DDD South West

CodeCurve — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:09:41 GMT

Last Saturday (the 23rd of May), I had the privilege of attending DDD South West at Queen’s College in lovely Taunton.

The venue was beautiful, the presentations educational and fun, the company convivial and the food plentiful and delicious. I only wish I’d had more sleep and less beer the night before.

I had wondered if the presentations would contain a lot of material from DDD7, but as far as I could tell there was no overlap. I attended sessions on the DLR and dynamic languages, jQuery, refactoring, WCF and C# 4.0 and learned new stuff from all of them.

All in all it was a cracking day and a real credit to the organisers. I’m sure the event will be back next year, and you’ll need to get in quick to get a place!

Oren Eini is coming to Bristol

CodeCurve — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:42:03 GMT

If you're in the Bristol area and want to hear a real software development pro speak about writing software fit to publish, then get along to the DotNetDevNet .NET user group on Monday the 13th of October.

Oren Eini (a.k.a. Ayende Rahien) is coming to town!

So much to learn...

CodeCurve — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:33:25 GMT

I’ve been doing development professionally now for maybe 18 months and my experiences over the last 8 months in an agile shop have made me realise just how much there is to know in the development arena and, more importantly, how much I would like to know in order to be really creative in my job and produce truly excellent software.

In my previous job, I used a text editor to write Perl. There was no such thing as unit testing and copying and pasting was viewed as an aid to productivity rather than a horrific sin.

In my current job, I write C# and a lot of XAML. We use MbUnit for our unit testing and TeamCity for continuous integration. I work with guys who know a lot more than me both at the technical level (custom IL generation anyone?) and the architectural level (a la “I think we’ve reached the point where we need an IoC now”). I’ve produced some code that I’m proud of, and I’ve also spent some time wondering which way was up. Happily, we pair program most of the time, and for this I am eternally grateful.

I’ve become a regular attendee at the Bristol DotNetDevNet group, an avid consumer of RSS feeds from topical blogs and a blogger myself. Exposure to this whirl of information has given me a broad view of things I aim to get to grips with over the coming years, and so I thought I’d compile a shopping list to refer back to.

Also, my current company is very Alt.Net-ish, and there has been a lot of discussion on the UK mailing list for Alt.Net about barriers to entry to doing software development the Alt.Net way. I think this shopping list proves them right.

Nuts and bolts

I use C# on a daily basis and it seems to me that being intimately acquainted with the language(s) you’re using is common sense. I’ve read a book or two and at some point I intend to (skim) read ECMA 334 and ECMA 335.

I’d also like to become very familiar with the .Net framework. The C# 3.0 Cookbook is on my list and maybe I’ll take a Microsoft exam or three?

As well as knowing the language and the BCL, I’d like to be conversant with WPF, WCF, WF and Linq. I have books on all of them sitting on my bookshelf and I’m about half way through the gargantuan Apress tome on WPF.

So that will give me technical knowledge that will be very useful for my current job, but there is oh so much more after which I hanker.

Architecture

How does one go about writing good software? I’ve read a couple of design patterns books, but they were at an introductory level and so I have these in my sights:

- Head First Design Patterns

- The Gang of Four book

And with those firmly tucked under my belt, I’d like to explore DDD (Domain Driven Development). Evans’ book is good, apparently. I’ve heard about n-tier architecture too, but don’t have much idea what that entails. And I’d like to explore ORMs a bit more, especially NHibernate.

Other things that spring to mind here are refactoring, Patterns of Enterprise Architecture and Working with Legacy Code. I hope I get through all the reading before my eyes wear out. One day, I might even dream in code, write beautiful code or become a pragmatic programmer.

The Development Process

And then there’s TDD. This has a famous toolkit, and the things that spring to mind that I’d like to spend more time with are:

- MbUnit

- Mocking (e.g. Rhino Mocks)

- IoC (e.g. Windsor from the Monorail project)

- Msbuild

- TeamCity

I can hear terms like “programming to interfaces” and “loose coupling” here.

I’ve heard the term Git bandied about a bit too, and not just when I break the build. How is that different from more traditional source control systems like SVN?

Is it all about objects though?

C# blurs the boundaries slightly between OO and functional programming with lambda syntax and Action<T> and Func<T,...> and I’ve found this to be very powerful in my limited use of it so far. So I’d like to explore functional programming. F# anyone? ML? Haskell?

And what about concurrency?

Also, I’ve tussled with multi-threading over the last few months and I’ve wondered why it seems so fraught with danger. How do languages like Erlang get round this problem and produce high availability, massively parallel systems?

This is going to become more and more topical as multi-core processors become ubiquitous.

Can I lose the chaperone (and possibly get into trouble)?

And then there’s unmanaged code. C# and .NET are amazing, but at some point I’d like to get down and dirty with the guts of the machine just for the experience. I wrote a simple pixel shader for use with WPF recently and that was great fun.

Back to Uni?

And finally, I am aware that my colleagues have a Computer Science degree and I don’t (I’m a mathematician and an actuary). I have heard it said that these CS degree thingies are a bit overrated, but I’m not so sure that’s true. I don’t know about different sorting algorithms and I don’t understand O() notation. I sense that my colleagues have a familiarity with certain key concepts in computing (e.g. networking) that I don’t share, and I’d like to get there. Reading may do it (there’s a networking book on my pile) or maybe at some point I’ll get the opportunity to go back to school.

Every journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step

It’s a daunting list. I have the joy of learning though and I expect to have it indefinitely. Clearly it’s going to take me years to get to grips with the main stuff. And all the while Microsoft (and maybe even other organisations and individuals) will be bringing out new stuff to stimulate my grey matter.

I like the article “Learning Programming in 10 years”. It seems to me that it’s spot on.

Developer education

DDD South West

Oren Eini is coming to Bristol

So much to learn...