Caffeinated Coder

It’s too hard to pick just one topic to delve into after a five month blogging hiatus, so I thought I would reenter the blogosphere by just spewing forth some random thoughts that have been floating around in my head lately.

1. Lamda soup is yummy – As you probably guessed from the title of the post, I’ve currently got C# 3.0 on the brain. I’ve been burning through John Skeet’s most excellent C# in Depth: What you need to master C# 2 and 3 book this last week and am finally beginning to grok some of the finder points of anonymous delegates, lamdas, and closures that have alluded me up until now. I especially like how the book explains the original problems that the new language features were attempting to address and also how it provides most of the examples in 1.1 first before showing how they can be rewritten more efficiently using the new 2.0 and 3.0 language improvements.
2. Side projects kill blogs – I started a side project back in February that has allowed me to learn a whole slew of frameworks that I’ve been itching to try like the MVC, NHibernate, Fluent NHibernate, JQuery, Windsor, and Sharp-Architecture. Unfortunately the pressure of learning all of those fun things on top of actually getting some work done pretty much sucked up all of my free time that used to go to blogging. By the time I finished the project a few months ago I was so burned out that I went on a fiction binge with such books as World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars, The Road, and Cryptomonicon. I think I’ve finally regained my sense of equilibrium enough to where I can start slipping some blogging back into the mix again.
3. Turning my back on Active Record – Last year I started down the path of using Castle’s ActiveRecord as a way to use NHibernate without all the messy XML mapping files. After having a chance to work with Fluent NHibernate, I’m ready to ditch the messy attributes and nasty inheritance dependencies of Active Record in favor of a more POCOesque approach. Clean entity objects AND no xml files? What’s not to love?
4. Third party controls are obsolete – When I decided to use Microsoft’s MVC Framework, one of my biggest concerns was the lack of built-in or third party controls. That was before I started to explore JQuery’s vast plugin community. With just a few lines of code and include files I was able to produce really nice looking calendar controls, autocomplete text boxes, media players, complex validation controls, and tool tips. It’s hard to imagine shelling out money for third party web controls ever again.
5. Bringing recruiting to the next level with the Rejectomizer 2000 – We are hiring for not one but FIVE separate positions in our department and yours truly has the dubious honor of being neck deep in it. As a polite gesture, we decided to send out an actual rejection email to anyone who went to the trouble to at least include a personalized cover letter with their resume. With our candidate pipeline being constantly refilled by 3 recruiters, Career Builder, and a stumbling economy this task quickly became a tedious chore…that is until I brought the full power of PowerShell to bear on the problem with a script that has affectionately been dubbed the Rejectomizer 2000 (source code to be provided in a later post). My most recent enhancement included adding a sound effect to the script of a flushing toilet, which I admit is totally cold hearted but at the same time it does help relieve the bitterness that tends to build up after sifting through hundreds of poorly formatted and otherwise indecipherable resumes in lieu of doing cool coding stuff.
6. Swimming against the Information Stream – While my 15 month old now twitters in her crib and my grandma reads her RSS feeds on the smart phone that is embedded in her walker, I have taken bold steps to swim against the current information tide by devoting myself more to good old fashioned tree killing modes of learning. I suck at multi-tasking and am sick of feeling like my knowledge is becoming more and more spread thin these days, so I’ve lined up 10 technology books that I’ve been meaning to read forever and decided to go on a strict RSS and twitter diet until I finish every last one of them.
7. Six Shooters should be outlawed – On a final note, I recently tested the limits of caffeine consumption by agreeing to drink a latte with six shots of espresso that one of my co-workers bought for me and then goaded me into drinking. Besides making my tongue a little numb and causing me to break out in a cold sweat, this highly potent drink, which we dubbed “The Six Shooter”, apparently sped up my response time by several orders of magnitude. According to office lore I responded to the question “what are you drinking?” before the first syllable had been fully uttered with a response that appeared to have been run through several very advanced compression algorithms. Moral of the story…don’t try this at home.

Cheers,

Caffeinated Coder

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