The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
Finally Talked Kathleen Dollard into Doing the Podcast
It took more than I expected to get Kathleen to join me on the podcast. But after begging, pleading, and some honest compliments she gave in. I think it was well worth the wait!
If you’re a fan of Kathleen like I am, I think you’ll enjoy her story of how her career unfolded. It all started with a cast-off NASA computer when she was growing up in Huntsville, AL. And I don’t’ think she’s ever stopped since.
The Hello World Podcast is where I get to talk with some of your favorite authors, developers and speakers about how they got started in software development.
Single Page Applications? Bah Humbug!
I know that the title of this post may be a bit of link bait, sorry about that. But having been in this business quite a while now, I am noticing a trend. A trend that worries me.
The Single Page Application (or SPA) moniker is one I’ve always disliked (as you’d know if you follow me on Twitter). But it’s not the technology I have a problem with, it’s the moniker and the implications of the moniker.
I started doing web development in the ‘90s on ASP (no, not ASP.NET). This was a treasure trove of open database connections, imported headers, and clunky HTML. I never thought we’d get to where the web was a mature platform to develop upon. In the past few years, technologies like Knockout, AngularJS, BackboneJS and the like have all contributed to a richer client-side experience. No longer were we dependent on post-backs or page requests to get the job done. Things are good. They are really good.
New Course: Front-end Web Dev Quick Start
It’s that time again. I’ve recently released a new course on Pluralsight. This time I tackle Web Development for complete beginners.
If you are a developer who wants to move from either back-end development or from desktop development to client-side web development, this course may be for you. The concept around the course is to get you up to speed with the very basics of web development in a short amount of time. In fact, in just over three hours, you should be able to get a basic understanding of web development.
After viewing my course, there are other courses that will take you through deeper knowledge of modern web development, but the basics is where you should probably start. In the course we cover the bare bones that you need including:
The Gear from the First 80 Days on the Road
As many of you know, me and my new wife are having the trip of our life. We’re in Switzerland at the moment and having a great time. We are certainly learning as we go what is important and what is not. I thought it might be a fun chance to talk about the gear I’ve used so far and discuss what worked and what didn’t.
As we travel, I am still working. I am recording Pluralsight courses, working with clients, doing the Hello World Podcast, as well as planning for some in-person training during the trip. This means I not only need gear to enjoy the trip but to work as well.
I think it’s important to see where we started and where we ended up. If you don’t know, this trip is a year-long trip across the globe. It’s seven or so months in Europe and five months in Asia. We don’t have a house to go back to so we’re carrying most of what we own (with a small storage place back in Atlanta). To complicate matters, we got married four days before the trip so it’s been pretty whirlwind.
Atlanta Code Camp 2014!
Even though I can’t be there this year, I’m excited to help out in holding this year’s Atlanta Code Camp. On October 11th, 2014, the Atlanta Code Camp will be held at the Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia.
Last year, we had a great time bringing you some of the best speakers in the southeast together to hold over forty different sessions across eight different tracks. It’s time to register for this year’s event.
If you want to attend, you can now register for the event here:
Web API in Aberdeen Scotland
For my last stop of my UK user group tour, I stopped in the town of Aberdeen. This is as far north as I’ve ever been. It’s at 57 degrees north latitude. That’s the same as Juneau Alaska! Luckily it’s summer time.
The group here in Aberdeen was a great group. I spoke about Web API 2 and I got some of the difficult questions about writing APIs. I want to thank Gary for helping get this handled.
Here are the promised resources from the talk:
Angular.js Talk in Glasgow Scotland
It’s been a busy week. Today I got to spend the day in Glasgow and see the city a bit. In the evening I got to talk to a great group of developers about Angular.js. They were mostly open to the ideas about building interactive pages with Angular.js.
I haven’t done this talk in a while so I had a couple of hiccups. But with the crowd’s help we got through the demo. I fixed a couple of snags that didn’t work during the talk and you’ll find the full demo below:
Here are the promised resources from the talk:
Node.js in Edinburgh Scotland
I’m now on the Scotland swing of my Wilder World Tour. Had a chance to stop by Edinburgh. What a lovely city, at least as much as I’ve seen so far.
For this stop, we talked about Node.js. Fun to see a Microsoft office outside the U.S. The organizers were great in helping fill up the room. Great questions from the attendees too.
Here are the promised resources from the talk:
Can't We Just Get Along: The Spurious NoSQL Battle
The first blog post I ever wrote was a short one on databases. In fact for those of you who haven’t been following me for more than ten years, my old domain was “ADOGuy.com”. I wrote about ADO and ADO.NET pretty exclusively for years.
These days I’m more known for web and XAML than data but it’s something that touches most developers so I continue to watch the trends. Of course the NoSQL v. Relational Database is the current fight in that space (taking over from the decade long ORM or no ORM skirmish). These fights seem awfully silly in the big picture because the answer is usually “it depends” or even “it’s both…” Let me see if I can convince you that the argument in itself is wrong.
Let’s start by explaining what I mean by NoSQL and Relational, just to be clear. Relational databases (e.g. SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and MySQL) store their data as two-dimensional arrays (e.g. Tables). Each of these tables support a way to relate to other tables. NoSQL databases (e.g. MongoDB, CouchDB, RavenDB, etc.) are really document stores. They tend to store their data as hierarchies. It is important to note that not all NoSQL data stores are document databases or use hierarchies, but most of them seem to. Why does this storage method matter?
Next Stop: Nottingham England for Node.js
The last stop of the week was in Nottingham. I had a chat with the Sheriff about some stolen hoodies. At least that’s what I thought he said – his accent was quite thick ; )
The team at dotNetNotts was great. We had a packed house of over sixty attendees. I am sure the pizza and beer helped, but some even stood for the talk. Resilient group!
We talked about “Node.js for .NET Developers” this time. I tried to stay away from the NoSQL v. Relational database story, but hopefully I was able to explain what Node.js is and how you could apply the lessons there to ASP.NET MVC/Web API. Lively group and some really tough questions. As usual for this great country, we ended the night in a lovely little pub that was likely older than my country.