Know any good software dev blogs/websites?



  • Well, I am new to software development, just graduated from college and landed a job for a non-profit telecom company.  I like this website a lot, there are many here who can relate to this field with experience.  I am looking for similar websites which share real knowledge (kind of a street smarts thing as opposed to book smarts)... as it is really hard for me to find any that contain any useful information... its seems that 95% of IT relevant websites are ran by the not-so-proffesional, regurtite each other, or fail to present much of anything useful. Just for a random example, take a look at this blog:
    http://web-wire.blogspot.com/

    A blog with entries telling me not to copy+paste code-- well gee, wouldn't I have my own insights into ctrl+c, ctrl+v by now? This is followed by many re-hashed points such as "don't write code manually" and "watch out for old code"

     

    If anyone knows very useful websites, particulary where people with expertise post rational information as opposed to just any, please share. 





  • Some of my favorites:

    • http://www.paulgraham.com/
    • http://www.folklore.org/index.py
    • (old) http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/blog-rants
    • (new) http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/





  • @Vechni said:

    its seems that 95% of IT relevant websites are ran by the not-so-proffesional, regurtite each other, or fail to present much of anything useful.

    Probably more than that, and this is a direct reflection of the behaviour of the people doing the actual work.

    The number of people who are actually any good at it is a tiny fraction of those employed in such roles. 



  • I enjoy reading Raymond Chen's Blog. Although it's mainly about win32 programming, it's worth a read even if you don't use that particular technology.

     
    http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/default.aspx

     



  • Oh, something to keep in mind:

    If somebody is writing a successful website on a technical subject, chances are that it's not because they're spending all their time doing useful work in that field. The really good people will almost invariably love their work far too much to have time to write about it at great length.

    This should tell you something about the people who do write these sites.
     



  • Yes, which is why I have only found anything interesting through blog comments, and not posts. Almost exclusive to comments, still good insights though.  Heh, also goes to show why RoR gets so much hype and blogs exclusivley devoted to it. Oddly enough the best I can find are these RoR debates (comments describing what people really use, nice to read when all you have done in college and on job is Java)... not that i don't like java.



  • Wow, I'm in your situation just out of college and this is the same way I feel.  A couple years ago I would stumble onto a site like theserverside.com when searching for an answer to a question...then I'd read the blog posts on a regular basis because I often didn't know what they were talking about.  Of course, by far the most interesting reading was in the comments, when someone bothered to make an insightful one.

    codinghorror is bad like this too IMO.  I don't really want to trash anyone who puts a lot of effort into a site but I just sort of roll my eyes and go back to whatever I was doing before.  dzone posts a great interview or reference link now and again, but mostly it's just "Ruby: Great or Greatest Programming Language Ever?"

    I'd really like to find a good website or forum about C++ and systems programming, but there's nothing out there.  Not trendy enough, I guess.  And honestly I could read a forum like cprogramming.com or something, but I don't really want to spend a lot of time troubleshooting other people's problems and why would anyone else? 



  • @mountain said:

    I'd really like to find a good website or forum about C++ and systems programming, but there's nothing out there.  Not trendy enough, I guess.

    Mostly the problem I described. Anybody who knows that much about it probably has better things to do than write about it. 


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @asuffield said:

    If somebody is writing a successful website on a technical subject, chances are that it's not because they're spending all their time doing useful work in that field. The really good people will almost invariably love their work far too much to have time to write about it at great length.

    As someone who writes for a tech website, I can assure you this is not the case. While maintaining the content is very time consuming (2-4+ hours per article), there are 16-18 hours available in the day. Work (and related activites) consume 10-12+ hours, leaving plenty of time for extra-cirrucular activities. And then there's the weekend.

    Some of us (like me) are even fortunate enough to spend company time on our blog. Probably not so good for the company, though...



  • ...and landed a job for a non-profit telecom company.

     Quietly put down that pen, close the laptop and walk slowly toward the door. Don't make eye contact. Make your way out of the building, across the street.

     
    Now RUN!

     

     

     



  • @Alex Papadimoulis said:

    @asuffield said:

    If somebody is writing a successful website on a technical subject, chances are that it's not because they're spending all their time doing useful work in that field. The really good people will almost invariably love their work far too much to have time to write about it at great length.

