Posted by Sébastien Lachance with Comments (0)
Back when I was young (I’m 28), I was a gamer. I could play for hours and get almost no sleep just to play games. Every games and only good rated games. I could complete several ones in just one week. I was at one point a really big fan of the Warcraft series (not WoW by the way) and got ranked really high on Battle.Net. But life goes on and I reduced my average playing time to the minimum (and I am a new father, so it’s really not that much). Now I only play games that fit into the kind I love and that I know will not be crappy.
I could say the same thing to the time I now spend learning new programming stuff. I’m more picky at what I choose and tend to ignore a lot of thing that I would have found interesting if I had time to read them. So I need to choose really carefully what I decide to involve myself into, and spend the less possible time on learning anything that I could find easily with some googling.. I also ignore stuff that come and go quickly (Cardspace?). I understand the inner plumbing, but the implementation details are not so important unless it’s something I really need to (example : I needed to create a secure WCF service, but It’s not something I use daily and will probably not use it again in the next year, so why should I choose to learn everything about securing a wcf services?).
But in my early years of programming I would have done it. I mean, learn all that I can and purchase new books every weeks. But the reality kick-in quickly and it’s just not possible anymore.
1. I read blog. No, I read blog title and choose only what I think will be interesting for me.
2. I read books. But only great books. Other people already done the job of finding good ones. So I am not loosing my time on less than average book.
3. I work on my own project on my own time. I find it to be great to feel involved in all the stage of creating an application. UI, architecture, design, deployment, redaction, marketing, etc…
4. Watch screencasts. Dime Casts.Net and TekPub (maybe someday, I will buy a subscription).
So the question is: what do you do to keep up to date with everything and not let yourself become a programming zombie?
It's hard, keeping the pace and finding interesting subjects to write about, but at the same time I enjoy seeing that I can help or entertain (maybe) someone.
I made a decision and decided to write first for myself about things that interest me, instead of trying to interest everyone. If you happen to like what I'm writing about (even if I gave no specific direction to my blog), subscribe to my feed and I will try to just be myself and have fun in the process.
2009 has been a big year. A lot happened. Professionally and in my life in general.
I have been reading a lot of books that had nothing to do with the technical aspect of my job, but with other challenges in mind. I’ve read about business development, learning process, design (not software design) and project management. I’ve also came in contact with the Pragmatic Thinking and Learning book which gave me a lot of great tools to learn more effectively.
I’ve been working with an Agile Team for half a year now, going back where I really belong. I liked the experience and hope we (the team) can get even more benefits from this methodology this year. I’ve also assisted to some of the conferences of the Agile Tour 2009 which was a fantastic event.
I’ve always been a developer with a little knowledge of web design but no deep knowledge. I’ve always had design supplied to me and been able to hack through it and get thing done. This year, I’ve gone deeply in web design and CSS, so deeply that I now really hate browsers differences :). And I’m now an expert in Javascript, thanks to jQuery. Seriously, I made really big improvement on this side.
Search Engine Optimization that his. I was expected to increase visitors from the US on a website. I’ve started with no real knowledge on how Google was indexing content. So I geared myself, watched videos and read everything I could for this. It’s not always easy but it was a fun learning experience. One tool worth mentioning is the IIS SEO toolkit. The first analysis with this extensions showed me that I had a lot of problems with missing descriptions, keywords, titles, broken links, etc, on my blog, and it provided a great experience in allowing me to resolve them and understand what I did wrong.
I’m now married. Since October 17. What an intense ride it was. And we are now waiting for our first child to be born (due February 2010).
I’ve done some consulting work at the beginning of the year and it was really fun. Delivered on time and exactly what they wanted. Great experience. Great customer.
I have missed a lot of opportunity to blog and I intend to get back on track this year. I also migrated my blog from Wordpress to BlogEngine.Net this summer and seen a drop of more than 50% in traffic. I blame myself for my lack of migration strategy.
I read some technical books in 2009, but not as many as the other years. In fact, aside from Clean Code, CSS Web Design and ASP.NET MVC in action, I had read no other technical book.
A situation has occurred in which I was unable to deliver a project on time. Some deadline were too thigh and a last minute change (technology switch at the last minute) made the situation goes havoc and the project was abandoned (by me).
I had a pair of Skullcandy headphones that broke unexpectedly. But due to the formidable warranty (complete replacement or half-price on another pair), I had sent them to be replaced in October. I’m still waiting and all my attempt to contact them has failed. The problem is that I would have been able to repair them myself and now I’ve just lost them.Update 1 (January 14, 2010 : It seems the package never arrived…). Update 2 (January 19, 2010 : Now they found it and the new headphones are being returned to me.Update 3 (February 11, 2010) : 3 weeks now and still haven't received them (Canada Post is slow or ...).
I want to thank everybody who has been visiting my blog. I have now reach 6000 hits with an average of 60 hits per day. I will keep raising my bar to deliver you some great content over the next few months. Thank you very much!!!
P.S. I'll keep working on my writing skills, don't worry!
I have a huge list of feeds and sometime there is some really long post and some excellent links. And I don't always have the time to go through this. So I hit Ctrl-D to place it in my bookmarks. So today I had some time left to clean this all up. So, here is all the bookmark that will stay bookmark.
This one is the most visited by me in the last month. Lot of useful tips.
147 Tips to be better (which happens to be the theme of my blog).
When you don't know what to listen.
Tim Ferriss offers you this OCD.
I have ordered the book today.
Finally someone answers them!
And at last, a developer link.
Let me know if you enjoy this kind of posts. Good day!
Here is a collection of all tower defense games on the Internet. Be advised that your day will be lost if you take a look at this site. towerdefence.net
Some months ago (when I was blogging on WDevs) I was using Windows Live Writer a lot. The only problem I had, was to configure it to actually see my blog. And today I have decided to give it a second try. And, wow, no problem at all. Everything is working perfectly. There is also some interesting plug-in that will enhance my experience (ex : Syntax Highlighting and Flicker4Writer).
This, has made my day. :) Windows Live Writer
And this blog is : Patrick Dussud's Blog
Very informative! This is the kind of thing I have overlooked when learning .NET and was very important (at least to impress colleague). And who is the most appropriate to explain the birth of the CLR than the Lead Architect of the CLR (Common Language Runtime) himself.