by Joey deVilla on February 22, 2010
It all starts next week on Thursday, March 4th: Ignite Your Coding, the live webcast where we interview some of the biggest brains in the industry, and then hand over the interview to you!
In Ignite Your Coding, my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe and I will talk to developers who’ve made their mark on the industry and ask them how they got started, what sorts of projects they’re working on, what interests them, where they see the industry heading, all with an eye towards helping you make sense of the changes happening in the world of software development. We’ll ask the questions for the first part, but then it’ll be your turn to ask them. The webcast will take place on Thursdays in March and April, and it won’t cost you a thing to catch them.
Our First Guest: Andy Hunt
Are you into agile programming? Andy Hunt co-authored the Manifesto. Does The Pragmatic Programmer occupy a special place on your bookshelf? (And really, it should.) Andy co-wrote that too. Have you ever coded using Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET MVC? Chances are you picked up some knowledge, either directly or indirectly, from a book published by Andy’s book publishing company, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.
We’re quite fortunate to have Andy as our first guest, and we’re looking forward to the interview! Our live webcast with Andy will take place on Thursday, March 4th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific) and run for an hour. To catch the webcast, all you have to do is register – it’s free!
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
There are all sorts of books out there that talk about how to get the most of your programming tools, from IDEs to utilities to languages to frameworks to methodologies. But of all these tools, the most important tool is the one that’s largely ignored: your brain. Enter Andy’s latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, which I declared “My Favourite Geek Book of 2008”. There are many books and tools for refactoring your code; this one’s about refactoring your brain. First, it presents the brain in a way that a programmer can grasp:
…and then talks about the many ways you can refactor it:
Taking advantage of R-mode (often called the “right brain” in pop psychology), which often gets ignored because of its non-linear, non-linguistic, unpredictable and even “artsy” nature. It’s actually an amazing problem-solver, so much that PT&L suggests that you should “lead with R-mode and follow with L-mode”, or more colloquially, “write drunk; revise sober”. - Working around the bugs in your brain. And there are many, from the primitive “lizard brain” that likes to override our higher cognitive functions to cognitive biases to generational affinity.
- Learning deliberately: what learning is and isn’t, how to plan to learn, figuring out what your learning style is and how to best take advantage of it, and harnessing mind maps, documentation and teaching in order to learn.
- Gaining experience, which includes understanding the importance of fun and how pressure kills cognition, learning the “inner game” and why your mantra shouldn’t be “learn to build”, but “build to learn”.
- Managing focus, a very important topic since there are so many things vying for it, from office interruptions to the siren song of the internet, with email, IM, Twitter, Digg, Reddit and LOLcats. One of my favourite bits in this section was some research whose results indicated that constantly checking your email lowers your effective IQ more than smoking a joint.
Get the book, then meet the author! Register for Andy’s Ignite Your Coding session!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Andy Hunt,
Ignite Your Coding,
webcasts
by Joey deVilla on December 30, 2009
The Book
I do believe I’ll be ordering an ebook edition of Apress’ Windows Azure Platform. Here’s Apress’ description of the book:
Master Microsoft’s brand-new cloud-computing technology with Windows Azure Platform by Tejaswi Redkar. You’ll learn how to utilize Azure’s four core components— Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services—both separately and together to build flawless cloud computing services.
What you’ll learn in Windows Azure Platform:
- Everything you need to know about the Azure Services components—from Access Control to SQL Services, from the Service Bus to Workflow Services.
- Understand both the architectural thinking behind Azure and the nuts-and-bolts code that binds your service together.
- Design, build, and deploy an Azure service with the assistance of a fully worked template for end-to-end application design that mimics a real-world scenario and gives you a rock-solid example of the design and development processes that you need to work through.
The Discounts
If you bought the ebook version of their previous Azure book, Introducing Windows Azure, you’ll get an automatic 50% discount off the the price of the ebook of Windows Azure Platform.
If you didn’t buy the ebook version of Introducing Windows Azure, you can still get a discount. If you place an order for Windows Azure Platform before the end of December 31st, use the discount code APRESSHOLIDAYML, which will apply a 25% discount to your entire purchase (so you can save on other Apress books, too!)
These discounts won’t last very long, so place an order today!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Azure,
discount codes,
discounts
by Joey deVilla on December 21, 2009
I wanted to post this earlier, but a number of things, shopping included, conspired to keep me from blogging until just now.
If you’re reading this and it’s still December 21st, Manning Publications, publishers of fine books such as C# in Depth, Real-World Functional Programming, ASP.NET MVC in Action and The Art of Unit Testing and even a whole book on Dependency Injection (and yes, they have a lot of non-Microsoft books as well) is having a half-price off all ebooks sale – but only on Monday, December 21st, Use the discount code dotd1221 when you place your order and the books will be half price.
