I just listened to a Hanselminutes podcast about becoming a better developer in 6 months and wanted to update my goals for becoming a better developer. Earlier this year I set a goal to read 30 books. I obviously had no idea what my schedule would be like in the first 7 months of the year. We’ve had birthdays and weddings to attend (and assist in planning and executing), we’ve had illnesses (who would have thought my immune system could be overrun by the germs of my two year olds?), and we’ve also been busy just keeping up with the house and sleeping a few hours a night.

So for my 30 books this year, yeah right. I will realistically read 10 this year. Something said in the Hanselminutes podcast I mentioned above was to not force yourself to read a book if it’s not going to bring you value. That made some sense. So without further ado, I list my goals from now until the end of the year for becoming a better developer:
1.   Reading other peoples’ code.

• I have moved into the maintenance team at work and this gives me the pleasure of spending lots of time each day reading other peoples’ code. I get to read a lot of working code and some really terrible code. Learning to see the difference is also helpful.

• I have started participating in LearnVisualStudio.Net Forums Contests. This leads to some interaction with at least one other developer and I get to read code, but I also get to explain my code in detail to someone else.  I’m finding out that the more communication you have with your remote partners, the more progress is realized.

2.   Learning Linux

• Because of a personal association, I ended up becoming a system administrator of a linux VPS over at SliceHost. This has helped me see a different environment. I have quickly learned to love the bash shell and even how some programs are designed for linux.

• This year I also started experimenting with Ubuntu Linux. I have loved just about every moment of using this operating system. It has been very easy to use and has also helped me to explore some other avenues of development and deployment.

3.   Vista gets a 2nd Chance

• Earlier this year I used Vista and hated the experience. I have many geek friends that love Vista and as much as why I can’t understand why they don’t have the same grievances I do, they can’t understand why I’m not impressed by what does work. Fortunately or unfortunately I am going to be forced to reinstall and use it a little at home in the near future if I am to get a head start on .Net 3.5.

4.   Choosing Books with Value

• My goals this year are really to understand unit testing better (and to write much better tests), learning Rails and some Linux, and learning WPF / WCF / WF for work. So my book choices for the rest of the year are going to follow that path. Not to say that I won’t finish Coder to Developer or the Pragmatic Programmer, but the rest of my book choices will be driven by the above goals.

What’s My Status?

I am actually learning how to write better unit tests by writing unit tests. So far, writing unit tests in RoR is making my C# unit tests better too. I’m still learning RoR, Linux, MySQL etc as time permits. I’ve been meaning to blog more and have a backlog of issues to cover such as iPhone Activiation, the LVS review, troubleshooting some errors when setting up a RoR environment, etc. I will be making time for them sooner rather than later.

Even before the iPhone was available, people were complaining about its lack of an API for developing apps to run directly on the platform.  With the “Web 2.0″ movement already in full swing, I think the iPhone is helping to push the envelope just a little further.

I’ve seen clever implementations of web based remote desktop technology, but each required some type of ActiveX control or Java Applet.  Now take a look at WebVNC.  From the web site:

WebVNC is a modification of the VNC server. Where before the HTTP server in VNC would just serve a Java applet, now it serves an AJAX application that downloads the screen as a set of JPEG images. The application then checks back with the server to see which ones have changed, and reloads them. Input is just another message to the server.

The window list is done with Windows-specific functions, enumerating top-level windows and returning a list of their titles and positions. When you click one the VNC server activates the window and the AJAX app limits its window size to just the one window. 

I am going to try this out next week and see how it works.

Here is some output today from the command line on Windows XP. I’m not going to add a lot of commentary here, but I thought this was a little ironic / funny.
U:\>net -help
The syntax of this command is:

NET [ ACCOUNTS | COMPUTER | CONFIG | CONTINUE | FILE | GROUP | HELP |
HELPMSG | LOCALGROUP | NAME | PAUSE | PRINT | SEND | SESSION |
SHARE | START | STATISTICS | STOP | TIME | USE | USER | VIEW ]

U:\>net send -help
Sending files is no longer supported.

More help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 3777.

U:\>net helpmsg 3777

Sending files is no longer supported.

Thank you. I love redundant messages.

Posting from the iPhone (as I am now) requires me to switch to the code view. I’m guessing that there is a lot of work to existing applications to modify the javascript to work with this browser. As far as typing out an entire post, although it’s not too bad it’s not something I would choose to do unless I was away from a machine for a while. My typing is getting decently fast in the landscape mode, so I think that this is a feasible option when I’m out and about.

I joined the other three quarters of a million people today and bought an iPhone. I actually bought two (you’re welcome honey!). My waiting experience was terrible (I’ll write about that in another post), but once they actually had phones in the store, the shopping experience was great.

This will probably increase the volume of my post count here, either telling you about all of the great features or complaining. Like the final verdict on the phone, only time will tell.