Why I'm Reading Research Papers

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In my recent post on doing deliberate practice to become a better developer I mentioned that I was going to spend some time to read and understand some research papers. This may seem a like an odd thing to do in order to become better at my craft, but I figured a little experimentation couldn't hurt. At the worst, I'll have a few research papers read and understood. Perhaps I'll even meet one of the co-authors and have something to engage in discussion with. However, I believe I may get a bit more out of it than just that.

Understand Latest Research

Seeing what the latest research trends are, I feel, can be quite beneficial in a practical sense. For instance, there's a paper that suggests that simple testing can prevent most critical failures in software. From reading the paper and Adrian Colyer's post about it one can get a lot of insight about preventing most crashes in software. One having that insight, you can put it to good use in all of the software that you currently are developing.

See Cutting Edge Technologies

I'm sure most of y'all have seen this graph on emerging technologies.

CC BY 2.5, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11484459

Keeping up with new research articles allows me to be a part of the early adopters. Whereas now, I'm most likely split between the Early Majority and the Late Majority. Getting in early to new technologies will give multiple advantages, such as being among the first to submit pull requests if they have their code on GitHub, or generating the first set of blog posts on the subjet.

For example, Elm, a functional web language that outputs to JavaScript, was first introduced as a research paper. While I would say it is still in the late stages of the Early Adopter phase, if I was able to get on it earlier soon after this paper came out I could be considered one of the go-to people for this technology and even could help contribute to future releases of it.

Try to Understand More Math

A lot of computer science, and especially most of the research done in the field that I've seen, has a good bit of math behind it. While I took some math in my own studies of computer science, a lot of that was lost due to just not using it or keeping up with it.

While it's not necessary in day-to-day programming, it can be a bit helpful. Learning the math can help develop that extra bit of logic that will help in my daily programming, whether business logic or debugging.

With these benefits in mind, I plan on reading a paper a quarter this year and see how that goes. I'll definitely report back any benefits, or lack of any, that I believe I receive during that process.

My Deliberate Practice Plan to Become a Better Programmer

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In the previous post, I reviewed the book So Good They Can't Ignore You. I wanted to take the ideas and advice from there and to create my own plan for deliberate practice as a software developer. Here's what I came up with...

Continuous learning

Being a software developer means to always be learning. Whether it's a new framework, new programming language, or a whole new programming paradigm learning something new is integral.

There are several ways to do this and I will try to incorporate all of them, though more will take more presidence and attentnion than others.

  • Use sites like Pluralsight and Udemy for on-demand tutorials and training.
    • Watch at least one course each one or two weeks, depending on the length of the course.
  • Watch at least one software presentation on YouTube or similar site.
    • Watch one at least each week. This should generate some "Top 10" posts for everyone to enjoy or, if it's really good enough, a post about a specific presentation.
  • Read at least one technical book each quarter.
  • Read and try to understand at least one journal paper on programming each quarter.

Practicing

Of course, one of the biggest and best things to do as a developer is to actually program something...anything to help put into practice what I've learned. The above methods are great for learning new things, but they have to be put to use, as well, otherwise I won't be able to retain what I've learned.

  • Have at least one personal project going at a time.
  • Blog about things learned and always have a demo project for it, if possible.
  • Get certified, if available.

Being uncomfortable

Doing deliberate practice often means being uncomfortable during the practice. This is an easy way to know if the practice is good or not. Here a couple of ways I can step outside of my comfort zone.

  • Speak at a local user group at least once each quarter.
  • Try to speak at a conference at least once this year.
  • Do more screencasts instead of regular text posts for the blog.

Keeping track

Now, none of the above doesn't mean all that much if I don't keep track and accoutable for each of these. Saying I'm going to do it doesn't mean I am going to do it.

  • Once again, blogging about each of the above items as much as possible
  • Use a time tracker such as Plan to keep a digital record and for some nice reports.

Since it's very close to the 2017 year, this is a great time to get started with this.

Do you have something you've done work very well for you but wasn't mentioned? What are your plans for having deliberate practice?

Exercism F# Track Now Available

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Wait....F#?

Yep. After attending an interesting talk by James Dixon on data in F# I got a bit interested in the language. Of course, that's followed by reading articles, watching videos, and playing with it a bit on my own. The past month or so I've been messing around with it and plan on sticking to it for a while.

I can see F# going places in terms of functional programming and it's uses within .NET. Be prepared for more F# posts in the future, as well.

What is Exercism?

In short, Exercism is another site where people can learn a new programming language by doing different exercises. The difference with this one than the others, however, is that it's crowd-sourced. Meaning that, once you finish an exercise, you can send it off to be code reviewed by others.

It's definitely the best of both worlds where you practice the language and get peer reviews to help you learn that much quicker.

F# Track

And so, since I got interested  a bit more in F# and no one started messing with it in the Exercism F# repository, I figured I'd give it a shot. After a little while I was able to get it to meet the requirements to be launched!

Hopefully, I did decently in my own examples for the exercises (and if not, I'm not scared of some helpful tips), and that some people can get a bit of use out of it.

So feel free to give it a try and let me know or submit an issue if there are any problems!

As An ng-conf Virtual Attendee...

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This past Thursday and Friday, Google held a public conference for all things AngularJS. I'm sure you've noticed lately that I've been a bit of a fan of it, especially the more I play around with what it all has to offer. 

Luckily, the fine folks who put on the conference decided to stream it as it was going on. Awesome! I got to catch a few of the sessions. Though, it's not the same as actually attending as I couldn't meet all the great people and speakers there, watching the live stream is the next best thing.

