70 Things Every Computer Geek Should Know. The term ‘geek’, once used to label a circus freak, has morphed in meaning over the years. What was once an unusual profession transferred into a word indicating social awkwardness. As time has gone on, the word has yet again morphed to indicate a new type of individual: someone who is obsessive over one (or more) particular subjects, whether it be science, photography, electronics, computers, media, or any other field.
A geek is one who isn’t satisfied knowing only the surface facts, but instead has a visceral desire to learn everything possible about a particular subject. A techie geek is usually one who knows a little about everything, and is thus the person family and friends turn to whenever they have a question. Software Training Sucks: Why We Need to Roll it Back 1,000 Years. If you're trying to grow your startup you've come to the right place.
Get my 170-page ebook on how to grow a startup and join thousands of self-funded entrepreneurs by subscribing to my newsletter at right. This article is about training, but not the typical “pay $1500 to sit in a stuffy hotel conference room for five days while some guy who hasn’t written software since Elvis reads his PowerPoint slides to you in an effort to keep you awake” training. We’re going to talk about in-your-face, do-as-I-do, on-the-job, get-them-writing-production-code-four-weeks-out-of-school training. Scott On Writing.NET. ASP.NET 4.5 introduced a nifty feature for script and stylesheet bundling and minification, a technique that can drastically reduce the size of your script and stylesheet files and, more importantly, reduce the number of round-trips the browser must make to the server to fully render a web page.
Today I was working with a client who had been using bundling and minification with great success for sometime but after a recent site update his script bundle, while being rendered in the web page, was not returning the bundled, minified script content as expected, but rather was returning a 404 error (File Not Found).
I’m going to provide a more in-depth discussion on the issue at hand, but let me state the exact problem and solution in short – the problem was that the name of the script bundle – e.g., ~/bundles/MyBundle – did not match the bundle name referenced in the Scripts.Render statement – e.g., Scripts.Render(“~/bundles/MyBundleTypo”). We instead saw one sans the querystring, like so: Rockford Lhotka. In my last post my focus was on listing the numerous WinRT apps I use on a regular basis – many of which, if I couldn’t get them on Win8 would drive me to carry an iPad.
I’m personally not just a software developer, I’m a user of computing as well. One line, a sensation-maker, in my post was that I think Windows developers who aren’t using WinRT apps are doing their ultimate users a disservice. This doesn’t apply to web developers or other people who aren’t developing actual Windows applications, but it surely applies to people living today in the legacy WPF, SL, and Windows Forms technologies.
The thing is, I made no effort to describe why I believe that to be true, because the focus of that post was to list useful apps. So what did I mean by that comment? Here’s the thing. Some apps are obviously built by pure mobile developers, who have no comprehension of keyboard/mouse or productivity on anything but a tablet. In short, sucky apps come from three sources: Update: ScottGu's Blog. The Business of Beautiful Code « Digital Interaction. A little while back I had a technology director tell me it doesn’t matter how well code is written as long as it works without breaking and gets the job done on time.
Why sweat it using complicated techniques that not everyone understands when there are more simple ways to do the work. After all, things can look the same on the surface regardless of it being well engineered or put together with duct tape and glue. This guy liked the intellectually lazy, brute force approach. Don’t think. Just start coding now and get it done. Writing software is a very creative discipline that requires a lot of abstract thinking about organization and performance.
Writing beautiful code is not just some nerdy game programmers engage in to see who can sit atop nerd mountain with their 4x scepter of insight. Web sites and applications have a lot in common with cars; they both have a purpose and a personality. A car is designed around the driver, but for many it’s what’s under the hood that counts. SourceForge.net: Find, Create, and Publish Open Source software for free.
Software Book Gems.