money for 15,083rd place (out of 40k runners), I still had a great time at the world’s largest marathon. I even managed to run my second negative split ever, which I attribute to not wanting to run behind Borat anymore (pictured to the right).

You can curse my running partner for capturing Borat in all his bare-butt glory on her camera phone right before we passed him.

1. How Hard Could It Be?: The Unproven Path - An interesting behind-the-scenes look at the making of StackOverflow from Joel Spolsky’s perspective. You can find more interesting tidbits from this Hanselminutes podcast with Jeff Atwood, such as the confession that they are running both the database and web server as well as dev, test, and production environments all on one hosting server! You’ll especially appreciate the shoestring budget, fly-by-the-seat of your pants approach to building this popular site if you’ve currently stuck in some heavily regulated, corporate development hell.
2. Deep Zoom Version of 4.0 .NET Framework -  Even if you know you will be stuck in legacy mode for the rest of your life and therefore don’t give a hoot about the 4.0 framework, you’ll still want to check this site out. I nearly wore my mouse scroller out playing with the zoom feature. It’s mesmerizing.
3. Microsoft kills Linq to SQL - Oren stirs up an interesting discussion on his blog by commenting on ADO.NET teams’ recent announcement that they were basically ditching Linq to SQL in favor of the Entity Framework. I thought at first that he was just reading too much into the post, but then I saw Damien Guard’s follow-up post on the topic, which seemed to confirm Ayende’s interpretation (albeit with slightly more spin control).

I’m still feeling sleepy from my late night of figuring out how to add fancy Ajax effects and pagination to my wife’s new RoR e-commerce site that we are getting close to launching.

Here’s some light Monday reading…

1. On the Difference between Newb and n00b - Don’t know the difference between a Newb and a n00b? Let this humorous urban dictionary definition clear some things up for you.
2. PDC 2008 Gang Signs - If you’re feeling left out for missing PDC08, cheer yourself up by learning the official PDC gang signs. This morning I flashed our tester the BSOD sign right before I popped a cap into his *ss.
3. The Web Browser is the New Laptop - Jeff brags on his new ‘netbook’, a cheap laptop for under $400 that’s optimized for web surfing. He makes an interesting point about this new breed of affordable machines potentially challenging MS & Apple’s oversized and\or overpriced behemoths.

I’m taking a needed break from implementing PCI compliance security features in order to bring you some of my favorite links from my weekend blog reading.

1. Version control with Subversion: so easy my wife can do it - There is no way that Jimmy Bogard didn’t get at least one night on the couch for this one (even with the ‘this is not my wife’ disclaimer that he added to the caveman picture). He’s right about the current Subversion toolset being dead simple though. After endless procrastination, I finally put my personal files under source control using Visual Subversion and TortoiseSVN and was amazed at how quick and easy it was to setup and use.
2. The 5 Most Annoying Programs on your PC - My favorite quote from this post: “Sure IE 7.0 is better than IE 6.0, but that is only in a ‘at least Mussolini made the trains run on time’ sort of way.” It has some spot-on rants against Outlook and Acrobat Reader for being so slow and bloated. It even inspired me to finally dump Acrobat Reader in favor of the much lighter weight FoxIt Reader. As a final F*** YOU, Acrobat insisted that I restart my computer after uninstalling it.
3. Is Product Splintering The Future Of Software? - Max Pool not only finally solves the mystery of why there are so many frickin’ brands of toothpaste at the grocery store, but also makes some interesting predictions about how software will be packaged and marketed in the future.

Take a break from watching the stock market tank and your retirement savings dwindle and check out the following links.

1. Growing Up Geek (A Hanselmeme) - Leon Bambrick (Secret Geek), a blogger after my own heart, posted the best meme response ever. After confessing that he used to beat up kids that looked like Scott Hanselman and steal their code, he then produces shocking photographic evidence of his own from his childhood.
2. 9 Options, 4 Icons, 1 MessageBox - A great WTF expose from Bill Simser on some bizarre behavior from the Windows MessageBox API.
3. Three simple Rhino Mocks rules - I’ve been stuck in .NET 1.1 legacy land for the last several months so I haven’t had a chance to dig into Rhino.Mocks 3.5 AAA syntax (Arrange, Act, and Assert) yet. Jimmy Bogard provides a very clear and concise explanation of how it works.

A few good reads I discovered while recovering from my 16 mile training run over the weekend in preparation for the upcoming New York marathon next month.

1. Transitioning between consulting projects -  Random reflections by Jimmy Boggard that contain good insights on the effect that absorbing new team members has on productivity and team dynamics. The post also has some good suggestions about focusing the majority of the modeling effort on the most critical, difficult, and volatile parts of the domain model.
2. Top 10 Things That Annoy Programmers - One of the rare top 10 lists that don’t suck. I identified with all the items on the list, but if I had to pick the three biggest annoyances I would go with: interruptions (#9), documenting my applications (#6), and self-evident code comments (#10).
3. For Fun: Bank Robber Hires Accomplices on Craigslist - A news gem that I found on Bruce Schenier’s blog. This is by far the most intelligent use of a web 2.0 social networking site that I’ve seen yet.

I spent all my blogging time this week brushing up on my paltry Ruby on Rails skills for an upcoming personal project and reading a most excellent book called  The Kite Runner, my first foray into non-brain candy fiction in over a year.

