Podcasts

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So little time, so much to learn

Gone are the days for the software developer where you can learn one technology inside out, sit back and work at the same job for 20 years. Continuous learning, the ongoing voluntary pursuit of knowledge, is becoming an essential pursuit to most working in the software industry.

The technological landscape is evolving so fast that most of us programmers have to continually learn, or risk having an increasingly extinct set of skills.

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There are a number of tools that I have started to use which have helped me better keep apace with some of the changing I.T. industry landscape.

Technical Podcasts – Learn On The Go

If, like me, you have a relatively long commute into work [30 minutes or more], there are many excellent ways that you can utilize this time. Some like to read newspapers, listen to music, enjoy a good novel; I like to use this time to ‘sharpen my axe‘ by catching up on the latest goings on in the software development world through listening to technical podcasts.

Using this time to listen to podcasts has been highly beneficial to me in a number of ways:

  • Learn the lingo. Once you start listening to podcasts you are much more aware and confident with many of the phrases and terms used within the industry. Terms like ‘big iron’, ‘cranking code’, ‘heisenbug’, ‘pokemon handling’, ‘stringly typed’ etc are all now part of a colorful vocabulary thanks to listening to others using them confidently on podcasts.

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  • Bleeding Edge. Most of the podcasts pick up on new technologies or practices. If someone uses a brand new technical term in the office that starts you sweating that they will ask you your opinion on something that you cannot even spell… you can be sure there is a podcast for that.
  • Different Viewpoints. Going outside your comfort zone, like listening to web podcasts when you have spent your life as a desktop developer, will open your horizons to similar, but different ways, to approach your own field (you never know, you might pick up a new golden hammer).
  • General Consensus. As well as picking up new terms and technologies it also helps to reinforce current terms or technologies that you are already using.

 

Lots of Great Podcasts

Here are some recommended podcasts that I am currently listening to:

  • .NET Rocks : My favorite podcast for technical content. Excellent audio quality, content and banter. Not as Microsoft centric as you might think.
  • Hanselminutes : Again good content and quality but sometimes steers away from tech relevant subjects.
  • Herding Code. Great web podcast. Sometimes a bit Microsoft centric.
  • Javascript Jabber. Good for web/javascript technology talk. Sometimes a bit tangential but very enjoyable.
  • Stuff You Should Know : My favorite non-technical podcast. Good for some respite from too much tech talk. Josh and Chuck are very funny and present some dry topics in an entertaining way. Some great and varied subjects like ‘How Pinball works‘ to ‘How the scientific method works’.

 

What other resources have you come across?

Have you had any experience with any of the resources I have mentioned, what did you think?

 

Angular – My New Golden Hammer

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Web Development feels ‘hacky’

For most of my career I have been a desktop developer but a few years ago I started making the move towards web development.

The move, at first, was horribly painful. For most of my working life I was working with the safety of compilers, full featured code libraries, mature test frameworks, UI frameworks and data-binding only to be thrown into the then (and even now) ‘wild west’ of web development.

My biggest gripe with web development was “how can it be so hard to do such simple things?”. I was finding that putting a button and some input controls on a screen that saved to a database required me to write waaaayyyy too much code. Never mind all the problems with screen size and browser compatibility, even simple things felt verbose and ‘hacky’

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Silverlight – Desktop like, but flawed

I quickly retreated back from pure Javascript/HTML/CSS development to using something more ‘desktop-like’ and started using, and advocating, Silverlight.

Silverlight is [was] Microsoft’s attempt to replace Flash (more or less). Things were good, I was productive again and spitting out highly functional web apps until I started fully realizing the limitations of using a plugin based approach. On the brink of giving up web development due to frustration, I started looking at the latest web technologies that were beginning to gain some traction.

Knockout JS. Better, but still too many dragons to slay…

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The first bit of relief came when I discovered Knockout.js. Knockout is a fantastic library that enables easy MVVM data-binding in your web apps. This was more like it, not having to write as much ‘grunt’ code to hook up data with UI felt much better. Something as simple as the data-binding that knockout gave me renewed my enthusiasm for web development and I started to look for other libraries that could address the other reservations that I had about web development.

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Angular, now we’re talking

The next discovery, and most fruitful, was AngularJS.

Angular is a Javascript library from Google which makes web development sooooo much easier. For almost every problem that I started to ask Angular it seemed that the developers had already had the same pain and had already built the functionality into Angular already. If there was something that I needed from the framework that didn’t already exist, there was usually an Angular extension that was readily available or I was able to make a directive from an existing Jquery plugin.

Angular has become so much of a golden hammer for me that I find it hard to contemplate starting a large website without using it.

Looking to the future

The landscape for web development is evolving rapidly but with frameworks like Angular, and maturing and adherence to web standards, it does not seem as anarchic as it once was. There are several other libraries that have made my life easier such as underscore/lodash, twitter bootstrap, and breezejs, but the underlying library that has made the most difference is Angular. Since converting to Angular I am now a happy and more productive web developer. Before, I was extremely frustrated and unproductive and although Angular, and web development in general, is still far from perfect, it is a more enjoyable place to be.

A Word of Caution for Angular 2

Before you get carried away and start seeing everything in angular tinted glasses, you need to consider the ramifications of the upcoming Angular 2.0.

I have had a look at the 2.0 syntax and it is a big departure from 1.x. IMHO this is a strange and worrying decision from Google as many people looking to dive into Angular at this point in time will be uneasy that the code they write now will not be supported/current in the near future.

2 Golden Hammers?

Although promises of a clear upgrade path are promised by Google, it might be time to find a backup golden hammer (i.e. React) to hedge my bets.

Has anyone else got similar experiences with Angular? Have you found other libraries that you feel you cannot do without? How do you see the future for frameworks like Angular, React, Backbone or Ember?

Why Write This Blog?

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I write code for a living, I love doing it, but I want to do it better.

I forget things, really important things.

Birthdays, meetings, anniversaries, names, outstanding bills, all fall victim to my absent-mindedness; nothing is safe. As programmers we have better things to do with our time, right? Why should we have to remember trivial things like anniversaries when there is code in front of us to crank.

Most of us coders don’t have a personal assistant to keep us on track, and most of us don’t conform to the basement-dwelling, cola drinking, RPG playing, colostomy bag wearing, nerdy stereotype (at least not all of the stereotypes). We are ordinary folk who just like as little distraction as possible while engrossed in some code.

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So what to do, how can we still keep our heads in code while having as few untimely interruptions from the outside world as possible?

Over the past few years I have been gradually getting better at remembering and organizing things. By using widely available software programs and apps I have able to save face on several occasions now, but things are still not perfect.

This blog chronicles my attempts at learning, from current tools and practices, and from you, about what I am doing wrong and how we can do it better.

Left to my own devices I can be a lazy and unproductive programmer.

I am scatterbrained; forgetting meetings, birthdays and names.

I fret that I will forget important things and so try to deal with them as soon as I encounter them or just sweep them under the carpet.

Procrastination is a habit that I cling onto like a life raft when things start to get difficult.

I like to think of myself as a typical coder 🙂

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BUT,

One redeeming quality that I do have is that I know that I have these flaws and recognize that they stop me from being a better programmer.

Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder.

Mason Cooley

 

I have been around just long enough to know that there is hope for coders like me. I know there exist tools, practices and tips that will enable me to shake the shackles of these common programmer traits and become a more rounded, confident and productive coder. This blog is about exploring these topics and getting opinions on what works and what doesn’t.
EDIT:

LOL! in the course of writing this post I found myself spending an hour [2 hours]: looking for an avatar, browsing Facebook and looking at a whole host of memes from quickmeme.com.