I guess its is a common problem for software developers with a day job as well as out-of-hours projects, but it can be hard to get around to spending time on the out-of-hours stuff.
I read with interest that James Carr sought out someone to pair with and found it a useful and enjoyable experience. ( James Carr » Blog Archive » Feels GREAT to Pair Again. ) It occurred to me that perhaps this is what I need, and by implication, perhaps this is what you might benefit from, too.
So I have an open offer. If you like the idea of spending some evening or weekend time pairing with me, please get in touch. Obviously I’d like to make some progress on some of my own projects, but I’m also very happy to spend time on your projects, too.
There’s a fighting chance that the commitment of an appointment with someone else might get both of us motivated and productive, and that we both might learn some good stuff along the way.
What can we work out together?
Kathy’s talks are usually very good, and this one is no exception. This fit really well with a business idea I’m working on at the moment and prompted a whole new way of thinking about it.
This looks really neat. A small JavaScript framework for setting up and running a single-page XML/XSLT application which fetches model data and view definitions from a server and combines them using JavaScript controllers. Once the data and views are loaded the application can run with no server latency, limited only by the ability of the browser to process XSLT and JavaScript.
Freja – CSScripting.
My personal preference would probably be for models in JSON rather than XML and a view template language a bit more developer friendly than XSLT, but this seems a good implementation nonetheless.
A nice summary of the complex landscape of RFCs that define URLs. I knew the great majority of it, but the official support of “;” as a parameter separator, and the ability to have mid-path parameters as well as query parameters looks very interesting.
What Every Developer Should Know About URLs.
Ever since I read Joel Spolsky’s password management article from 2008, I have enjoyed using Dropbox to synchronize files between my various computers. Recently I found a page of tips aimed at using the service as an automatic backup of important files, rather than just for transfer between machines. You get 2GB of free “cloud” space when you sign up with the service, which is enough for quite a lot of stuff.
Using DropBox to backup instead of sync
The recent launch of Ubuntu One has added another cloud data service with a generous free storage limit. Although the client software only runs on Linux at the moment I’m fully expecting Windows and MaxOSX clients to appear soon. The same tricks described in the Dropbox article could just as likely be used with Ubuntu One.
This looks interesting. A way of transitively including code examples from current, tested, code into documentation. In some ways it’s in the same vein as Knuth’s “Literate Programming” and its associated tools, although it does not quite go as far in abandoning the structure of code in favour of the structure of readable documentation.
Lemma – Introduction.