    As someone who writes for a tech website, I can assure you this is not the case.

    Do I really have to point out the gaping hole here? 



  • @asuffield said:

    Oh, something to keep in mind:

    If somebody is writing a successful website on a technical subject, chances are that it's not because they're spending all their time doing useful work in that field. The really good people will almost invariably love their work far too much to have time to write about it at great length.

    This should tell you something about the people who do write these sites.
     

    I wonder how those really good people who almost invariably love their work find the time to write thousands of posts in the WTF forums. 



  • @asuffield (1200++ posts) said:

    Oh, something to keep in mind:

    If somebody is writing a successful website forum messages on a technical subject, chances are that it's not because they're spending all their time doing useful work in that field. The really good people will almost invariably love their work far too much to have time to write about it at great length.

    This should tell you something about the people who do write these sites.
     

     

    Hmm.. 



  • @ammoQ said:

    @asuffield said:

    Oh, something to keep in mind:

    If somebody is writing a successful website on a technical subject, chances are that it's not because they're spending all their time doing useful work in that field. The really good people will almost invariably love their work far too much to have time to write about it at great length.

    This should tell you something about the people who do write these sites.
     

    I wonder how those really good people who almost invariably love their work find the time to write thousands of posts in the WTF forums. 

    I think that if you have a point to make here, you're going to find some factual errors behind it. 



  • @milmin said:

    ...and landed a job for a non-profit telecom company.

     Quietly put down that pen, close the laptop and walk slowly toward the door. Don't make eye contact. Make your way out of the building, across the street.

     
    Now RUN!

     

     

     

    I've been here for about a year, everyone has a degree, and the pay is pretty good. It's the best job in this area (beach town)... there are grad students I know in this area that make 1/2 as much as I do (sadly).



  • @milmin said:

    ...and landed a job for a non-profit telecom company.

     Quietly put down that pen, close the laptop and walk slowly toward the door. Don't make eye contact. Make your way out of the building, across the street.

     
    Now RUN!

     

     

     

    No! He could be a great source of WTFs!



  • djork: what do u do?



  • @Vechni said:

    djork: what do u do?

    If I told you, it would just kill the mystery...

    Oh who am I kidding... I develop random business apps in C#, maintain some VB.NET dinosaurs, write Ruby to hold shambling behemoths together, and tinker with anything that will keep me interested for a few minutes in the off time (Lisp, Forth, Objective-C, Lua).



  • @djork said:

    @Vechni said:
    djork: what do u do?
    If I told you, it would just kill the mystery...

    Oh who am I kidding... I develop random business apps in C#, maintain some VB.NET dinosaurs, write Ruby to hold shambling behemoths together, and tinker with anything that will keep me interested for a few minutes in the off time (Lisp, Forth, Objective-C, Lua).

    You seem cool. Let's be friends.



  • Objective-C?



  • @PSWorx said:

    Objective-C?

    Yes. A very thin layer on top of C that turns a very static procedural language into a very dynamic object-oriented language. Dynamic typing, message forwarding, and even the ability to extend classes at run-time.

    [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C[/url]



  • Do you run across many WTF's where you work? I don't run across any here, maybe it has something to do with everyone here having a degree or 2. Maybe I'll have to read a howstuffwork article on vb.net to get the full experience you have. I mean, that is if it can "keep me interested for a few minutes," oh boy!



  • @Vechni said:

    Do you run across many WTF's where you work? I don't run across any here, maybe it has something to do with everyone here having a degree or 2. Maybe I'll have to read a howstuffwork article on vb.net to get the full experience you have. I mean, that is if it can "keep me interested for a few minutes," oh boy!

     How long have you worked there ?  Every place where I worked had at least a developer or two add some WTFs to the system. (And probably me, when I wasn't as experienced).



  • While some developers are bad enough to build WTFs right from the start, it's more common that a project starts well, but sooner or later the codebase begins to decay because of changing requirements, fluctuation among the team members, deadline pressure; add a few years of underfunded maintenance and voila - the project makes it to the front page.



  • @Vechni said:

    Do you run across many WTF's where you work? I don't run across any here, maybe it has something to do with everyone here having a degree or 2.

