Wednesday, August 22, 2007

On Reading Tech Books and ORM's

Man reading tech books is hard, well to some extent anyway, there are moments you just can't wait to get through a chapter. But there are moments where the chapter does not seem to come to an end. And reading on just makes you sleepy.

I have been reading Agile Principles Patterns and Practices in C# and any free time I got I had my face in that book. And when I got to chapter 14, where I started reading about UML, I just lost my fire. Anyway I dicided to skip that section, i guess I will come back to I sometime later.
I have nothing against the book though and Iwould recommend it to anyone trying to get thier hands around Agile Development.

I was also poking my head around some ORM packages. I had a look at NHibernate and Subsonic. But in the end I decided to go with the Data Access Guidance Package found in the Web Services Factory. NHibernate is great but if found the learning curve to be a bit steep. But i kepp looking at at it, I don't know I will ever really use it when linq comes round. The only thing I didn't like about subsonic was that I would have had to write extra code to map my data access layer to my domain model.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Who would have thought

I could never have imagined this the man who inspired me to start actively developing myself to be a better developer and also to start this blog was the first person to comment on my very first blog post. Wow thanks Justice.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Continuous Learning

I had always considered myself a good developer, that is until I started looking at what other developers were doing. And I realised just how little I knew about the world of Software Development.

Anyway to cut a long story short, I came across an article by Justice Grey on what he was going to do to be come a better developer in six months. Justice also tagged a couple of guys so that they too would state what they were going to do in six months to become better developers.

Since niether Justice and his pals tagged me (since none know me) I tagged myself. And hence this blog was born. I am going to set goals for myself every six months, with regular reviews of my progress every two weeks.

so here is a list of my goals for the following six months
  • Get my MCPD certification. I am not going to download a couple transcender and memorise them. I am actualy going to go through the selfpaced trainning kits.
  • Read two books on software development every month.
  • Blog about my learning expriences

I am going to be putting more flesh to these objectives as time goes on.