The Intraweb Home of Andy White

Here are a few of the nerdy sites I occasionally visit:

Blogs

• Coding Horror
  • Great software development blog
• Daily WTF
  • Things that make you say “WTF?” on a daily basis
• GameDev.net
  • I don’t really know how to write games, but this site has some great resources on programming in general
  • Good books section (I’m a book guy)
• Joel on Software
  • Pretty well-known software development “thinker”
• Practice Makes…
  • Co-worker’s blog on software development
  • I have to admit, I do enjoy talking about nerdy software theory, so it’s interesting to hear what the people that you know actually think
• Rob Conery
  • Creator of SubSonic library for .NET
  • I like this guy because he doesn’t just spew conceptual non-sense about the latest technologies, he actually tries to use them, and tries to evaluate whether things actually make sense or make your life any easier
• Scott Guthrie
  • Microsoft guy who always has the most cutting edge, interesting news on ASP.NET
• Scott Hanselman
  • Another one of those software development “thinkers”
• Stack Overflow
  • A great digg-like community site for software development nerds
  • Promotes OCD behavior for answering questions in order to gain a somewhat useless reputation

Podcasts

• Stack Overflow
  • This might be the ideal software dev podcast - they talk about things that people care about, and don’t BS about stupid theories
  • I like how Joel Spolsky always plays the devil’s advocate about all the trendy new bull crap that people are trying to schlep.  Sometimes he seems a little behind the times, but he usually makes really valid points, and you wonder if he’s actually behind the times, or actually ahead.
  • I like how how Jeff Atwood really digs into everything.  He’s not just BS’ing about theories, he’s actually trying to implement things.
• Hanselminutes
  • Not quite as “controversial” or “challenging to the status quo” as Stack Overflow, but he still brings an ounce of reason to any discussion
  • Covers interesting topics

Tools

• Cygwin
  • Moving from the Unix world to Microsoft, I really missed the command line tools - this fills the void sufficiently for me
• Fiddler
  • HTTP debugger tool
  • This might be one of the most valuable tools I’ve ever come across
  • Completely invaluable for debugging web-services internally and externally
• Spring/Spring.NET
  • Inversion of Control (IoC) application framework
  • Provides so many useful utilities and conventions for developing code
  • I’m not an experienced software developer by any means, but I feel like Spring just makes complete sense, it completely rocks
• Vim
  • I don’t know if I could ever stand to use a normal text editor again
  • I go through great pains and am willing to spend money to get even basic vim capabilities into whatever IDE I have to use for whatever I’m doing
• Wireshark
  • Packet sniffer
  • Very useful for debugging external web-service integrations without having to modify code

Books

• Design Patterns
  • The famous “Gang of Four” (GoF) design patterns book
  • A little dry to read, but a timeless reference
• Domain Driven Design
  • Describes a relatively new “theory” on designing systems and applications
• Head First Design Patterns
  • A more accessible version of the GoF Design Patterns
  • Great for getting into OO design for the first time
• Killer Game Programming in Java
  • I learned Java using this book
  • Provides some really interesting examples of game development, AI, 3D graphics, etc.
  • Code examples are pretty ugly, but they do the job, and it’s a fun book to work through
• The Pragmatic Programmer
  • Really useful, common-sense tips on software development
  • Reinforces things that, deep-down, you probably already know
• Refactoring
  • Methods of improving existing code without necessarily changing any functionality
  • Most IDEs provide automatic refactoring support, which are all described in this book
  • A little dry to read, but reinforces concepts