You can listen to this episode on ShoutEngine here: #CodingPersonalities Episode 9
In this episode of #CodingPersonalities, Kelsey and I sit down with Jon Ash to discuss his podcast “The Six Figure Developer” and how he got his start as a developer.
Check out “The Six Figure Developer”
*Brett and Kelsey’s opinions only represent themselves and not any other organization or their employer.
You can contact us here or on Twitter:
Kelsey Robertson
Brett Whittington
On this episode of Coding Personalities, Kelsey and I are joined by Mike Hand. We discuss how Mike got into software development, issues developers face starting out and throughout their careers in software development, and how to go from “Chair to Debonair.” Mike talks about how developers can start speaking more at conferences no matter the skillset, topic idea, or experiences.
*My and Kelsey’s opinions only represent ourselves and not any other organization or our employer
Working with iOS applications is always somewhat of a chore. Dealing with mobile provisioning profiles, certificates, the Apple App Store; these all seem like barriers to be over come.
I am currently working on a new mobile application that has .NET Core 2 API that is hosting a download page for new iOS mobile app. Previous to this I have never worked with .NET Core 2 in a production application so there is always a bit of a learning curve and I wanted to impart my trials and tribulations in this post.
Every year, I attempt to do at least one very hard goal. A goal that either stretches my mental attributes, my physical attributes, or a combination of the two. To give a general idea, I did this in 2016 by losing 90 lbs. in 9 months. In 2017, I decided to give my body a break and read 70 books in one year. To most people that seems like a insurmountable goal, I chose this arbitrary number because I friend I know said she would read 60 and I thought, “I can do better than that!”
Why did I do this?
The real reason I chose 70 books is that I am already a very fast reader and read at least two hours a day. I had the lucky chance to take speed reading in Junior High and it served me well in life. When reading for enjoyment, I don’t read as fast as I can but it does lead to me being able to read many books. I read all of these books on my Kindle Paperwhite.
With this challenge, I’d need to read 1.5 books a week which is normally doable. Unfortunately for my goal but fortunately for my career, I was selected to speak at 2 different conferences and teach Grad Academy at work. So for 3 whole months, I didn’t read at all. This left me with being 15 books behind at the beginning of July. To catch up, I had to read 3 books a week. It was excessive but thankfully I enjoy reading books I’ve read before and plowed through the Dresden Files.
I definitely realized that I enjoy reading way more than I enjoy watching TV. Reading a book always gives a sense of accomplishment, while watching TV does not. I learned lots of cool new words and while much of my reading is fiction, I learned a lot of about the world. A lot science fiction opened up new ideas that lead to deep dives into Wikipedia.
This is the breakdown of the 70 books I read over the course of the year divded into the categories of books I read.
Every year at work, I try to read a couple of books that would help me with some aspect of my job that I could be doing better. On my previous review, I was told I could more to improve my leadership skills so I decided to read several books having to do with leadership. I highly recommend the 1, 3, and 4 book if you are interested in these types of books.
Fantasy was my first genre and will always be a favorite of mine. I went back this year and touch on a lot of books in this genre that I’ve had in my queue for awhile. Of these, I highly recommend 3, 4, and 6. That happens to be a ton of books but I highly recommend them all.
I’ve recently been expanding into the Sci-Fi genre and I’ve been highly impressed with really old novels and some of the newest genres in this field. I highly recommend 1, 3, 9, 12, 14, 18, and 20.
I am not a horror genre fan and I hate scary movies but these 3 books were really small but also very entertaining. In each book, I was pleasantly surprised by what happened and couldn’t guess the story.
While thinking about this podcast and reading about reading challenges, many people have described not enjoying reading because of the challenge. People were way too focused on meeting the goal and either sped through their books, picked books based on size versus content, read books they didn’t enjoy. In each case, that happened during this challenge for me. I will counter that I did enjoy that aspect. I found many books this year I normally wouldn’t have read if not for those three “negatives” others have commented on.
Reading can be very expensive. If each book was $5 then I spent $350 on entertainment this year. I didn’t get any these from the library and of the books listed, I had only owned about 20 the books before. But if lived by myself, cable television alone would have been $600 dollars a year, I also got more sleep because I tended to fall asleep earlier in the evening. due to reading.
Will I read 70 books in one year again? Not in 2018 but maybe sometime in the future.
Kelsey Robertson, Jeremy Solomon, and I talk about various gift ideas for when shopping for techies.
And More!
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Twitter: @BrettTheWhitt
This guide is my ultimate guide to setting up Sitefinity. I’ll be updating it as I find new things that I commonly do when I want to setup a new project. Today, I’ll be going over common Visual Studio solution changes, Sitefinity Settings and more that I use on almost every project.
In Part One, I setup the base solution and continuous integration with Visual Studio Team Services. This post will be more about actual settings in the Sitefinity project.
#Coding Personalities – Unconscious Bias in Software Development
Kelsey and Italk about starting the podcast and give a brief introduction about ourselves. We also discuss an article describing Unconscious Bias in Software Development.
The article was written by Therese Stowell and is titled “The changing nature of software development: Addressing unconscious bias” Link
*Myand Kelsey’s opinions only represent themselves and not any other organization or their employer.
You can contact us here or on Twitter:
This guide is my ultimate guide to setting up Sitefinity. I’ll be updating it as I find new things that I commonly do when I want to setup a new project. Today, I’ll be going over common Visual Studio solution changes, Sitefinity Settings and more that I use on almost every project.
There are already a ton of groups, tips, and blogs that are out there that will help you learn to become a great speaker. This post won’t go into a lot those topics because simply Googling will you get there. What I will be doing though is describing the process that I use to come up with my speaking ideas, created my decks, and practicing for the upcoming conferences.
I hope to give you another perspective on taking your speaking to the next level and the tips and tricks I use to get there. This will be a multipart series on becoming a conference speaker.
I am constantly asked to review and analyze websites’ performance statistics and analytics. Over the years, I have found several tools known and unknown that I use in combination to get an idea of the overall health and performance of these sites. As a developer, if you are not looking at these tools or similar tools, help yourself and get on board.
This week I am exploring website performance tools and why they can be a useful tool in development.
Brett The Whitt 