16 1 / 2012
"Ruby is dead simple. It’s why I do it professionally - I don’t want to think."
15 1 / 2012
IBM SAGE computer system developed for the US Air Force in 50s/60s to defender against Soviet Bombers. Unfortunately it was completed *after* bombers were replaced by missiles, making it essentially useless for it’s main purpose.
14 1 / 2012
Tabbed browsing has got to be the worst productivity killer ever invented - I seem to end up with this every day…
14 1 / 2012
.NET vs. Java - Scott Hanselman shared this during our CodeMash session - hilarious if you are familiar with the .NET/Java wars!
14 1 / 2012
Starstruck at CodeMash
I have a (un)healthy fascination with ‘celebrities’ in my industry - bloggers, software developers, authors, and any other such people of notable name or fame. My time at CodeMash had me thrown head fist in many expected and unexpected encounters with my programming heroes. In chronological(ish) order:
Keith Elder, Code Mash emcee and host of Deep Fried Bytes
Host of one of my favorite .NET podcasts, Deep Fried Bytes
Jeff Casimir, founder of Jumpstart Labs and founder of Hungry Academy
The announcement of Hungry Academy (a sort of paid internship/training with career opportunities at LivingSocial) caused quite a stir on Hacker News due to it’s ‘controversial’ requirements as well as few discussions in the office. Walk in on my first half day and *bam* the one and only creator of the whole thing is running the session.
Scott Hanselman, Microsoft
Man who needs no introduction - got a handshake and some small talk!
Jon Skeet, Google and the winner of StackOverflow
Aside from being an absolute genius, Jon Skeet is known to me (and probably every other programmer on the internet) as the guy who has such a high reputation score of StackOverflow that he could literally quit today and second place would not catch up for years. He’s also British.
Devin Rader - Twilio and Author
There is one book that I can hang my hat on as the tome that got me up to speed on ASP.NET to a capable level for my first job out of college - Professional ASP.NET 2.0 (Wrox). Of the handful of faces on the cover, one was Devin Rader. For the first vendor session I attended, a demo of the crazy-amazing-make-phone-calls-by-visiting-urls Twilio, I was shocked to see that he was in fact the man giving the presentation. Mind Blown.
Chris Woodruff, Deep Fried Bytes
Co-Host of the previous mentioned Deep Fried Bytes podcast. Ran a vendor session on an intro to OData (which is pretty cool).
Julie Lerman, Microsoft (Entity Framework)
Entity Framework was my first introduction to ORM’s, which also was one of the ‘ah ha!’ moment’s in my career that catapulted my forward. Seeing her on panels and about at the waterpark was stunning.
Carl Franklin, .NET Rocks!
.NET Rocks is another podcast that I follow fairly closely. I find out as the post-session panel discussions begin, that it is in fact being recorded as a live recording for a future podcast. I attended a live .NET Rocks! session - jaw dropping.
Bruce Eckel
While I didn’t personally see him, his Java book has always been a go-to reference for me.
There were plenty of other hugely influential people there, but this small exposure to my heroes of my small niche in the developer world was just staggering. Can’t wait to experience this again!
