I have just finished listening to the first episode of a new podcast. It’s a discussion about self-improvement for developer with Chad Myers, David Laribee and Jeremy D. Miller. It’s very inspiring and I recommend that you listen to it if you are serious about software development.

Alt.NET Podcast

100th post. I want to thanks everyone who came visiting me regularly. Over the last year, the amount of visits grew each weeks. I remember when I got the 100 visits mark. Now I am at an average of 120 visits per day with a day of 199 visits. As you can see below, it’s pretty clear where the weekend is.

Here is a gift for you all !!! (I think he had a lot of spare time …) Enjoy!

I was thinking about this for a while. If I have to choose five peoples who have influenced me the most concerning my career, who would that be?

1. My first supervisor when I was a wielder.

This guy once said to me that I would never do anything more than wielding in my life and if it wasn’t for my father, he would have fired me for nothing. I promised him that It will not happen. Four years later, I was the leader of a small team in the company. Take that…

2. Bernard Voyer.

A famous explorator that I met when I was in school. He believed in his dream and have conquered the Everest, South Pole, North Pole and a lot of hard to reach places. He his just a normal person who gave everything he had to make his dream true.

3. The ASP.NET guy.

I don’t remember his name , but it’s shortly after I finished school. He had just completed a Microsoft Certification in ASP.NET. This is where I first heard the term MCSD and I promised myself I would be one (even though I had no idea what it was at that time). 2 years later, February 7 2006 at almost 9:00 PM, I was one. I learned all by myself with the help of some books and the requirement list on MSDN. It just felt incredible. Even if I’m no longer in the world of certification, I’m still very proud of it.

4. Scott Hanselman.

First blog ever that I have put in my RSS aggregator. I’m following him since a long time and he inspired me a lot. It’s because of him that I am a blogger. He’s coming to the .NET User Group of Québec next week and I can’t wait to meet him.

5. Jean-Paul Boodhoo

Never met the man. I first heard of him in an episode on DnrTv about design patterns. It seem he has a lot passion… If you have never heard of him, head here. I wish I was as passionate as him. I am, but he his more :).

This was my top 5 of the peoples who had the most impact on me. But I want to talk about a 6th person. He probably don’t want me to talk about him so I will not give any name. Before meeting him, I was already into Agile development. But he taught me a lot about other aspect of the methodology. Everything that can’t be learn in a book to be more precise. But thing haven’t got very well at some point and after a lot of different events we lost touch. Anyway, I am very recognizing to have worked with him.

Last week, I have left my job at bxsystems. I had an opportunity that I could not refuse. I have worked for 3 years and 8 months with the most talented peoples I ever encountered. They are great professionals and I am sure they will continue to be successful in their careers. This is where all started for me, where I started to get passionate about programming. I had a lot of freedom and a lot of learning opportunities.

I am very grateful for everything. For a beginner, it could not be a better place. Thank you!

You may not know, but I am a full time web worker since February 2007 and I am loving it. I followed my girlfriend to his new job in mechanical engineering located in the “Beauce” area in the province of Québec (1 hour from Québec City). But let’s make a point clear. It was not as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of discipline and you may find that you just can’t do it. I have had many friends who were not able to work from home. For me, it was easy since it’s a childhood dream. I have gone through 3 phases.

The first one is the “That’s easy” phase. During the first 2 months, everything seemed so easy. I was very productive and enjoyed every minutes working from home. This is also the phase were you work more than you are supposed and keep no free time. You have the impression you can achieve anything.

I called the second phase : “I need to check everything around the house to be sure nothing changed.”. In this phase, everything disturbed me. I started to feel lonely and was wondering if I made the right choice. During this 6 months phase I had a hard time concentrating on my job. It’s also the time we were building our new home. During that time, I never took a day off except the day we moved in. I was exhausted, stressed and lost. We had problems with contractors. The price we anticipated was a bit higher due to the angle of the lot we bought. To make things worst, I started working on a new project requiring me to work with Microsoft Dynamics (until you used the supplied API you can’t imagine how frustrating of an experience it is). But I have gone through it.

Now, I am in the third phase. I called it the “Rebirth phase”. I restarted my old habit of learning as much as I can. I have solved my concentration problem. I feel a lot more happier and a lot more in health. I started to really enjoy working remotely and I am sure I am as productive as I was before. I am now fully happy with it. And I have new projects for my region…

I am now available to work on small contracts for now. I also want to work remotely. If you are interested, just let me know via the contact form.

HIRE ME !

I was wondering when this day would come. When I’d start thinking in term of object. This change in paradigm was not easy. I started programming using the data-centric way and was submerged by it. I was struggling to get rid on this kind of thinking. I’ve read multiple book before : Agile Software Development, Object Thinking, Refactoring, etc. But this was hard to me. However, 6 months ago, I finally landed on an Agile team. I got a hard time changing the way I was thinking because I was sure that I was understanding object-oriented development.

