Continuous Education

VIDEO: Windows Azure on Cloud9 – Cloud9 IDE Blog
VIDEO: Skills Matter : In The Brain of Udi Dahan & John Stevenson
VIDEO: Gil Zilberfeld interviews Uncle Bob Martin
Jasmine-BDD: A Screencast On The Standalone Test Runner | ThoughtStream.new
VIDEO: ayende on ravendb problem
VIDEO: Session 02: Introduction to Compute
Northwind Starter Kit Review : Data Access and the essence of needless work
Ruby on Rails in Windows Azure – Part 2 – Creating Windows Azure SDK 1.4 based Application to Host Ruby on Rails Application in Cloud
Pragmatic Programming Techniques: NOSQL Patterns
HBase vs. Cassandra: NoSQL Battle!
VIDEO: Skills Matter : DDD eXchange 2010: Udi Dahan on Architectura
One Millionth Tower documentary elevates the art of HTML5 – Engadget
VIDEO: DataStax Cassandra Tutorials – Managing Objects & Data In Cassandra
Skills Matter : In The Brain of Udi Dahan: CQRS, race conditions
NOSQL – Introduction on Vimeo
The Coming War on General Purpose Computation
Pragmatic Programming Techniques: Choosing between SQL and Non-SQL
Pragmatic Programming Techniques: NoSQL GraphDB
Martin Fowler: Slideument
Understanding Microsoft’s big-picture plans for Hadoop and Project Isotope
Shan Carter on data storytelling
VIDEO: Hadoop in Action
Pragmatic Programming Techniques: Between Elasticity and Scalability
Cloud Expo 2012 East
VIDEO: "The Lost Session" at KAN Malmo – Introduction to RavenDB
A Java Developer’s Guide to PaaS
VIDEO: NDC 2011: Kill Your ORM
World Wide Webber – Graph Processing versus Graph Databases
VIDEO: Building loosely-coupled apps with Windows Azure Service Bus Topics and Queues
Procrastineering – Project blog for Johnny Chung Lee: Low-Cost Video Chat Robot
Going realtime with Socket.IO
WebSocket and Socket.IO
Asynchronous scalable web applications with real-time persistent long-running connections with SignalR
Scott Hanselman’s 2011 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows
patterns & practices: Project Silk
Martin Fowler: StranglerApplication
What’s in (and missing from) Microsoft’s latest batch of Azure cloud update
Introduction to Spring Data Neo4j
Raspberry Pi’s $35, 700MHz Linux computer enters manufacturing
Scenario-based Unit Tests for DDD with Event Sourcing – Journal – CQRS and
Pretotyping
I’m a phony. Are you?
How Trello is different
How to handle relations in RavenDB
Design Patterns for Distributed Non-Relational Databases

Blending tablet PC experience with the real world – new fronteers for the development

Happy Holydays!

Limited choice of good-enough features will take you a long way

I’ve finally got a perfect explanation why the iPhone users are much happier than the Android users and, over time, their devotion drastically grows.
According to this provocative research of Dan Gilbert (TED2004: Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?), the synthetic happiness can be cultivated. It’s becoming prominent when a person gets a limited choice and it’s becoming even more so over time.
I think the solid implementation of the good-enough features in the iPhone has an increasing effect of the synthetic happiness.

AppFabric Service Bus Queues and Topics presentation (for Boston Azure User Group)

Recently we’ve delivered a presentation to the Boston Azure User Group on how perfectly the cloud technologies are aligned for development for the Mobile Apps and clients. My coworkers from Blue Metal Architects delivered great content about integrating iOS (featured iPhone and iPad) and Windows Phone with the cloud. I’ve covered the use of the AppFabric Service Bus Queues and Topics – these technologies are perfect for communications for partially connected clients (like mobile ones).

