Code Obsession

TL;DR - If you care about software development at all, read this book now! This book is a condensation and distillation of more than 40 years of industry experience. It is an amazing read. The book expresses the concept of professionalism in the clear, simple (not simplistic,) unapologetic style that Bob uses in all his writing. At a short 204 pages, you can read it in a weekend (like I did.) Having been involved in Agile (XP, XPish, ScrumBut) projects for several years and recently in the software craftsmanship movement, many of the concepts in the book were familiar. The chapters on Saying Yes, Saying No and Estimation really spoke to me. I have had many experiences where I have agreed to "try." Now I see the danger of that statement clearly. I have also had experiences where I have stayed firm on my estimates and been encouraged to feel as though I was not a committed team player. I now have additional tools to help me combat that feeling and take professional actions desp...

Finding the correct code to edit is essential. Here are a few shortcuts to make that easier: Ctrl+I => Incremental search. Just hit the keystroke and start typing. Your cursor will move to the next match. Ctrl+F => You better know this one! Ctrl+Shift+F => Find All. F3 => Next match. Ctrl+Shift+F7 => Highlight usages. Esc clears the highlight. Use it more than once is you will see it is a stack. Alt+F7 => Find usages. Excellent for detecting the scope of a refactoring. Practice these until they are burned into your fingers. I honestly had to execute the command and watch my fingers.

I updated yesterday. So far, so good. Well, mostly. The top 2 options in my boot menu don't actually work, they just load a black screen and I have to power off the machine and try again. But the next option works like a champ and I get some nifty new features. I hope to figure out what those are in the near future . . .

I've read a couple times that the difference between the apprentice and the master performing a the same task isn't one big thing, it is many, many small things that together make a big difference. To that end, I am going to share the small things that help me work more efficiently under the title MicroTips. Here is the first of (hopefully) many: ReSharper is a very powerful add-on for Visual Studio that improves the way one develops .NET code, but only if you know how to use it. (To see a ReSharper Jedi in action, go here .) One of the primary ways it improves one's ability to express thought in code is to eliminate the need to context switch from keyboard to mouse for navigation. First of all, you need to configure the keyboard shortcuts. Do yourself a favor and learn the IntelliJ IDEA shortcuts now, because you will eventually find the Visual Studio flavored shortcuts are inefficient as they each require 2 keystrokes for common activities while the IDEA shortcuts only r...