If it’s after December 21st but before the new year, Apress has a deal for you! If you order off their site and use the discount code APRESSHOLIDAYML, they’ll take 25% off your entire purchase.
If you’ve been holding off buying new geeks books and waiting for some deals, those deals are here!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Apress,
deals,
Manning
by Joey deVilla on November 27, 2009
Sooner or later, unless you’re going to hide in a monastery or settle for entry-level jobs for the rest of your life, you will have to speak in front of a crowd of people. It may happen in front of a small circle of peers, a boardroom meeting, online or in front of an auditorium with thousands of people.
Whether you’re like me — I enjoy public speaking; it’s one way I get my jollies — or whether the thought of standing in front of a crowd to deliver a presentation turns your blood to ice, I think you’ll find Scott Berkun’s book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, both helpful and entertaining. I’ve been reading this book for a handful of reasons:
- As a way to get myself fired up to take on three weeks of being a track lead at TechDays conferences in cities away from home: next week it’s Montreal, the week after that I’m in Ottawa, and finally, the week after that, Winnipeg.
- To help crystallize my own thoughts on public speaking in order to give advice to my fellow programmers about speaking in front of crowds.
- Because Scott Berkun’s a great writer and has some interesting (and often amusing) stories to tell.
At 240 small pages with decent-sized type and with Berkun’s storytelling style, Confessions of a Public Speaker is a pretty quick read. He provides insights, advice, tips and probably most important of all, true “road warrior” stories that come from his own 15 years of public speaking plus stories of disasters faced by other well-known public speakers. Topics covered in the book include:
- It’s okay to get “the butterflies” before public speaking; the trick is getting them to fly in formation!
- “Umm”, “Ahh” and other verbal placeholders that people use, and how to stop using them (I’m guilty of this one myself).
- How to work a tough room, and why a “tough room” is often actually the fault of the room, not the audience.
- A very important chapter titled The Science of Not Boring People
- Why most speaker evaluations are useless (I may have to show this one to the folks at Microsoft; we use speaker evaluations all the time).
- The little things pros do (Luckily, we do every one on the list at Microsoft!).
- What to do if your talk sucks, what to do if things go wrong, and which of these your audience will notice.
Confessions of a Public Speaker is one of those rare books that’s both entertaining and immediately useful. I’m going to recommend it to my fellow evangelists, and I certainly recommend it to you as well! It’s available directly from O’Reilly in both paper and ebook formats (I went with the ebook, which is US$19.99 / CA$21.45 as of this writing) as well as from the usual suspects: Chapters/Indigo, Amazon.ca and Amazon.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
public speaking
by Joey deVilla on November 12, 2009
My friend (and former officemate!) Cory Doctorow is launching his latest novel, Makers, tonight at the Toronto Public Library at 239 College Street (east of Spadina). The fun happens in the Merrill Collection room, located on the third floor at 7 p.m. tonight. Cory will be doing a reading, taking questions and signing books. There will be books for sale at the event courtesy of our local science fiction and fantasy bookstore, Bakka Phoenix.
Here’s the publisher’s blurb about the book:
From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, a major novel of the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America
Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester’s. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it.
Then it slides into collapse. The New Work bust puts the dot.combomb to shame. Perry and Lester build a network of interactive rides in abandoned Wal-Marts across the land. As their rides, which commemorate the New Work’s glory days, gain in popularity, a rogue Disney executive grows jealous, and convinces the police that Perry and Lester’s 3D printers are being used to run off AK-47s.
Hordes of goths descend on the shantytown built by the New Workers, joining the cult. Lawsuits multiply as venture capitalists take on a new investment strategy: backing litigation against companies like Disney. Lester and Perry’s friendship falls to pieces when Lester gets the ‘fatkins’ treatment, turning him into a sybaritic gigolo.
Then things get really interesting.
It should be noted that while 3-D printers of the sort in Cory’s novel are still the stuff of science fiction, simpler versions exist today. In fact, at the Hacklab, where I spend many a working day, we’ve got a MakerBot Industries “Cupcake” 3-D printer that can “print” plastic objects.
Here’s what the Cupcake looks like:
A computer connected to the Cupcake controls it. The big loop of plastic to the upper left of the machine is the material from which objects are printed. Here’s a closer look at its internals:
We have a small gallery of objects that were created using the Cupcake:
If you’d like one of your own, the fine folks at Makerbot Industries would be more than happy to sell you a kit.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Tagged as:
3-D printing,
Cory Doctorow,
HacklabTO,
MakerBot
