• Book Review (of sorts): The Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide – John Sonmez

    developer guide book cover I’ve been following John Sonmez via his Simple Programmer site for a few years now and have found his approach to be very refreshing. He doesn’t go down the ‘warm and fuzzy – it will all be fine’ road, oh no!

    John has a no BS approach which leaves you in no doubt that if you want to succeed in your career as a Software Developer (or anything come to think of it) then it will take hard work and dedication on your part – it won’t just happen.

    Now, we all read technical books (or blogs) on a pretty regular basis in an effort to keep up with the ever changing world of technology, but what about those softer skills? Would you really buy a general ‘self help’ book? I mean, Software Developers are special right!?

    I have previously read John’s first book, Soft Skills, which I found very enlightening, so when I received an email from John asking if I wanted to read a preview of his new book, The Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide, I hit the reply button straight away. [John contacted a number of his subscribers with the same request – I’m not special in that regard 😉 ].

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  • Stackify Prefix – first thoughts

    Listening to one of my favorite podcast (.Net Rocks) I heard a plug for the Stackify Prefix tool which claims to help the developer fix problems before anyone else sees them – a bold claim. Well as I am currently working on a greenfield development project I decided to give is a whirl – it’s free after all so why not.

    Now I was not expecting to find too much wrong with the application and thankfully I was right – but I was getting errors.

    stackify interface

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  • Why don’t users "read the manual"?

    In a previous post I had a little rant about some reviews I’d received from users of the FillLPG Android application. This was as a result of a handful of 1 star reviews from users who I believe had missed the point of the app.

    You see, the application itself is just a portal into the FillLPG website – a website I do not control. The data provided by the website is maintained by a community of users who use the site and the app to add new stations, remove stations and update prices.

    The problem is that users of the app have a place to sound off and express their displeasure – the Google Play Store. By leaving a 1 star review and the most basic of justifications for it (see previous rant) they get it off their chest and move on.

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  • Xamarin Certified Once More

    xamarin certification badge I first passed my Xamarin Mobile Certification back in June 2014 but when it came to taking the recertification exam the following year I never quite got around to it. Ultimately it lapsed and I while I was no longer certified I did keep my University subscription running so that I could keep my skills up to date.

    During the next year I have to say that I was quite disappointed as there didn’t really seem to be any new content, i.e. no new courses were added as far as I could tell. At the end of that year I was considering not renewing my University subscription, at $1500 it was not exactly a no-brainer.

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  • Creating a Simple Modal Dialog Form for Xamarin.Forms

    I’ve finally managed to get some time to look at the Smite Scoreboard application that I’m using as a vehicle to dive into Xamarin.Forms (XF) and it’s been a fraught time (see bottom of post).

    Between incompatible nuget packages, mismatched Windows and iOS configurations and finding that XF didn’t actually support what I wanted to do I was pretty close to saying, “you know what, to hell with it – I’ll just use the native Xamarin approach instead”.

    However, I recalled a video by John Sonmez titled ‘Why does Programming Suck?’ and rolled my sleeves up and dug in again.

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