I didn't get to see all of the sessions yet (they have all been uploaded), but here are the ones I have seen that seemed to stand out:

In total, I'm glad I was able to catch what I could of the live stream and hope that next time I can be able to join in person. I hope at some point I can be able to contribute something to help make everyone's life easier with AngularJS.

Beginning Ruby for C# Developers

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Ruby has become quite popular as a programming language over the past few years. Probably mainly due to the popularity of the Ruby on Rails framework. Because of its popularity, it makes sense to learn at least the basics of it and what all it can do for you as a developer.

Until I have a better solution for embedding Ruby code and output, I'm just embedding the code and results as Github Markdown for now. Even though it doesn't seem to display properly in the embed, it does when viewing the actual gist on GitHub.

Getting Started

One of the easiest ways to get started using Ruby is to just use your browser. Repl.it is a site that supports many dynamic languages to be run in a browser and it's very handy to just play around in.

I've also seen people use Sublime Text to edit their Ruby code (I admit, I enjoy using it as well as a light weight IDE. I've had no problems using the beta of version 3, either). For Windows, you'd just need to install Ruby. If you're on a Mac, you already have it installed. In fact, you can just type "ruby -v" in the terminal to see what version you have.

Since Ruby is a dynamic language, there is no compiling. However, everything in Ruby is considered an object, and because of that everything will include some built in functions with it. With everything in Ruby being an object isn't necessarily a new concept to C# developers since every object in C# derives from System.Object and you do get a few predefined functions, Ruby just seems to have gone that extra step. 

For example, say you want to run a statement three times in a row. How would you do that in Ruby? It's actually easier than just using a for-loop similar to what you would do in C# or even creating a way to use a lambda expression.

Pretty easy and very straight forward, especially for someone who may not even have a programming background.

Let's go on with a few other basics...

Output

Ruby has a couple of ways to display output back to the console. The main way is to use the "print" statement, though you may also see the "puts" (put string) command as well. The only difference in these is the "puts" command will append a new line. You'll probably see these statements quite a bit, especially if you go through online tutorials.

Methods

As mentioned earlier everything in Ruby is an object, and since that's true it can have methods on those objects. Of course, depending on the type Ruby recognizes it during runtime is what methods are available. For example, the "length" method can be used on strings but not on numbers.

Methods, like in C#, can also be chained together to give some added syntactic sugar and to reduce the overall code needed to accomplish what you need.

One final note about methods that got me confused early on but I thought was really nice is that there is a bit of a naming convention associated with certain methods. Mainly methods that change the object itself and methods that return a boolean.

Take the "upcase" method we used earlier. There are actually two versions of this method, "upcase" and "upcase!". The first returns a copy of the string being used, the second (indicated with an exclamation point) changes the instance of the string being used. In other words, the first version causes the string to be immutable.

For methods that return a boolean value a question mark is appended to the end of the method name to indicate to the developer that that method can be used for branching. Take the string's "empty?" method, for example. As you can probably tell, it returns if the string is empty or not.

Program Flow

Like most programming languages Ruby supports the if/else block. However, one noticeable difference is that Ruby also has an "unless"' keyword. It will only execute if the given conditional is false. This was included to help make certain branching more readable and a bit more intuitive.

So we can change the structure of an if/else to an unless block like so...

Further Learning

One of the best resources I can recommend to help get you on the path of learning Ruby much easier is Code Wars. This site has quite a few code katas that will help in understanding the syntax and included methods that come in with Ruby.

Codecademy is recommended a lot, as well, by people and for very good reason...they have a lot of good interactive tutorials for learning Ruby.

Conclusion

Of course, I definitely don't know everything about the language or all the tools the community uses. I still haven't gotten my head totally around gem files or rake. I'm not even totally sure of the correct structure of a Ruby application! But, hopefully this will at least spark some interest in you C# people to maybe try something different outside of the .NET world. There is plenty of fun to be had with it and I throughly enjoy learning the language and all it has to offer.

Code Katas Can Be Helpful

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After reading a few posts in the development community lately about code katas, I felt I should put out my own opinion about the subject. 

At work, a few of us developers decided to take a couple of lunches each week and get together to work on a code kata that we all decide on prior to the meetings. This was mainly so we can increase our skills in development, but mainly it was a way for us to use a new or not so familiar language for a fairly small coding project.

For our first shot at a kata we decided to try Poker Hands (you're always welcome to view my progress), which we had to rank two player's poker hand and determine who won and display how they won (high card or higher set of cards). Not exactly the easiest kata to do, especially when doing it in a language you're definitely not familiar with, but we thought it was one that could give us a good challenge.

Another aspect to doing katas is to do solve very small problems. One of my favorite ways to do this lately is by playing around at Code Wars. I've been messing with the JavaScript and Ruby katas there and have been learning quite a lot about the languages as each new kata I do gets progressively harder. They have a pretty slick interface, as well.

I feel this site does a lot of things right. Most importantly, once you've successfully finished a kata it will also display how others have successfully implemented it. Looking though those can help see how other people use the language to their advantage.

Sure, you can also be doing other things in order to learn, such as messing around GitHub for a project to contribute to or volunteering. However, a big benefit to doing these small katas is because they are small compared to these other types of projects. You won't feel as overwhelmed by the size of the project or try to figure out where to start. Here you just create the appropriate class or function and make sure all the tests pass. 

Of course, you want to do code katas because you believe they help and because you find them enjoyable. I feel like I'm learning new languages little by little the more I do these. I seem to have rekindled my love of programming just by doing these katas. I hope I'm not the only one.