Well it’s been 9 months since my last blog post and I’ve been gestating plenty of ideas for posts but other more important commitments have got in the way.
Namely, starting a new developer job in the summer, and then starting my personal coding project. At my new role, the team I’m in uses some rather interesting technologies for this public facing site in the entertainment industry.

As the purpose of this blog is for me to track & improve upon my programming skills, I will list what I’ve learnt in the past 9 months:

Professionally:

ASP.Net MVC
having spent my previous web developer experience working with ASP .Net web forms, MVC is a welcome change!

LINQ
I now use it much more effectively than before

NHibernate
which is the first ORM tool I’ve used

NServicebus
a bus for enabling messaging in a scalable manner, it has forced me to rethink how I code

TDD
initially I found it disorienting as I’d always seen tests as something to slap on at the end of coding, but now I truly can see how tests can force you to think through what exactly the code must do. Mocking up objects is now part of my TDD routine. Having the VS2008 plugin Resharper installed helps with this process.

Design Patterns
It’s also been great to work with design patterns such as Publish/Subscribe and Dependency Injection and to see them applied appropriately in the codebase I work with.

In my own time I’ve decided to learn the language and Framework that inspired ASP.Net MVC: Ruby On Rails

Working off the web version of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book got my jump started on the project.
Just for the heck of it, I thought I’d do this all on Ubuntu, and which I’m learning two new concepts, why not through in some more?

I found that gVim is useful for editing against huge sql scripts that VS2008 struggled to open or search within quickly enough for me (I’m impatient, which is one of the Programmer virtues)

Having learning the commands using youtube screencasts and cheatsheets I feel fairly comfortable with it as an editor with the Linux terminal, but I still would put myself in the beginner category, having seen the level of expertise others have achieved.

Probably the next learning curve that I’ve attempted to ascend is Git which I quite enjoy using. I’ve set up a github account to demo some of the tutorials that I’m trying out. Ruby Koans is an interesting one.

Well the adventure continues, I’ll hopefully post more frequently this year!