For me, the revelation occurred in this team. There I was introduced to my first test-driven project. One of the team members and a consultant for the company was previously working for Object Mentor. I needed to be up to the task, and immerged myself completely into it. I was reading the code of the project regularly and tried to do the same thing. I made mistakes, lots of mistakes, but I learned from them (even if I was not being directed in the right way after making them, but this is another story). Unfortunately the project was put to an halt and I had to get back to the old project, the one that became so complicated that I had abandoned all hope of doing something right with it. I was wrong, this was a wonderful opportunity and this is where the mind shift occurred. I started doing some unit tests and when I was comfortable with the coverage of a certain part, refactor to reflect a more object-oriented and easier to understand ways. I learned about Inversion Of Control (IoC), Dependency Injection, Mocking, Domain-Driven Design and Design Pattern. I also started to read my books back. I re-read Code Complete, Refactor and Object-Design Heuristics, and I am planning to read a lot more. I also adopted many of the Agile practices. This was not hard, since I had worked on project that had big upfront design, and after every release, we were deploying every week a new versions because of the bugs we had found or enhancements the clients wanted. This was just the natural thing to do and I firmly believe this is a good road to follow.

Now, If I could only get a new challenge to push my limits and learn more!

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!

Following the definition of a nightmare platform, I officially declare Microsoft Dynamics GP to be one of them. Sorry Dynamics GP guys, but I need an explanation for why I have spent half a day trying to figure out how this can be possible.

Consider this example :

            salesItem.StandardCost = new MoneyAmount();
            salesItem.StandardCost.Value = 1;
            salesItem.StandardCost.DecimalDigits = 2;

            salesItem.UofMScheduleKey = new UofMScheduleKey();
            salesItem.UofMScheduleKey.Id = "EACH";

            Policy policy = DynamicsWebService.GetPolicyByOperation("CreateSalesItem", DynamicsWebServiceContext);
            DynamicsWebService.CreateSalesItem(salesItem, DynamicsWebServiceContext, policy);</PRE


 

And here is the error message :

A validation exception has occurred.
Validation Errors:
- StandardCost cannot be less than 0.

I’m still trying to figure out what amount should I put when the item has a cost…

I have just received this! The inscription is :

Thank you for the lasting contribution you made to Microsoft Visual Studio. S. Somasegar

I really like receiving gifts, but I would have preferred a free copy of Visual Studio 2008. . Anyway, It’s a nice thank you.

Some time ago, I listened a podcast from Scott Hanselman which discussed about how to be a better developer in 6 months. Since I’m a huge fan of motivation blog and personal improvement, this subject tickled me almost everyday. And now, I am ready to announce my plan which is ending at the end of february.

I’m will read a book every 2 weeks and do a review for each of them, for a total of 12 books. Here is the list I thoroughly choosed :

1. Windows Forms 2.0 Programming (Since this is what I am doing, maybe I can learn a few tips and tricks)
2. CLR via C#, Second Edition
3. Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
4. CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition
5. Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns: With Examples in C# and .NET
6. Object Thinking (Reading it again…)
7. Code Complete (Already read, but very informative)
8. Head First : Design Pattern (So much images)
9. UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, Third Edition
10. Beyond Code
11. The Algorithm Design Manual
12. Rapid Development

Then, I will regain my health back by doing exercise every day and try my best to eat healthy food. I want at least to loose 10 pounds.

I want to finalize and distribute a little home project I made to track weight lost, track food consumption and can be used as a journal tool.

And I need to give credit where it’s due. First of all, the guy who started it all : Justice Gray. I have also based my list of books on his because he seems to know a lot and he probably choose some really good books. I also want to thank Scott Hanselman (very very great blog) for making a podcast on this subject.

A lot happen in the past weeks. First of all, this blog has reached 1000 visits. I’m extremely proud of that and I will try to maintain this constant growth. Next, my house is almost done, finally. This is a Profab house which is in the NovoClimat category. I expect to move in in 2 or 3 weeks.

If you have been following my blog since the beginning, you probably know about Tower Defense Games. This is a real time killer. I have lost a lot of my free time just to see if I can get a level higher. Then I have turned to simple solution like the LifeHacker’s Invisibility Cloak which is really great. It blocks web site that you have added to this GreaseMonkey script. But another alternative that is simpler to use is the LeechBlock Firefox Add-On. With this one, you can’t deactivate it, if you have decided to use it. So it will really help I think .

Day 3 completed and I think I’m seeing progress. Right now, I’m completing 3 series of 10 push-ups on my knees. After day 10, I’m going to give a try without my knees.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see this previous post : 30 Day Trial : Push-Up!

Feel free to post any comment with some sort of 30 day trial to get a new habit.

Good news, I will see progress! Since I was not able to do a full one. I will probably do them on my knees for the next couple of days. I forgot to mention how much I will do each time. It’s simple, 3 series of the maximum I can do. I hope to be able to do at least 20 at the end of the trial.