LINKBLOG for March 8, 2008

• Pablo's Topic of the Month - March: SOLID Principles - Chad Myers
  First post in a new series on good old OO principles


• TIP: The Top Mistake of public speaking - Craig Bailey
  ' Lesson reminder: It's never about you - it's about them '


• Usability Testing Pitfalls - Wheeler Software
  ' We decided to use contextual inquiry as a way to understand the users' work.\
  Here's where it gets interesting '


• Career path from hobbyist to professional - Tim Stall
  ' Software Engineering is unique in that it offers a gradual path from a hobbyist to a professional '


• A Question of Programming Ethics - Jeff Atwood
  Shocking example how you can also handle passwords of user accounts for your application


• Breathtaking UI Award: Linksys - Gervase Markham
  As I'm in almost the same situation, Linksys router and no signal on the attic, this is mostly a note-to-self. And a good example how not to to a user interface


• Wednesday Time Saver: Yourli.st - Jason Harris
  Cool service, no registration is a good idea when not really necessary. And they have your email anyway, so that could count as a partial registration. Only gripe is that the time zone is set to GMT-1, while I'm in GMT+1...


• DebuggerStepThroughAttribute - Craig Andera
  ' By the time I've finished stepping in and out of that, I'm all, "Aargh! Just take me to the code!" Luckily, there's an attribute that lets you skip all these piddly statements: DebuggerStepThroughAttribute '


• 6 Ways to Increase Your Confidence As You Code - Ben Watson
  Some great tips, both on the technical and the communication side (e.g. let other people help you)
  ' Having a set of rules to follow is a fundamental requirement of good software engineering '


• Work on your Vocabulary. The word for today is "CodableValue" - Eric Gunnerson
  ' So, to make things simpler, there are a set of codes - using one to three letters in this case - that are the "standard" ways of encoding the longer string (what I'll call the "Display Text") '


• Agile Irony - David Starr
  funny picture (how one can be pro-agile but contra-communication)


• Freeware/Open Source for Windows Weekly Summary - Todd Ogasawara
  


• The IE8 VPC - IE8 the easy way - Greg Duncan
  Microsoft release XP/Vista VPC's with IE8 so you can try it out safely