Lines, nerds and bears…oh, my

Darin included in Development Processes Personal

2009-08-15 898 words 5 minutes

Contents

Ok. . .that’s not really an original line, but stick with me. Hopefully it will make sense as I move through this.

Here’s the attempt at “Lines”

Remember last week I was whining about all the WordPress upgrades I had to do the previous week? There was yet another one this week (2.8.4) and it was an interesting one. If this is going to keep up, I’m going to have to spend some time automating my upgrades to save more time. Here to hoping that this week is WordPress upgrade free.

On to the “nerds”

Big Nerds, that is.

I attended the Big Nerd Ranch iPhone Bootcamp earlier this year. (As a side note, if you want quality training on anything Mac, go with these guys. Plus, if you take the class in Atlanta, you’ll thank me for it. It’s a great location and the food is freaking amazing.) Joe Conway was my instructor. Recently, Joe posted on the BNR blog about dot-notation syntax. That post has set off a a firestorm of posts across the web. His boss/co-worker Aaron Hillegass, shocked by the reaction to Joe’s post, has started a series of “Real iPhone Crap.” Here are links to the latest posts:

It’s going to be interesting to see how all this plays out. I will admit, BNR was my first exposure to Mac/iPhone training, so I am a bit biased. No matter what anyone says, I’m grateful to the BNR crew for helping me move ahead in my iPhone development.

And now on to the bears. . .Smart Bear Software

I was listening to the new episode of techZING! entitled Smarter Than Your Average Bear. This episode was an interview with Jason Cohen of Smart Bear Software fame about bootstrapping your business. Being a small business owner myself, I always enjoy hearing how other people solved their business problems. If you own your own business, no matter what kind of business it is, you owe it to yourself (and your family and your employees) to listen to and apply the lessons that Jason shares throughout the podcast.

One of the items that Jason brought up was in marketing your business. In his case, he really did write the book on code reviews.

Best Kept Secrets of Code Review

Until I listened to the podcast, I forgot that I already had a copy of the book. At the time I ordered the book, I was looking at implementing a formal code review process with a client, so when I saw the book and that it was free, I got a copy and read it. Once I got to the end of the book, Jason (rightfully so) gave a small pitch for the Smart Bear solutions. Did I think that the pitch was too much? Absolutely not. In fact, for as much information as Jason had put into the book, I would have been totally ok with a harder pitch.

What’s the lesson I’ve learned? I’ve got to “write the book” in order to stand out in my chosen field. Whether I literally write the book doesn’t really matter to me. However, I really have to start promoting my solutions and services and I can’t think of a better way that the way that Smart Bear has done it. It fits my personality a lot better.

One of the things I’m really looking forward to is on 8/25, Techsmith is releasing Camtasia for the Mac. I don’t know how many features this version will have out of the gate, but I’m not expecting to see the same feature set as is on the Windows version. I just don’t think that is realistic for version 1. With that said, they’ll definitely be getting my $99 on 8/25 and I’m looking forward to putting it through it’s paces as quickly as possible. I’ve got ScreenFlow for the Mac, but I’m really comfortable with Camtasia on Windows. If Techsmith even gets it close, I will be saying sayanora to ScreenFlow for my Mac captures.

One of the best articles that I read this week was 13 scalability best practices. As someone who spends the majority of my time trying to architect the most scalable solutions for his clients that don’t have unlimited budgets, this list really helped put in order everything that I’ve been doing as second nature for so long. When I read it, it was one of those duh moments and I asked myself “why didn’t I write this myself?”

For all you mobile developers or anyone interested in mobile development that are anywhere near the Charlotte area, there is going to be a MobileBarCamp in Charlotte in October. It is still in the early planning stages and I should have more information next week and I’ll post it as soon as I do.

Finally, I’m heading up to Raleigh in a couple of weeks for the Research Triangle Software Symposium put on by NFJS. This is the first NFJS conference that I’ve been to so I’m really looking forward to it.

The other thing I’m looking forward to is seeing my sister and her family. They live about 20 minutes from the conference. We don’t get to see each other nearly enough. I’ve gotta work on that. Sometimes you just have to step away from the code.