C#, VB.Net, XML and mass consumption of coffee.

Have you ever looked at a code that you wrote several years ago? I have to do this all the time, after all I am working on the same application. Not only do I do it to fix bugs, but I do it to optimize the production code. And at times I see my old code and think what was I thinking when I wrote this. You see, with every release our main product grows, new features, core changes, you name it. One can say that we are optimizing the software by adding things our clients ask for and this leads to optimization of code. Optimizing your code is extremely important, normally there are few ways in which a particular problem could be solved, but if you are serious about your work, you do want to pick the most efficient way of doing things. Many books have been written on the subject, simple Google search will produce lots of articles concerning code optimization. Today I am not going to talk about that, instead I will talk about optimizing a developer.

If you are like me – doing coding full time and at times after hours, you want to achieve something which falls beyond simple financial compensation for you work. I want to grow as a developer. I have read somewhere that it takes roughly 10000 hours to master a task – be it musical instrument, a sport or any other activity. I think similar thing is applied to programming. I have been thinking of a way to apply optimization to myself, after all if my code can be optimized, why can’t the writer of the code. Here are some principles that I have came up with. This works for me, might not work for everyone. Once again, just my own opinion. Read more…

It has been a while since I written anything here, I’d like to tell myself that I am just busy and not procrastinating, but that would not be true. I do find time to watch House, so there is no excuse. On the other side, I am very busy. At work we are rolling out a new project, well it is not completely new, but in it’s old form, the project was not used at all, had too many bugs and looked like garbage. Have to say that we are on the final phase of the project, will release a beta version soon.

This would be the first time we used an external GUI dll, and I am quite happy with results. DotNetBar is a great library, and I am positive that we will use it for all our user interfaces; after all, when you have more then one app and all of those have a different look to them, kind of makes you want to re-work it all. That’s what we are doing presently.

New version of Rosetta is coming out soon too, everyone worked hard, and it feels like we are all burned out right before holidays, at least we will have few days to relax and get into the holiday spirit before going back to work.