Holy smokes, do I have a lot to learn

It's been a loooooooooong time since I really invested in my technical expertise as a developer. Sure, I've grown a ton over the last year and I've really "come into my own" but as far as the latest and greatest talks, toys and technology platforms, my head is still somewhere in late 2007. Luckily, podcasts and prolific blog writers are making my education far easier than I could have imagined. At the same time I'm absorbing massive quantities of information that I hope I can retain at least 50% of. Here's a shortlist of the craziness swimming in my mind.

I made a small quest into truly learning what Javascript is all about and I'm happy to report that it really is an awesome tool. It's been getting a bad rap for a number of years but it's really turned out to be a simple but effective language. I've been getting interested in dynamic languages overall and I used Javascript as an opportunity to check out something I've already meddled with AND I can program with nothing more than Notepad and a browser (how effing sweet is that?). Seriously, I'm sick of compilation. I waste an hour of my day every day compiling projects. But that's beside the point. Javascript is great. Go check it out, understand closure, understand that everything is a module (function, whatevs) and dynamic languages are not as scary as you've been programmed to believe.

I've begun to study domain driven design simply so I can see what all the hoopla is about. At first, you'll be patting yourself on the back since it's talking about things that any seasoned programmer is familiar with. You have your solution domain where you model your customers or orders or whatever it is that your software is trying to solve. But it's more than that. It's creating discipline and drawing lines and boundaries where you may not have considered them before. It's trying to promote clarity not purity.

Case in point, I was involved with a recent code review where I came across some code that had a distinct smell. Upon discussing the issue with the developer submitting the review it was revealed that the code existed due to a hack from an external system. Basically, the external system didn't have a way to model some financial transaction so it used another financial transaction to "hack" it into the system. For example, it's like recording a negative deposit to some banking software because the software doesn't have a function to withdraw money. Some of the DDD literature I've been reading recently points to the simple fact that we're no longer modeling the domain. We're modeling the hack of another system. Frankly, you don't need DDD to see this as a problem but it certainly brings it into perspective. It brings confusion to the codebase, to the domain, to any developers coming on board, the code that evolves from this will be as bent and unsightly as its ancestors and so forth. I may have not given this as much scrutiny had I not had so much DDD dancing through my mind.

I read Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle's Agile Software Development with Scrum since the scrum tsunami is about to crash on my development organization. I'm drinking the Kool Aid so I'm not so concerned about whether or not it's a good methodology. The only thing that worries me is if the management cast can stomach it when I actually speak up and collaborate in ways I had never done before. If what I read is true then I should be telling them when what we're doing is ill advised. I continuously read that I am now "empowered". We'll have to see how that ultimately shakes out...

I started digging into .NET 3.5 and some of the niceties that have come to the framework. Nothing too serious but I hope to be writing a new web app with it soon. I'm particularly interested in ASP.NET MVC since that's now in 1.0. I've downloaded everything, now I just need to do something with it.

Other stuff that's on my radar but I haven't played with yet is Fluent NHibernate, Structure Map, Ruby, and DSLs. I think I may have a post or two coming to discuss some thoughts that those topics have generated for me.

In any case, my brain is running dry and it's 2am.