John Coder

Welcome to my blog!  You maybe wondering "Why a blog?"  The answer is simple.  Engagement.  No, not marital engagement--more like active engagement.  On my own time, I try to stay on top of what is "up and coming" in the developer community.  When I find something interesting, it might find its way to this blog.  It could be related to a specific technology like C#, ASP.NET, JavaScript, Visual Studio 2008/2010, or SQL Server.  It might be a philosophical post involving design patterns and industry-wide best practices.

How is that active engagement?  Well, #1 indicator of success is that you've gotten even this far in the blog post.  If you (the reader) has found even a single blog post worth reading and you (hopefully) even learned something, then it was all worth it.

Blogging is a way for me to write, and thus become a better developer.  During an interview about Stack Overflow, Jeff Atwood advised that developers should blog about everything (blog, blog, blog).  Stack Overflow is a place for less known, but fantastic developers to gain presence in the community.  I found this to be great advice, especially if you're able to blog about something worthwhile time and again.  That lead me to Jeff's blog Coding Horror, and furthermore to an article titled "Is writing More Important Than Programming?"  In the article, Jeff refers to some advice from Joel Spolsky to college students:

"The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is not how many programming languages they know, and it's not whether they prefer Python or Java. It's whether they can communicate their ideas. By persuading other people, they get leverage."

As I post things that I've learned, it is important to consider that the ways I am showing are NOT always "the perfect way" to do something.

I hope that future posts may spread inspiration and insight.  Please feel free to comment (in fact, I encourage it).  Let me know if there is something you would like me to post about, or if you would like to see some more in-depth coverage of a certain topic.  Thanks for reading my post, and I hope you return with each new entry.