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The FTW! Coding Competition

FTW - For The Web - Coding Competition

“FTW” has been known to stand for many things, but in the case of the FTW! Coding Competition, it means “For The Web” (as well as “For The Win”). The FTW Coding Competition is part of our Make Web Not War event taking place on Thursday, May 27th in Montreal.

What is the FTW! Coding Competition?

The FTW! Coding Competition is your chance to show off your web development skills and compete for some great prizes. We’re looking for people to either:

  • Write a new web application or
  • Port an existing web application

as long as it falls under one of these categories:

  • PHP application running on Internet Information Server (that’s our web server) and Windows Server (that’s our server OS)
  • Windows Azure (that’s our cloud computing environment) application, written in any language that works on it (C#, Visual Basic .NET, PHP, Ruby and Python)
  • Open Government application (using any of the Open Data catalogues on Windows Server or Windows Azure, using any programming language)

What Can I Win?

The prizes for the FTW! Coding Competition are:

First Place: The Dell Office Computer Makeover

I’m tempted to take this off the prize list and keep it for myself. It’s made up of all these goodies:

  • Dell Precision Workstation 15” notebook computer
  • Notebook stand and port replicator
  • 27” widescreen LCD monitor
  • Wireless keyboard and mouse
  • Ferguson Hill FH007 sound system

Second Place: The Home/Office System

A nice package for bouncing between home and the office.

Third Place: The Road Warrior

A very portable and powerful system for the coder on the go. This one’s for all you “cafe coders”!

  • Dell Adamo XPS 13 notebook computer

Bonus Prizes

We’re awarding bonus prizes for submitted apps that we feel worthy of the following superlatives. You can win these on their own or in combination with the first, second and third place prizes!

What’s the Deadline?

In order to be eligible, you have to submit your web application by Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 8:00 a.m. Eastern. So get working!

Where Can I Find Out More about the FTW! Coding Competition?

You can find out more about the FTW! Coding Competition, including all the terms and conditions of the competition, at the FTW! Coding Competition site.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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David Laribee Today on Ignite Your Coding

David LaribeeIt’s Thursday, which means that it’s time for another live Ignite Your Coding webcast! Today’s guest is David Laribee, who coaches the product development team at VersionOne, has over a dozen years’ experience building enterprise software and coaching lean/agile teams in many industries. He recently wrote about technical debt in MSDN Magazine, and that’s just one of the topics he’ll cover in our live talk today.

Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!

How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?

You’ll need:

How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?

It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Ignite Your Coding, Episode 3: Jeremy Miller

Jeremy MillerLast week, John Bristowe and I interviewed Jeremy Miller — “the Shade Tree Developer” – in a live Ignite Your Coding webcast. Jeremy holds the title of Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, Austin’s coolest ISV, and we talked about open source in the .NET world, StoryTeller, dependency injection and many other topics.

imageIn case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

The recording of our webcast with Jeremy (which took place on March 18th, 2010) is linked below, and we’ll set up RSS, Zune and iTunes feeds shortly.

Direct Download:

MP3 - click here to download

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Ignite Your Coding, Episode 2: Glenn Block

Joey deVilla, Ward Bell dressed up as Elvis, Glenn Block

A couple of weeks ago, my coworker and Ignite Your Coding co-host John Bristowe and I did a live webcast interviewing Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talked about building composite applications, design patterns, dependency injection and why it’s good for you, and other aspects of good object-oriented design as we understand it these days.

imageIgnite Your Coding is a series of webcasts in which John and I talk to some of the bright lights of the software industry about how they got started, what they’re doing, how they cope with the change that affects our industry constantly and whatever else they want to talk about, all with the goal of informing and inspiring you.

The recording of our webcast with Glenn (which took place on March 10th, 2010) is linked below, and we’ll set up RSS, Zune and iTunes feeds shortly.

Direct Download:

MP3 - click here to download

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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“Star Trek: The Next Generation”, Deconstructed

The comic below, created by John Campbell, is a snarky but amusing deconstruction of Star Trek: The Next Generation:

John Campbell's comic, skillfully decosntructing Star TrekI always found it funny that the “empathic” character Deanna Troi had the power to sense plainly obvious emotions and painful that they had to explain bits of human behaviour that one should’ve picked up by the end of adolescence. That being said, much of the show’s audience was teenage boys, and teens often figure out the world through stories, so why not explain that stuff? And as someone much wiser than me once said, science fiction is a sandwich: once you’ve gotten past the bread of aliens and future tech and the thin slices of plot meat, it’s all about the thick moral mayo.

The last panels in this comic had me laughing out loud, especially since I imagined the line as delivered by actor (and dater-of-inapproriately-young-women, the lucky bastard) Patrick Stewart himself, using that William. Shatner. Mode. Of. Delivery.

In case it’s not apparent who the comic figures are, here’s a quick guide…

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Comic and TV representations of Jean-Luc Picard

 

Commander William Riker

Comic and TV representations of Will Riker

 

Lt. Commander Data

Comic and TV representations of Data

 

Lt. Commander Deanna Troi

Comic and TV representations of Deanna Troi

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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Much Clearer Than “PC LOAD LETTER”

Printer displaying the message "I CRAVE BLOOD" Photo courtesy of M Thru F.

I assume that someone did this using this trick.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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David Laribee on Thursday’s “Ignite Your Coding”

image

David Laribee on Technical Debt

“Debt” is a term so unpleasant that we don’t even pronounce one of its letters. Technical debt is equally unpleasant in its own way; like the financial kind of debt, it holds you back and haunts you. It’s the hard-to-change, error-prone parts of your code that bog down your project and its maintenance. Ward Cunningham – the guy behind the wiki and contributor to the concept of Extreme Programming – coined this clever metaphor, and it’s the topic of Thursday’s Ignite Your Coding.

David LaribeeWalking us through the topic of technical debt is our guest David Laribee, who’s going to be our technical debt counselor, providing advice on how to pay back technical debt. He coaches the product development team at VersionOne, has over a dozen years’ experience building enterprise software and coaching lean/agile teams in many industries. He’s also a co-organizer of the ALT.NET movement, and was a Microsoft Architecture MVP for 2007 and 2008.

If you’d like to know more about David’s thoughts on technical debt, check out this article of his from the December 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine: Using Agile Techniques to Pay Back Technical Debt.

What’s Ignite Your Coding All About?

In case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask David Questions…

You’ll need:

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.