An Interesting List of Development Stuff (August 2014)
In my continual effort to catch up on this seemingly endless back-log of blog posts, this monthly installment of the Interesting List of Development Stuff is quite a bit late. This month covers a few different topics primarily focusing with a few database-oriented topics as well as the usual sprinkling of personal / professional related articles.
3 Highly Effective Habits of Remote Developers
“Work from Home” and “100% Remote” are often found in the titles of job descriptions that many software developers dream about, but it isn’t easy. You might think that waking up and spending hours coding sans pants might be as easy as it sounds, but it’s difficult to do well. This article by Walter Chen discusses a few key changes that you might consider making if you are going to be working remotely and you want to do it effectively!
The Future is Now : Hyperlapse is Here!
Are you a film-maker? Do you have tons of unnecessary footage that might be cool if usefully compiled into a shorter compilation? Do you like practical Computer Science related research? Well, if you answers “Yes” or “No” to any of the previous questions, then I would recommend checking out this recent article on Microsoft Research’s Hyperlapse algorithm and watching it in action.
Document Databases Meet Azure
If document databases like NoSQL are your thing and you are big into the cloud, you might enjoy the announcement of Microsoft’s DocumentDB. A fully-managed, scalable, NoSQL document database service.
Don’t Call Yourself a Programmer
In this much needed article by Patrick McKenzie, he discusses the importance of what you call yourself in your career and how it might affect you in the long run. “Programmer”, “Coder”, “Software Developer” are generally all clumped together as the same thing, but Patrick demonstrates that what you call yourself can matter. This is just one of the many insights this article provides and I encourage any one that writes code to read.
What ORMs Have Taught Me : Just Learn SQL.
This article by Geoff Wozniak discusses his thoughts on the recent rise in ORM (Object Relational Mapper) usage in the past few years and some of the detriments that come along with it. While writing pure SQL may go against these trends, he argues that it is still better than letting an ORM do all of the work (incorrectly) for you.
Compute Magazine and Appreciating the Internet
This Ars Technica piece turns back the clock to 1985 and what you might have to do to find a code snippet. Before the days of Stack Overflow, GitHub and all of the other sites with code that we know and love, there was paper. That’s right, if you wanted to know how to code “Balloon Crazy” for the Atari, you needed to swing by your local new-stand and pick up a copy of Compute Magazine, which ever so kindly included the game in BASIC, which was a heck of a lot better than when it included the machine code implementations.
Appreciate the internet.