Back to writing,
Following my last year experience interviewing over hundreds of candidates I was looking for the ingredients for making you better than your colleagues.
I know that the internet is full of such tutorials, especially one minute before the new year’s eve, but I will try to add my own twist, give you some tips and share my own goals for each bullet.
The goals were designed to the LCD (lowest common denominator) – feel free to increase the goals as you go.

Rule #1 – Read blogs
I found out that the world is trying to tell you something which most of the time is that it has a lot of new things that you need to try and learn
So I have a huge list of blogs that I am reading on a daily basis (http://www.google.com/reader) trying to maintain a long list and zero based unread posts on a weekly basis. Well I’ve crafted some tricks to overcome the huge amount of posts and the tradeoff between subscribing to everything and having the amount of posts that a human-working-being can read, but this is for a different post.

Goal: 30 minutes a day is a good place to start with and 2 hours during the weekend, so all in all 4.5 – 5 hours a week is the time for yourself to learn from others
Tip: 2 tools that will make your reading experience better during this the day - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TwoMustHaveToolsForAMoreReadableWeb.aspx

Rule #2 – View technical sessions\videos
I must admit, I am not a big fan of podcasts, don’t know why, maybe because of all the sponsors and chit chats (and the geeky jokes) during those sessions, but I really like watching live sessions\video.

Goal: 1 video per week.
Tip: Keep in mind that sometimes you will need to start 2-3 videos and turn them off. try to find at least one that you can watch till the end. I like to summarize it as well and save a reference

Rule #3 – after school curriculum
The logic here is actually the same reason that your parents sent you to learn physics, chess, judo, or whatever outdoor activity right after school - Here you are responsible for yourself. We have many options but as I see it you should at least choose 1 to push at every single minute.

• Participate in open source – choose an open source project you feel connected to or you think you want to learn from. Being an active part in Open Source Community can help you learn a lot from others – e.g: how they work, standards, tools, collaboration and code-reviews by people that you will probably never work with.
• Deep Dive into the details in writing your own solution for existing framework – trying to write on your own a replacement for nihberante (or at least part of it) or write your own linq-implementation or implement your own map-reduce instead of just using it can help you a lot ot understand the underlying implementation.
• Learn a new framework\language – you can start with huge projects like: starting to use linux, perl, F# or smaller projects like use hadoop or lucene.

Each one of the three has its own benefits and you should try to play with all of them, but all of them are about practicing your coding-skills. Most of the people that read a lot, don't find enough time to practice their coding skills, which IMO, might be a mistake.

Goal: have at least two projects for the next year

Tip: as a developer we tend to jump from idea to idea, project to project, committing one file in nhibernate, then learning mvc, reading about lucene, installing mongo, but not playing with them for more than few hours\days,

try to set yourself a goal for 3-6 months to play with it, I guess that all your time is during the weekend and nights, so you will need enough time to learn and play with it to learn whether it is good or not.

Bonus: If you are working in a company with more than 5-10 developers I suggest you track others commits on a daily basis. It isn't going to be easy, but tracking commits and sending your notes (online) to others might help you improve your skills a lot (reading more code than you ever thought you can and letting others know what you think and sometimes argue about it)

Rule #4: Teach others:
Try to explain what you learn to others. The major problem in learning for yourself or reading alone is that you might not be able to get real world feedback about what you’ve learned,
Same idea as rubber ducking or pair-programming – sharing with more will force you to improve the knowledge that you already have. Presenting to others will make you ask more questions and dig a bit more.
Setting a day for a presentation will also help you to make your goals public so others will anticipate it, and that won’t let you run away in the middle of something.

Goal: Set Two lectures for the next year
Tip: combine the two rules #3 + #4 to lecture on the subjects that you choose to deep dive. So if you decided to learn a bit more about F# - set yourself a meeting till the end of the period, this is some kind of a milestone for your knowledge.
Bonus: Write a blog, or share your weekly\monthly learning with a group of people – again for the same purpose. It will give you smaller milestones on your way to becoming an expert

Rule #5: read books
Don’t take shortcuts, IMO, reading only blogs might take you into the final point\decisions of someone else’s journey. While it can be good, I prefer reading the raw data.

Goal: 4 books a year
Tip: Clean Code, Pragmatic Programmer, Applying Domain Driven Design, Framework Design Guidelines in .net 
You can Track my reading list here and here.

Would love to hear from you – what do you think about those Goals\Tips?

Nir just finished coding his new module, simple read-only entrance page that renders grid of products with its name underneath, each name links to the relevant product page.
This feature was deployed a week later. After deploying to production we find out a new bug that wasn’t discover during QA phase.
Our team has 5 developers which each of them committed at least one feature for this release. After cursing and blaming I scanned the latest release notes to find the possible features we just deployed I’ve found out that the bug should be part of Nir’s implementation. of course that Nir already started his next feature and need to have an expensive context-switch to resolve this issue. Additional overhead which can’t be avoided in order to understand whether we need to deploy the hotfix right away or we can wait for the next version, not talking about synching between other bug-fixes.

