Every day in the ever changing world of technology and development, I try to do some reading to keep up with the world around me. I have worked in places with small teams and big teams, but my current situation puts me as the only person with development skills in my current company. It’s really important in this situation, not to lose touch with the world of development around you. This feed has kept me up to date with new tech and also taught me even more about tech I all ready thought I knew.

I’ve been curating this list of blog feeds since I became a developer a long time ago, so many of them may be out-dated. Still, there are always great articles popping up for me to read and dabble in the tech if I have the time. Personally I use Feedly for my RSS reader, but the file should easily import into your favorite RSS reader.

Developer Feed File - You may need to Right Click -> Save As

Anyhow, hope you enjoy!

I was talking to a friend the other day about what you need to know to be an effective developer. We touched on topics like source control, people skills, presentation skills and a ton of other skills that are inherent things that are need to know. Other things could include frameworks, good blog sites, or how to get what you’re asking for from your boss. After a while we got into the code aspect of being a developer. Where do you start? What is a waste of time to learn? When should I know what? Well, I certainly don’t know the best way but I’ll share the order that worked for me.

Let’s just start basic. The first thing you should know about developing for whatever it is you want to write code for is the syntax of the language you’ll be using. Start simple, think “Hello World”.

If you’re learning an Object Oriented language (like C#), your next stop should be The four pillars of Object Oriented Design

• Abstraction
• Polymorphism
• Inheritance
• Encapsulation

Once you have an understanding of the 4 pillars in my opinion your next stop should be learning the SOLID principles

• Single responsibility principle
• Open/closed principle
• Liskov substitution principle
• Interface substitution principle

Once you’ve gotten to principles you can start to make more maintainable code in larger projects.

Finally, once you’ve gotten those down it’d be best to look into the Gang of Four Design Patterns. These are proven patterns for enterprise scale production systems. If you have a good understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, there’s a good chance a combination of these patterns will help you solve it.

All of this being said, there are problems you come across time and again as a developer. One of the biggest ones I face often is that of cross cutting concerns. I have this thing that does one thing, but now needs to do another. For example, you have data going into a database and you’d like to audit who put the record in with some sort of logging. In this case there are many solutions, and you could even write your own using all those spiffy patterns. Or in my case I found a great library called MediatR that implements a nice architecture solving that problem for me. Sometimes with the right amount of digging you’ll find a good library that solves the recurring problems.

Update

It is almost imperative now to know about cloud architecture for hightly available and scalable applications. I had the pleasure of reconnecting with a former colleague of mine who so happens to be a cloud architect at Microsoft. He pointed me toward his GitHub for some guidance on Microsoft Azure cloud architecture. You can see the repository on his GitHub here.

Happy coding!

I’ve been working with a lot of NodeJS stuff lately in my off time using things like Bower, Grunt, Gulp, etc… It’s been a nice break from my usual .NET stuff. It’s been a long while since I had my site up, running and full functional with a blog and everything. I’m not sure how much I’ll use it, but I used to put a lot of time and energy into blog posts. Maybe I’ll see if I can recover those old posts somehow. But for now I’m up and running with GitHub Pages and Hexo.

You can find more about hexo at http://hexo.io

Update

I was able to get some, but not all of my old posts back. It took a lot of digging and code re-formatting but it was worth it. Took some time learning EJS and Hexo template stuff, but the site is looking nice.

The Coder

Much like everyone else, I started my career as a coder. Rob Conery from Tekpub has a great series on going from coder to developer here. Being the coder has it’s up sides, low responsibilities being one of them. If you just like to do what you do and go home, then there is no need to move up for you here. This usually consists of taking strict written or verbal requirements and turning them into a bit of code. This person is usually in charge of testing too. You usually are under at least one person who guides you a lot. But if you aspire to do more, you will most likely want to become a developer.

The Developer

The developer has a lot more decision making power when it comes to both requirements and system architecture. In most scenarios, a discovery phase of a project is done and then all of that is in turn made into functional requirements. The developer can be called upon to both try to make requirements from the discovery documents or review functional requirements for refinement. The developer also has a bit more reign when it comes to speaking to clients and making bigger decisions in system architecture and implementation.

The Architect

The architect has the ultimate power when it comes to the system architecture. This is the person called upon to solve the really complex problems. Usually the most talented person that codes for the hardest problems, but overall probably writes the least amount of code on the project. This sometimes isn’t by choice. A lot of the time it is due to the fact that this person is usually in charge of peer code reviews and other administrative duties. Especially duties of discovery and helping find all of the functional requirements. The architect also weighs the risks of implementing new technologies into the system. This person usually has the last call on what technologies go into the system, and what is left out.

The Project Manager

The PM is the person usually in charge of documentation and collaboration. Documenting the current processes through the discovery phase and then working with whom ever they need to to make a functional requirements document out of it. The PM does a lot of system testing to make sure everything passes to spec. The keep a constant watch over the project and budget to make sure that the client stays happy and the project comes in on budget.

The Decision

Starting out as a coder, you usually climb up the latter to a PM or an Architect. If you are in an unfortunate situation then sometimes you have to do it all. Depending on the type of person you are and your desires as a professional, you will choose different paths out of the coder role. I myself am finding that I’m having a hard time with the PM duties because I like to stay more on the technical side of things. I’m not sure if that may change in the future, but for now my next move up is most likely looking to be an Architect.

Conclusion

There comes a point in time as a coder where you will need to make a decision on which way is up. This decision will be made not only for career advancement, but also for some extra padding in the salary department. When that time comes you may be asked to try some things out that you may or may not love. I suggest you give it a good shot because you never know, some things might grow on you.

I recently canceled my account for a VPS in lieu of shared hosting. I was dropping a bunch of websites and didn’t really need a VPS anymore. So I figured I hadn’t touched my website in a while so I thought I’d kick it back up a notch. Aside from a domain name change (major SEO foul, I know), I also decided on a software change for managing my website.

BlogEngine.NET

I was using BlogEngine.NET as my blog software. It actually worked really well, I had no real complaints. The only thing for me was that it wasn’t easily customized. By easy I mean pure and simple customizations. I was on a previous version of it because I hadn’t touched the site in a while, so I’m not sure if this has change or how much in later releases.

Orchard

I chose to go with the Orchard software for my new site. It is full featured and is very easily customized with modules and theme. It’s taken some getting use to, but everything I need to learn is pretty much in the Dashboard of Orchard. There are quite a few articles out there on getting started with Orchard, but a series I found particularly helpful was written by John Papa. You can find it here: http://johnpapa.net/orchardpart1

I’m thinking it will be a bit of an adventure still getting into this. The export and import of my blog worked out nicely. So from here on in, it’s Orchard or bust!

Update

Moved it again to Hexo, see this post for more details.