Continuous Education

• MonoTouch – Create amazing iPhone and iPad apps with C# and .NET
• Reference Documentation for Timeline – SIMILE Widgets
• Five Absolutely Essential Utilities that make Windows better – Scott Hanselman
• Study Hacks »The Grandmaster in the Corner Office: What the Study of Chess Experts Teaches Us about Building a Remarkable Life
  
  Deliberate Practice:
  
1. It’s designed to improve performance. “The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice.”
2. It’s repeated a lot. “High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.”
3. Feedback on results is continuously available. “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.”
4. It’s highly demanding mentally. “Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it ‘deliberate,’ as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.”
5. It’s hard. “Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.”
6. It requires (good) goals. “The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome.”
• How Windows 8 KO’d the innovative Courier tablet | Microsoft – CNET News
• The inside story of how Microsoft killed its Courier tablet
• Yet Another Podcast #41–JQuery with Elijah Manor | Jesse Liberty
• How To: Add a custom build action to Visual Studio – MSBuild Team Blog
• Study Hacks » If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong:
  
• Hard work is deliberate practice. It’s not fun while you’re doing it, but you don’t have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into two sessions). It also provides you measurable progress in a skill, which generates a strong sense of contentment and motivation. Therefore, although hard work is hard, it’s not draining and it can fit nicely into a relaxed and enjoyable day.
• Hard to do work, by contrast, is draining. It has you running around all day in a state of false busyness that leaves you, like the average players from the Berlin study, feeling tired and stressed. It also, as we just learned, has very little to do with real accomplishment.

• The solution is as simple as it is startling: Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.

• Redis tutorial, April 2010 – by Simon Willison
• Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’ | W
• C# Compiler as a Service Update – Miguel de Icaza
• Scripting Asp.net MVC Controllers at Runtime | Fusonic Blog
• joaroyen/ReSharperExtensions – GitHub
• Alt.Net Podcast (Dead?)
• Timeglider jQuery Plugin/Widget
• Thinking about Product Data, Information Overload and Data Management
• Demos – JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit
• Java Message Service API
• semanticweb.com – The Voice of Semantic Web Business
• Infographics & Data Visualizations – Visual.ly
• Is Your Bachelors Degree Worth It? | Visual.ly
• Tech Talk Video: Udi Dahan | Brian Hartsock’s Blog
• Explaining Semantic Technologies to the Enterprise – semanticweb.com
• Why is it so Hard to "Get" Semantics Inside the Enterprise? | Javalobby
• An Open Data Ecosystem – semanticweb.com
• Scaling the Open Data Ecosystem | Open Knowledge Foundation Blog
• Trueg’s Blog – Nepomuk Fundraiser
• Plasma/Active/Contour – KDE Community Wiki
• Aperture – Semantic Desktop
• The Open Graph Protocol Design Decisions
• Apache Velocity – Velocity User Guide
• Solr tutorial
• Ontology (information science) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• BorisMoore/jsrender – GitHub
• Recursivity – The Big Picture: True Machine Intelligence & Predictive Power
• ZeroMQ an introduction
• VIDEO: London .NET User Group : Command Query Responsibility Segregation
• Programming in Apache Qpid
• The Javascript Show
• PolyglotPersistence
• DovetailConnect Blog | Dovetail Software
• Protocol Buffers – Google Code
• Developer Guide – Protocol Buffers – Google Code
• AutoMapper/AutoMapper – GitHub
• Code, code and more code.: protobuf-net v2, beta
• protobuf-net – Fast, portable, binary serialization for .NET – Google Proje
• Yaml Library for .NET
• YAML for .NET, Visual Studio and Powershell
• Goodbye XML… Hello YAML (part 1) « Brian Genisio’s House of Bilz
• Goodbye XML… Hello YAML (part 2)
• How I learned to stop worrying and write my own ORM
• Tales from a Trading Desk – Node.JS and JavaScript Reading
• A Full Javascript Architecture, Part One – NodeJS – Zenika
• Realtime Performance Visualizations using Node.js – How To Node – NodeJS
• Study Finds That Memory Works Differently in the Age of Google
• Not so anonymous — Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
• Documentation Resources for ASP.NET MVC 3

Algorithms are terraforming Earth and our environment

Just recently watched Kevin Slavin [TED talk] on “How algorithms shape our world”. This made me realize why I’m intuitively trying to stay away from the open trading.

How can you continue to call yourself an investor and go against the algorithms? Your money can disappear in an instant like the 9% of the market Kevin was referring to. The market works like a lotto or a Russian roulette and very similar to the Wild Wild West – who pulls the gun first and pulls the trigger faster – wins.