Sounds familiar? Do you release versions too? Try thinking of releasing features.
Think about it, release the feature when it is DONE. don’t wait for others.

                         
   Releasing all features in one planned ahead release, check feature #5 – that will need to be queued till the next release\train

     Releasing a feature when it is done. feature #5 will be released when it is ready – no need to wait for the next train

So, Putting the technical details aside and the context switch we already explained, try to think about your product managers – they’re going to love you.

                 Read more about ideas-code-data 

In Delver we started our journey to continuously deploy to production. Read more here.

Meet Nir Altmark, a good friend of mine and a teammate at Delver he is a gifted developer who knows how to get things Done.
Nir just published two new posts about releasing faster and Building confidence between QA and Dev – well written. Read them to have a better understanding about this process.

This is my second post about AppHarbor, I suggest you to read my first impression.

I am reading a lot about continuous deployment lately and AppHarbor provide great implementation for simple web applications deployment.

1. Source Control – Support Git to host your code
2. Continuous integration – Check build per commit and run NUnit as part of each build
3. Deployment Script – Each successful commit can be deploy in one click
4. Rollback – Even after passing build and tests it can be that you still have bugs, so you can simply check older version and deploy it till you commit a fix

Code and publish is so easy, this is by far this better than using FTP for such things and the option to run tests makes it even more fun.

The option to rollback to previous commit\version is trivial but so important. Moreover, by clicking on “show” you can check the build log and see the tests-run.

You can click the tests link to read more about each test

Tip - UrlParameter does not exist:

When first trying to deploy my code it failed during compilation. I got this output:

  Global.asax.cs(18,67): error CS0103: The name 'UrlParameter' does not exist in the current context

I am not sure why, it could be that I am using early beta (didn’t update for a long time), anyhow I fixed this by changing the global.asax.cs from using UrlParamters.Optional to "". You can read more here: http://haacked.com/archive/2010/02/12/asp-net-mvc-2-optional-url-parameters.aspx

Everyone knows Google app engine But what about .net apps? Meet AppHarbor (Thanks Gadi)

So I wanted to give it a chance and after playing for less than an hour:

• Enable you to build \ host \ deploy web apps
• Provide both Version control and hosting service
• Absolutely free (for now)
• Damn simple

Short tutorial on how to do it:

1. Create your appharbor account + create new application
2. Hopefully you have Git installed (msysgit downloads)
3. Init empty Git repository
       git init test1
4. Copy your files to this directory (download from here: https://github.com/appharbor/appharbor-splash )
5. Add files and subdirectories
       git add .
6. Create your remote repository
       git remote add appharbor https://username@appharbor.com/test-178.git 
7. Commit your code
       git commit -m 'firstcommit'
8. Almost forgot, we are working on Git - so don't forget to push...
       git push appharbor master

Till here everything should work but I had a small issue, got this error: error setting certificate verify locations:
I've found out that it is all about versions (git --version) - So check yours and upgrade if needed

Here you can find great cheat sheet for Git commands: http://ionrails.com/2009/08/07/git-commands-adding-and-committing-cheatsheet/

Btw, AppHarbor support Databases and Running unit-testing after successful builds – I will post about those features later on.

Lately my “find usages” (shift+F12) stopped working.

I tried to restore ReSharper again and again but it fails (ReSharper –> find usages –> General –> restore ReSharper)

I’ve found out that some other shortcuts still working (for example: find usages advanced, CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+F12)

Then I checked the visual studio binding (Tools->Options->Keyboard) and find out that ReSharper.Find binding is missing.
I thought about fixing this manually – but god knows what also is not working.

And then I found out the magical button called RESET -> clicking on this and running the restore ReSharper again solve this issue!

Cheers…

Following Oren’s post I thought it would be great to post my feedburner too.

subscribe to my new feed - http://feeds.feedburner.com/human-debugger
I also changed the Rss-Icons to point to the new feed – so feel free to click them

Thanks.

Finally I’ve found some time to customize my blog with tiny change:

FB:Like Plugin – Whenever you LIKE it – let me know. This will be shared with your friends and help me spread my ideas.

Tip #1 - FB:Like Plugin
If you are using dasblog and you want to add this to your theme use the PermaLinkUrl macro - href=”<%PermalinkUrl%>”

Tip #2 – measure using FB insights
You can track the trends here http://www.facebook.com/insights BUT in order to see it you should add meta-tag your head <meta property="fb:admins" content="user_id" />

Have fun.

Delver is a “Social Shopping Platform”, You are more than welcome to check our website at www.delver.com

We are still in “closed beta” but, leave me a comment or an email and I will send you an invitation.

We also opened our Blog where we will post about new features, technology and other cool stuff.