    Places without WTFs do not exist. Degrees don't really count for much.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Vechni said:

    Do you run across many WTF's where you work? I don't run across any here, maybe it has something to do with everyone here having a degree or 2.

    Places without WTFs do not exist. Degrees don't really count for much.

    Degrees are basically just a way to keep people busy until they look old enough that HR droids won't dismiss them out of hand without talking to them. 



  • I was thinking of studying Informatica* next year but you're not really helping.

    *) I can't say if it's the Dutch equivalent to CS. One'd think so, but then one can never know.



  • @ammoQ said:

    @asuffield said:

    Oh, something to keep in mind:

    If somebody is writing a successful website on a technical subject, chances are that it's not because they're spending all their time doing useful work in that field. The really good people will almost invariably love their work far too much to have time to write about it at great length.

    This should tell you something about the people who do write these sites.
     

    I wonder how those really good people who almost invariably love their work find the time to write thousands of posts in the WTF forums. 

     

    In a word: compile time. I spend most of my waking hours working on an absolutely humungous web-app. Compilation can sometimes take 5 minutes or more (all those custom .NET libs plus a fairly dumb compiler). Plenty of time to write a comment or two.



  • @zedhex said:

    In a word: compile time. I spend most of my waking hours working on an absolutely humungous web-app. Compilation can sometimes take 5 minutes or more (all those custom .NET libs plus a fairly dumb compiler). Plenty of time to write a comment or two.

    Employee: "Boss, I need a 600 MHz with 256MB RAM"

    Boss: "No problem, we have such machines down in the storage room.. but what for do you need it?"

    Employee: "To increase compile time. Currently it's only 30 seconds, not enough time for a decent posting..."
     



  • @ammoQ said:

    @zedhex said:

    In a word: compile time. I spend most of my waking hours working on an absolutely humungous web-app. Compilation can sometimes take 5 minutes or more (all those custom .NET libs plus a fairly dumb compiler). Plenty of time to write a comment or two.

    Employee: "Boss, I need a 600 MHz with 256MB RAM"

    Boss: "No problem, we have such machines down in the storage room.. but what for do you need it?"

    Employee: "To increase compile time. Currently it's only 30 seconds, not enough time for a decent posting..."
     

    Now why didn't I think of that??? My ten yr old laptop has exactly those spex....



  • @dhromed said:

    @Vechni said:

    Do you run across many WTF's where you work? I don't run across any here, maybe it has something to do with everyone here having a degree or 2.

    Places without WTFs do not exist. Degrees don't really count for much.

    I'm going to have to second that.  My job is reasonably WTF free, although I did run across something the other week which almost made me cry (I really should post it). 

    There are people at the office with and without college educations, and everyone is pretty cool and competent.  

    Also, it might be considered more "book learning", but [url=http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/]ESR's The Art of Unix Programming[/url] is pretty awesome.  It's a digestion of what we've learned from Unix and Open Source over the last 3+ decades.  So it's a lot more "street" knowledge.  I'm a Unix guy, but I'd suggest it for anyone--because one of the reasons Unix systems are as stable as they are is because the programmers got a lot of basic design points right.



  • @phaedrus said:

    @dhromed said:

    Places without WTFs do not exist. Degrees don't really count for much.

    I'm going to have to second that.  My job is reasonably WTF free, although I did run across something the other week which almost made me cry (I really should post it). 

    There are people at the office with and without college educations, and everyone is pretty cool and competent.

    That sounds like an accurate description of my work place.

    We also midly chastise people for performing WTFs. To summarize:
    -- Dude, that shit your wrote? It sucks. this & this; such & so.
    and he's like
    -- Dude stfu but okay I hear ya.

    And there's the outsource bashing where we all had a hearty laugh/cry about an implementation of a WHERE clause in a for loop in ASP.

    @phaedrus said:

    one of the reasons Unix systems are as stable as they are is because the programmers got a lot of basic design points right.

     One wonders, given the state of most OS & software, if this was mostly competence or mostly luck. :<br> 



  • @dhromed said:

    @phaedrus said:

    one of the reasons Unix systems are as stable as they are is because the programmers got a lot of basic design points right.

     One wonders, given the state of most OS & software, if this was mostly competence or mostly luck. :<br> 

    Mostly environmental. Unix was created in an era when it was incredibly hard to get anything to work at all, so the only way to do it was for very smart people to expend great effort and concentration on the problem.