Continuous Education

• SignalIR Documentation
• Cloudera
• WTF is a SuperColumn? An Intro to the Cassandra Data Model — Arin Sarkissia
• Sharding vs. Having multiple databases
• KnockoutJs: Introduction
• Ward Cunningham on Agile: 10 Years After
• Software Engineering Radio – the podcast for professional software develope
• How to do test reviews – a session at Øredev 2010
• Skills Matter : In The Brain of Greg Young: Simple is better
• User Interface Design Tutorial | Ryan Singer | PeepCode Screencast
• Good JavaScript Habits for C# Developers | MIX11 | Channel 9
• Copilot: a whole new product
• Aral Balkan | The Future is Native | Fronteers 2011 on Vimeo
• Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, behind-the-scenes, 5k resolution, 48 fps, 3D
• THOUGHTS ON HOW KANBAN DIFFERS FROM SCRUM
• Synaptics shows conceptual trackpad interface with Windows 8, better make i
• Simple Hickey | 8th Light
• How Running A Business Changes The Way You Think
• A Field Guide to Developers
• Finding Great Developers – Joel on Software
• CommonJS Promises/A
• Deferred Object – jQuery API
• InfoQ: Better Best Practices
• Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Softw
• Why if you have implemented or in the process of implementing Scrum and are considering adding Kanban, you will want to evaluate that decision carefully
• Microsoft “Roslyn” CTP
• Hammock Driven Development
• InfoQ: Simple Made Easy
• New England Code Camp #16 – Eventbrite
• What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know (Hebrew) – Videos – Osherove
• FlaccidScrum
• Switched On: As Siri gets serious – Engadget
• Martin Fowler: Mocks Aren’t Stubs
• Dummy objects are passed around but never actually used. Usually they are just used to fill parameter lists.
• Fake objects actually have working implementations, but usually take some shortcut which makes them not suitable for production (an in memory database is a good example).
• Stubs provide canned answers to calls made during the test, usually not responding at all to anything outside what’s programmed in for the test. Stubs may also record information about calls, such as an email gateway stub that remembers the messages it ‘sent’, or maybe only how many messages it ‘sent’.
• Mocks are what we are talking about here: objects pre-programmed with expectations which form a specification of the calls they are expected to receive.

Hello from the mobile-me

Today, with our super busy schedules, we’re badgered into producing (anything and everything). This is how our employees make sure to get as much as possible ROI (return on investment) out of you.

I’ve always felt that there was not enough time to consume and to learn in general. This was alway bugging me because I felt that my value was declining with each and every passing day and I was afraid that something new in the world will be born without me learning abou it.

I hope that this situation is going to improve going forward. Recently I got myself an iPad. This allows me to get more content consumption on the road and on a couch.

With this post I’m, in fact, testing a WordPress application for iPad.

If it works as expected, will try to start posting on my blog the links to noteworthy content and, as usual, you are welcome to comment.

NWT – .Net Web Toolkit

Now, after waiting for quite some time, we finally can implement the real solution for .Net <-> javascript conversion and bridge the impedance gap in the projects that heavily rely on the powerful rich web UI.

Currently we have solutions like Script# and CofeeScript and others. The pros in cons of these systems have been discussed countless times (ex: Hanselminutes -  JavaScript is Assembly Language for the Web: Semantic Markup is Dead! Clean vs. Machine-coded HTML).

With the recently released project Roslyn (or alternatively Mono Compiler Services) it is possible to have a clean solution to the problem:  I write my data and data model in a language and an environment that allow solid validation and refactoring.

I’m ironing out some kinks in my implementation and, as soon as it’ll be in a stable state, I’m going to release a NWT (NeWT) project that will provide a similar to GWT (Google Web Toolkit) functionality.

Architect Factory – Agile Design: Best Practices

Thanks for everyone attending the Architect Factory last week, especially everyone that attended my presentation. Great participation and great questions – Thanks.

As promised – below are the slides from the talk:

P.S. I’m still trying to figure out what happened to the video recording of the session. Will update the post as soon as the issue will get resolved.