After we understand what video stream is all about and we wrote our first piece of SWFObject in Javascript. let’s try to have this working on our servers, of course that such things tend to fail. But let’s understand why…

First thing we need to understand is whether such failures occur due to my code, file format or server configuration.
let’s have a simple check trying to access the file directly using our browser.

IIS7:

configure your IIS to serve the following files: swf and mp4 using Static Content

<add name="FlashFiles" path="*.swf" verb="*" modules="StaticFileModule" scriptProcessor="" resourceType="File" requireAccess="Script" />
<add name="VideoFiles" path="*.mp4" verb="*" modules="StaticFileModule" scriptProcessor="" resourceType="File" requireAccess="Script" />

Setting handler(s) won’t be good enough, requesting the server again will return “404.3 – mime type missing”.
Don’t worry Adding new  mime type to IIS 7 - is easy:

<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <staticContent>
            <mimeMap fileExtension=".mp4" mimeType="video/mp4" />
        </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration> 

Apache:

While installing the static content on our static servers (apache) – we’ve found out that requesting the files from firefox return with “no content length” and “incorrect mime type”
adding the correct mime type to the /etc/mime.type

video/mp4     mp4

Check the Request\Response we’ve found out that our servers are still returning compressed response , googling it find out that Firefox cann’t handle gzipped video stream,
compression was selectively disabled by adding the following line to /etc/httpd/conf.d/static.d/static.conf:

SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|mp4)$ no-gzip dont-vary

Apache solution provided by Tomer G.

You can read here my introduction about video streaming.

In order to embed rich media content into web pages and have our code compatible with different browsers we will use the SWFObject 2.2.
The SWFObject will render the right tags for the right browsers.

Here is a short, unobtrusive JS for showing your movie:

   1:  $(function() {

   2:    var videoBase = 'http://static-server/';    

   3:    

   4:    $('.VideoTeaserArea').click(function() {   

   5:      $(this).openLightBox("<div id='media'></div>");  

   6:      playMovie('intro-movie.swf');   

   7:    });    

   8:    

   9:    function playMovie(videoFile) {  

  10:      var videoUrl = videoBase + videoFile;  

  11:      var att = { data: videoUrl, width: "640", height: "378", allowfullscreen:true};  

  12:      var params = { flashvars: "autostart=true"};  

  13:      var id = "media";  

  14:      var myObject = swfobject.createSWF(att, params, id);  

  15:    }  

  16:  });

- line 2: Our movie directory, better place such content on static server or even CDNs.
- line 4: VideoTeaserArea is a class name that we spread all over our site - clicking on it will trigger the movie.
- line 5: openLightBox – on our site the movie will be opened in a light box.
- line 11: the videoUrl, will be seen in the configured size. allowfullscreen is false by default. read more here
- line 12: flashVars will be used here in order to have our movie start as our light-box will be opened.
- line 13: The placeholder we want to replace while loading the movie
- line 14: Add reference to the swfObject.js in order to have its instance(read bellow). The createSWF method is a low level API which enable combining with other Javascript libraries.

in order to have this code running we must add script tag:
<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>

Now, after having embedding SWF to our site  - Let’s understand how to make this work on IIS and Apache.

So our mission is to have our website play a short intro movie.

Wiki Definition

“Progressive download is a term used to describe the transfer of digital media files from a server to a client, typically using the HTTP protocol when initiated from a computer. The consumer may begin playback of the media before the download is complete. The key difference between streaming media and progressive download is in how the digital media data is received and stored by the end user device that is accessing the digital media.”

Actually the “progressive download” feature implemented in most media players allows them to begin playing the file as soon as enough data received.

File formats: SWF VS. FLV

• Both are Adobe formats.
• FLV is a video container, intended to contain only audio\video
• SWF can contain animations, games, applications and videos
• SWF uses a lossless compression and is limited to a certain number of frames. Due to it is not compressed some files can be too big for use in the internet.
• Large websites like Google, Amazon are using the FLV file formats

After this short explanation, we are ready to start:

1. Create a video file in a common streaming media format (in our case: Camtasia -> SWF, mp4)
2. Upload the files to your Web Server
3. Check whether this link is working from common browsers
4. Link from you Web Pages (HTML tags or JS)

In the next posts we will talk about steps 3 and 4.

For now you can keep reading about step 1 - here

Area 51 – GIS is a new place supported by the Stack Overflow to post your Qusetions and Answers about Geographic information systems. Part of the questions are talking about interesting issues like: Databases comparisons, Algorithms, New tools, GeoTagging, GeoJson, Kml, Map Caching layers etc.

Public beta will begin in 5 days.

Finally, after a long time I find time to upgrade my blog to the newly 2.3 version.

I had many problems installing this version Go-daddy, Monorail and SecurityException.
The last one was also the funny one, after Google-ing a little bit, I found this post by Gabel one of my co-workers.

What’s new?

So first I created my self a new homepage which you can see here.
Second, you can track my reading-list, my twitter statuses and my projects (will be published later).

Have fun.