Alec the Geek

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Archive for November, 2008

Handy Hack: Using FriendFeed to follow more than status updates from ANYONE

Posted by Alec on 29 November 2008

Now that twitter has become mainstream (Even the Australian prime minister has a microblog)  it can be useful to consolidate all of a contact’s information into one place (instead having to monitor their blog, microblog, flickr account etc etc) which is where a service life FriendFeed (ff) comes in.

On ff you create create an account that sucks in all your other feeds (blog, twitter, identi.ca, flickr, digg, slidshare and so on) into a single place. All people have to do is to subscribe to  that single account (probably via RSS or IM) and they get everything you are doing — not just your twitters. At the time of writing ff supports:

That’s all very well and good, but what if your network buddy does not have an account on FriendFeed? That’s were ff Imaginary friends come it. You can create an proxy account and then add the external accounts your contact posts on. All the account types listed above can be added and anything not in the list can created using the Blog type which expects an RSS or Atom feed. If you are adding a WordPress blog then make sure you follow this suggestion to get post titles to display correctly.

So currently I have 21 ‘real’ contacts on ff, but another 17 proxy contacts setup, including @stephenfry. Not only do I get his twitter posts but also notification of his wonderful blog posts, all in one place.

Posted in Web | Leave a Comment »

What a young developer needs to know

Posted by Alec on 3 November 2008

(Updated 5/Oct/08 and 11/Nov/08)

I occasionally ponder on what skills and knowledge a novice who wants to become a skilled developer should acquire. In no particular order here is a suggested list of things to consider:

  • Basic accounting: This is useful from both an IT perspective — a lot of IT systems are used for financial management; and from a general work perspective because it helps with your future in business
  • Version control concepts and tools
  • Waterfall Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC): Requirements, design, building, testing, release
  • Agile SDLC such as XP and/or Scrum
  • How to use a command line
  • Basic compiler architecture — the 7 phases of compiling
  • Data representation: Number bases (binary, Hex, BCD); character sets; XML markup
  • Basic algorithms: Sorting, Linked lists etc, recursion,…
  • Important design patterns
  • Testing and quality as a substantial stand alone topic
  • Programming in at least three languages: C (or Java, C++, Ada etc), Perl (or Python, Ruby etc) plus one other (e.g. Lisp, Haskell). At least one needs to be an OO language and OO programming should be a familiar habit. Perl does not count as OO for this discussion.
  • How to use a word processor and spreadsheet
  • Basic SQL, RDBMS architectures, 1st, 2nd & 3rd Normal forms and basic DB schema design
  • TCP/IP networking and basics of http, email, ftp, etc. Needs to include conceptual understanding of DNS and related security issues
  • Basic IT security concepts
  • Basic IT System Management
  • Personal task and work management (e.g. GTD or GSD, suggested by Sinewalker)
  • Maintaining personal work records in a  log book

Further topics

  • More advanced RDBMS use and schema design
  • Embedded systems
  • How to use LaTeX or Docbook
  • Application engineering for quality (maintenance, extensibility, performance etc)
  • OS design
  • Requirements engineering
  • UML

Further suggestions anyone?

Posted in LinkedIn, Personal Opinion, Software Development, Work Practices | 5 Comments »