10 Things To Improve Your Development Career

Cruising the Web late last night, I ran across "10
things you can do to advance your career as a developer", summarized below:

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2010 Predictions, 2009 Predictions Revisited

Here we go again—another year, another set of predictions revisited and offered up
for the next 12 months. And maybe, if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll take that
shot I thought about last year and try predicting for the decade.

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A New Kind of Service

Why study new and different programming languages? To change your programming mindset.
Not sure what I mean by that? Check this out.

Ever done one of these?

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Thoughts from the (Java)Edge 2009

These are the things I think as I sit here in my resort hotel on the edge of the Dead
Sea in Israel after the JavaEdge
2009 conference on Thursday:

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Book Review: Debug It! (Paul Butcher, Pragmatic Bookshelf)

Paul asked me to review this, his first book, and my comment to him was that he had
a pretty high bar to match; being of the same "series" as Release It!,
Mike Nygard's take on building software ready for production (and, in my repeatedly
stated opinion, the most important-to-read book of the decade), Debug It! had
some pretty impressive shoes to fill. Paul's comment was pretty predictable: "Thanks
for keeping the pressure to a minimum."

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Closures are back again!

Those of you who've seen me speak on Java 7 at various conferences have heard me lament
(in a small way) the fact that Sun decided last year (Dec 2008) to forgo the idea
of including closures in the Java language. Imagine my surprise, then, to check my
Twitter feed and discover that, to everyone's surprise, closures are
back in as a consideration for the Java7 release.

Several thoughts come to mind:

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Haacked, but not content; agile still treats the disease

Phil Haack wrote a
thoughtful, insightful and absolutely correct response to my
earlier blog post. But he's still missing the point.

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"Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease"

The above quote was tossed off by Billy Hollis at the patterns&practices Summit
this week in Redmond. I passed the quote out to the Twitter masses, along with my
+1, and predictably, the comments started coming in shortly thereafter. Rather than
limit the thoughts to the 120 or so characters that Twitter limits us to, I thought
this subject deserved some greater expansion.

But before I do, let me try (badly) to paraphrase the lightning talk that Billy gave
here, which sets context for the discussion:

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Are you a language wonk? Do you want to be?

Recently I've had the pleasure to make the acquaintance of Walter
Bright, one of the heavyweights of compiler construction, and the creator of the
D language (among other things), and he's been great in giving me some hand-holding
on some compiler-related topics and ideas.

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More on journalistic integrity: Sys-Con, Ulitzer, theft and libel

Recently, an email crossed my Inbox from a friend who was concerned about some questionable
practices involving my content (as well as a few others'); apparently, I have been
listed as an "author" for SysCon, I have a "domain" with them,
and that I've been writing for them since 10 January, 2003, including two articles,
"Effective Enterprise Java" and "Java/.NET Interoperability".

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Thoughts on the Chrome OS announcement

Google made the announcement on
Tuesday: Chrome OS, a "open source, lightweight operating system that will initially
be targeted at netbooks."

Huh?

I'm sorry, but from a number of perspectives, this move makes no sense to me.

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Review: "Programming Clojure", by Stu Halloway

(Disclaimer: In the spirit of full disclosure, Stu is a friend,
fellow NFJS speaker, and former co-worker of mine from DevelopMentor.)

I present this review to you in two parts.

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Interview with Scott Bellware and Scott Hanselman on the Death of the Professional Speaker

Well, OK, the title is trolling ever so slightly, but there is an interesting trend
at work, and I'm genuinely concerned about its ultimate expression if the trend continues
to its logical conclusion. Have
a look and tell me if you agree or disagree.

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The "controversy" continues

Apparently the Rails community isn't the only one pursuing that ephemeral goal of
"edginess"—another blatantly sexist presentation came off without a hitch,
this time at a Flash conference, and if anything, it was worse than the Rails/CouchDB
presentation. I excerpt a few choice tidbits from
an eyewitness here, but be warned—if you're not comfortable with language, skip
the next block paragraph.

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A eulogy: DevelopMentor, RIP

Update: See below, but I wanted to include the text Mike Abercrombie
(DM's owner) posted as a comment to this post, in the body of the blog post itself. "Ted
- All of us at DevelopMentor greatly appreciate your admiration. We're also grateful
for your contributions to DevelopMentor when you were part of our staff. However,
all of us that work here, especially our technical staff that write and delivery our
courses today, would appreciate it if you would check your sources before writing
our eulogy.

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