    We're now a few decades down the line, and people have put a great deal of time and energy into making it possible for a complete idiot to create software with an absolute minimum of thought. The outcome of this should be entirely unsurprising. 



  • @asuffield said:

    We're now a few decades down the line, and people have put a great deal of time and energy into making it possible for a complete idiot to create software with an absolute minimum of thought. The outcome of this should be entirely unsurprising. 

    With a minimum of though about technial troubles, that is. And this is IMO a good think since it allows us to focus on the business side of the task.



  • @ammoQ said:

    @asuffield said:

    We're now a few decades down the line, and people have put a great deal of time and energy into making it possible for a complete idiot to create software with an absolute minimum of thought. The outcome of this should be entirely unsurprising. 

    With a minimum of though about technial troubles, that is. And this is IMO a good think since it allows us to focus on the business side of the task.

    On the one side, we have "focus on the business side of the task". On the other same side, we have PHP.



  • @asuffield said:

    @ammoQ said:
    @asuffield said:

    We're now a few decades down the line, and people have put a great deal of time and energy into making it possible for a complete idiot to create software with an absolute minimum of thought. The outcome of this should be entirely unsurprising. 

    With a minimum of though about technial troubles, that is. And this is IMO a good think since it allows us to focus on the business side of the task.

    On the one side, we have "focus on the business side of the task". On the other same side, we have PHP.

    So people have put a great deal of time and energy into making it possible for a complete idiot to create a "programming language" (for the lack of a better name) with an absolute minimum of thought.

    Or would you want to suggest that people have put a great deal of time and energy into making PHP? 



  • @dhromed said:

    @phaedrus said:
    @dhromed said:

    Places without WTFs do not exist. Degrees don't really count for much.

    I'm going to have to second that.  My job is reasonably WTF free, although I did run across something the other week which almost made me cry (I really should post it). 

    There are people at the office with and without college educations, and everyone is pretty cool and competent.

    That sounds like an accurate description of my work place.

    We also midly chastise people for performing WTFs. To summarize:
    -- Dude, that shit your wrote? It sucks. this & this; such & so.
    and he's like
    -- Dude stfu but okay I hear ya.

    And there's the outsource bashing where we all had a hearty laugh/cry about an implementation of a WHERE clause in a for loop in ASP.

    Or one of my fellow devs getting "delete this;" in a straight forward C++ coding interview question from a potential outsourcing hire.   

    @dhromed said:

    @phaedrus said:
    one of the reasons Unix systems are as stable as they are is because the programmers got a lot of basic design points right.

     One wonders, given the state of most OS & software, if this was mostly competence or mostly luck. :</blockquote>

    For the basic, initial design?  Competence--those guys were geniuses.  However, later programmers did come along and add things like ioctl() to the kernel and we do have a couple separate (BSD & std) flavors of most APIs for the C library.  There's more to add to that list.  So, creep, legacy, and hacks have snuck in over the years. 

    Even still, you can pry my Slackware out of my cold, dead fingers.  I'll take the Unix/Linux warts any day of the week.



  • @dhromed said:

    I was thinking of studying Informatica* next year but you're not really helping.

    *) I can't say if it's the Dutch equivalent to CS. One'd think so, but then one can never know.

    As a fellow duchlander,  i would say that it really depends on what field of IT you are in. In programming you might actually need a HBO paper, in web-programming you mostly see HBO work and think level.(which means (i don't have the paper, but i could get it if i wanted too)
    I would say that a higher degree will give you a jumpstart, but a good resume with a good portfolio of skills & projects will be the deal maker.

    I only have a MBO degree, but my skillset is pretty wide, with quite a few skills that are currently in trend. And of course a few sites/web-applications that are well beyond your average site/webshop.

    For the non-dutchies

    The degree system in duchland is basically. (from high to low)
    University, HBO, MBO


    [really of topic]
    p.s.
    If you know PHP and your looking for a job, my company is desperately in need of more people. It's located in Breda. PM me if your interested.
    [/realy of topic]
     



  • @stratos said:

    The degree system in duchland is basically. (from high to low)

    University, HBO, MBO

    Why can't you people just follow the logical American university system and buy your degrees from dodgy websites like we do? 


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