Lucky day!

It’s like finding folding money in the pocket of the pants you just took out of the dryer. Like when you put on your coat from last winter and find those keys you’ve been looking for forever. It’s your lucky day. That’s how I felt last night when I found this little gem. A text editor? Oh brother … this is the one I’ve been looking for. I live in SQL and VB all day, but the one constant in every system I use is a good text editor. I love having a tabbed interface I can drop all sorts of notes , code snips, whatever into. this one is cool because it’s smart. When I click on tim.cost it starts by selecting just part of the string and not the whole damn thing. I wish notepad did this. It does syntax highlighting and it has collapsible ranges (just like my beloved visual studio). The icons are smooth and professional looking. The default font is easy to look at and the line highlighting is subtle, but helpful. Very nice. The tabs are easy to open, close, bulk close, bulk save, bulk search and replace. This thing just rocks. I think the coolest part is that it can run from a USB stick. I’ve used other text editors that do some of these things, but this one blows the others away. I’ve been thinking of putting together a toolbox of stuff like this that I could have handy at all times. This is just the thing to get that project started. NotePad++

HTML wind sprints …

In my last post I admitted that I suck at web stuff. Wow … that little revelation really got me thinking. Once upon a time I was OK at web stuff. In the dark days before .net I was able to cobble together a basic web page, even a little classic asp. But now I’d be lost even trying to do that stuff. So yesterday I set out for nerdbooks and picked up a copy of “Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML“. It’s my third head first book. I’m also reading Head first Java and Head First Object Oriented Analysis and Design. Anyway … it’s one hell of a book. I’m tearing through it at a startling rate and feel like I’m developing a stronger grasp of HTML than ever before. Not only that, but I’m finally starting to grok CSS. Wow. At the risk of seaming like a total noobie, it’s about the coolest stuff ever.

As I was sort of stalling in my study of .net I thought it might be good for me to change gears a little bit. I hope switching to HTML for a while will sort of prime the pump and put me back on track with my pursuit of c#. At any rate … it can’t hurt. I’ve been planning on putting a Fort Worth web dev and design user group on my calendar, maybe I should make room for the Dallas ASP.net group as well.

p.s. I’m still working through the Boag podcasts. I’ve listened to all of the archives at .Net Magazine , now I’m working through the ones at Boagworld.com. Really great stuff.

Branching Out.

I’ve been listening to the Britishy web dev wisdom of Paul Boag all day. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a web guy. I can surf all day, but aside from this wyswyg blog writing I suck at web stuff. Today anyway. And so I listen to those who know. That brings me back round to BoagWorld. He’s got a really cool blog, but it’s his podcast that really rocks. I’ve tried other techy podcasts but there is usually this sort of geeky superiority in them that kind of turns me off. Boag is easy to listen to. I listened to about 5 hours of his podcast today (while I pound out sql like a good code monkey). So far everything he’s said applies equally to the non-web stuff as to the css/html’ish stuff.

My favorite bits so far …

1. He’s passionate about David Allen’s “Getting Things Done.”

2. He argues for white space in web design. I’ve always sort of instinctively felt that white space was important. He does a good job of summing up the best argument for it.

3. He laughs like a little girl at his own jokes. (this is also the number one reason I would never do a podcast … I’m a total goob when I start giggling like that.) www.boagworld.com

Update: 05/30/07 I’ve listened to way more than 5 hours of the BoagWorld podcast now. I think it’s fantastic! You should definately check it out.

High quality death march

A friend sent this link to a great blog “Andres’ thoughts”… right there in the first paragraph it just jumps right off the page … “The team consists of really smart developers, but over time, stress and too little focus on quality have seriously hurt their code base. Today, they are struggling to deliver at all.” www.taylor.se/blog/

I’ve seen this at so many jobs that it starts to feel like the struggle is the only constant. Almost everyone can see the problems, but it’s hard to break the cycle.

For another view of the same problems check out “the Angry Coder”. They break out 5 common problems to look for in small (and not so small) companies. My personal favorite is #3 “Small companies tend to solve problems from the hip … They just dive in, develop something, and modify/rewrite it as required to make it fit various clients’ needs.” www.angrycoder.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=185

Man … I’m so sick of hearing “Oh it’s no big deal, we’ll just make a copy of X and add in a little Y …”. It never works that way! You always end up going the long way around before you realize that your working on a totally different set of problems. I’m all for reusing stuff, but not before you think it through.

Update: The caption on the Quality poster reads “The race for Quality has no finish line – so techinally it’s more of a death march”. Aint that the damned truth! This and other bitter little nuggets can be found at the brilliant www.despair.com