Here’s a few link recommendations to tide you over until I get inspired again to pull another real post out of my arse.

1. Software Development’s Classic Mistakes 2008 - Don’t let the page count (40) on this white paper from Steve McConnell, the author of the classic book Code Complete, scare you off. It’s really a pretty quick and informative read with updated stats and insight about the most common mistakes that lead to project failures. While many of the catalogued mistakes are common sense, I came across a few thought provoking ones regarding excessive multi-tasking, noisy\crowded offices, inappropriate outsourcing, and over-estimating savings from new tools and methods that I’ll probably spin off into future posts.
2. Epiphany on a plumber - A nicely written personal anecdote by Kyle Baley (Coding Hillbilly) about the intersection between passion and communication. As JP’s “Develop with Passion” mantra becomes more and more ingrained into our collective developer psyches, it’s good to get an occasional reminder about the importance of taking your audience into consideration before unleashing our new found passion upon some poor, unsuspecting soul.
3. For Fun: 1 minute video showing condition 1 conditions in Antarctica: - Winter is just around the corner, so I couldn’t resist sharing this eye-opening video I came across on the Kickin’ In the Darkness blog. Suddenly my childhood memories of Michigan winters don’t seem so impressive anymore.

Back from another fun weekend that consisted of a couple of 6 hour car trips with a bored 7 year old and a screaming 6 month old with a bad case of explosive diarrhea. All this just to visit in-laws in a nursing home located in the booming metropolis that is West Plains, MO. What could be better?

1. More thinking about “Agile” vs “Waterfall” - Fresh insight by Jason Yip into the strengths and weaknesses of the Agile and Waterfall methodologies, including some challenges to conventional wisdom about when a waterfall approach is most appropriate. I especially liked his refinement of the Agile principles and values.
2. The Problem with Every Implementation of a “Forgot Your Password?” Feature I’ve Seen Online - Dare Obasanjo reflects on the recent Sarah Palin email hack and draws what should have been a really obvious conclusion that the standard ‘forgot password’ functionality which relies on answering a personal questions in lieu of the password is fundamentally unsafe in the age of google, wikipedia, and social networking sites like facebook and myspace.
3. Simple Trouble Shooting Application Now Fixes Everything - The Secret Geek provides a humorous list of common debugging techniques. I enjoyed the silly, creative ones on the list, but it also got me thinking about how many times developers rely on catch-all ‘reset’ techniques to resolve problems without really figuring out or understanding the underlying causes.

Question: What’s worse than the stomach flu?

Answer: Having your wife and 6 month old get sick at the same time and having it all happen on the same weekend as your parents visit from out of town.

Despite these horrors, I’m back and ready for business with my second Triple Shot installment.

1. Win $100 Worth of Software Development Books! - Jurgen is going to hook the person with the best ‘What motivates me’ answer with $100 of free software books from his chums at Amazon. I made an initial list, but so far everything on it will either get me arrested or kicked in the junk by my wife. I’m going to keep thinking though because I’m pretty sure that if I get rid of one of my cats I might be able to fit a couple of more computer books in the house.
2. SOA & DDD For Everyone - I was trying to blackmail my boss into sending me to this course last month when it was first advertised, but the original price tag simply broke our training budget. Now at $2000 for a week of premium training with Udi, it is a steal. Unfortunately, now personal commitments are standing in my way. Oh the miserable irony of it all…
3. Jeremy’s Penultimate Law of Continuous Integration - I’ve been bitten by this one several times in the last few months. It’s such a nice feeling to have everything checked in before you go home, but waiting to do it until right before you leave to do it automatically conjures up some really bad build-breaking ju-ju. Better to just let your code languish in check-in purgatory over-night than to chance angering the build gods with such a brazen act of coding hubris.

I decided that I liked the concept of sharing some of my favorite links each week along with my witty banter, but that I don’t particularly like the format offered by the Feedburner-Delicious integration service.

I especially don’t like how there is no way to leave comments and it is not available to people who stumble on the blog outside of an RSS channel.

So instead of doing the Delicious links, I’m just going to do publish the links as a traditional blog post with the heading “Triple Shot Links” (obviously I’ll continue with my established habit of providing three links at a time).

Here’s the first installment using the new format.

1. Best tools for creating website wireframes - Stack Overflow - This is the first referrer link to my blog from Stack Overflow. In honor of the occasion, I finally signed up for an account tonight and started trolling for questions. So far I only have 1 pity reputation point that I got for signing up…:-(
2. Animated Sorting Algorithms - Click on the green arrow to see a mesmerizing animation of how each sort method work. Warning: Do not watch while taking any narcotic substances! I found it through Hanselman’s latest Back-To-Basics inspired post. It’s great for anyone feeling nostalgic for their old college days or inferior for having mis sed out on a proper CS education.
3. Hiring Expert Web Developers at Hashrocket - Describes a tempting job offer from Obie Fernandez’s company. I especially like the part about “up to 8 hours paid time per week allotted to ‘other activities’ including open-source hacking, writing books and blogs, education and other internal initiatives”. I wonder if he is bitter about my little jest about his old blog photo…oh wait…Florida…nevermind. I guess I’ll have to stick with writing my blog posts during my lunch hour and at night after the wee ones go to bed. Sigh…