The Better Developer Thing

Raymond tags me in every blogging meme, which is great. If it wasn't for Raymond, I wouldn't get to play along.

The current meme is "what I will do to be a better developer in the next 6 months". Bettering is a tough topic to write about, because there are so many ways to get better.

Interviewing Skills

Not interviewing for jobs, but interviewing candidates. Although interviewing isn't strictly a development job – it is a job I am occasionally tasked to do. Good interviewing skills can help you build a great team and contribute to the success of a project and a company. The truth is – I have terrible interviewing skills. My record shows I'm too optimistic about candidates. If left to build a team on my own, I'd end up with something that resembles the 1976 Buccaneers. I need to prepare better, and have a plan in place to dig deeper in interviews.

Forge Ahead

I feel like I've spent the last 6 months playing catch up on some old technologies (these days – old technology is anything released over 6 months ago – legacy technology is anything released over 18 months ago). While I was catching up to get work done on current projects, exciting changes began to loom on the horizon. LINQ comes to mind as a technology that I think will be huge, and I want to be ready before the next application comes along.

Build Something New

I learn the most when I build working software. To forge ahead I really need to set aside some time, put together some ideas, and build something new. Actually, I do have an idea for a new web site- and one wholly unrelated to technology. The technology I'll use to build the web site? ASP.NET. It's fashionable these days to criticize ASP.NET as a leaky, heavyweight, complicated beast, but I believe it's easy to poke holes in any non-trivial platform. ASP.NET is what you make of it. If you want to swim against the current and make ASP.NET be difficult - it will be difficult. I can't leave the huge feature set, the range of extensibility, and the strong foundation of the CLR and the framework class libraries.

But enough fanboy racket – I gotta build some software, and hopefully have time to blog about it, too.

Tag

Four people, picked at random people from my techie OPML list:

Wayward LINQ Lacky Matt Warren
New and Notable Sam Gentile
Master Microsoft Interviewer Chris Sells
Carnage4Life aka Dare Obasanjo

Will they play the game, too?