Just a small review and feedback for the newly started TentacleprOn Podcast by tante.

Its a podcast with a weird but unique name. Against all conventions, its pretty much categoryless, and from what I heard I’d put it in Philosophy if I was forced to. But overall, tante wants to pick up everything interesting he can find - as there are already so many categorized podcasts that you could listen to. A good point.

Episode 0 explains what the podcast aims to be and what ideas it should convey. I think this stuff definitely needs to be in textform easily accessible from the main blog page - as noone usually listens to 1 hour of “something” he knows nothing about. So at least try to be more descriptive about the contents in text form.

In Episode 1, the podcast begins with the fundamental concepts of reality and introduces us to the theories of Leipnitz - that all things are based on some atomar building blocks that don’t underlie the physical laws, don’t communicate and have different levels - of of them is the sentinent human spirit. Tante exlains that he wants to invite guests in the following episodes, and in Episode 1 you can easily understand why: talking about such a philosophical topic makes you want to get more views than only those of just one person. You’ll also want questions to be thrown in like “How do we percieve a reality, if our spirits can’t communicate with the sensory input our nerves / eyes give us?” But the shownotes are pretty exhaustive.

So, with no specific topics or categories set, I’d argue everyone should decide if he likes to listen to new, interesting stuff, and if so, if he likes the style Tante uses in his podcast. For my part, I like his voice, his choice of words and his use of language, he should just whine less about his german accent and his inferior knowledge. I seldomly hear people talking english that good and fluent and I bet he isn’t that dumb! ;-)

One small technical comment from a part-time Apple-fanboy: I’d love to get this podcast via iTunes (and this shouldn’t be hard to set up). As I didn’t see a better way than opening the feed, download the .mp3-file, put it in iTunes, mark it as podcast, synch it to my iDevice to listen to it on my way to work. Okay, I didn’t really investigate in that area - but it should be found in iTunes. iTunes after all is the first software that made up my mind about podcasts, because there wasn’t an uncomplicated method to get podcasts for me before, and so I didn’t listen to them.

Overall rating: Interesting. I’ll stick to it for now. Try it yourself!

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This is a litte unstructured rant. That just needs to come out.

I listen to some software-engineering postcasts, read some SE-blogs and generally try to get better at what I do for a living (which is developing software). But I listen to those bloggers and postcasters,  who have often developed software for two or three decades (this means 20-30 friggin’ years), and wonder if they think we all did so. No, we didn’t. And this is where they fail.

They are gurus. Nerdy heroes. They developed languages, built enterprise software, know all the technical details and some may even be able to read assembler code. They work at google, microsoft or some agile startup that will do it all right. The wiser ones tell us what the best practices are, which design patterns are more superb than others and why dynamically typed languages rule now that we’re doing test-driven development. The lesser wise ones use other buzzwords like SEO, Social, Scrum, Semantic, … S-omething. Some are talking about architectural layers, loose coupling, ORMS, SQL vs. NoSql databases, the importance of version control, team-management and the big difference between computer science and the software development craft. Dependency inversion and injection. They’re talking about a wide array of frameworks, tools, libraries and assemblies. Damn, and they still talk about command-line-tools, grep-commands and build-scripts.

But they fail to realise that the usual software-developer out there doesn’t understand what they’re talking about. I see it every day. Computer scientists that finish with a university-degree know next-to-nothing about software development. People programming everything in PHP. I mean the easy stuff and the complex stuff - and PHP wasn’t made for both. I met doctors of “buisiness informatics” with no clue about Software Development - but a good skill with word and powerpoint. Project planners who taught this at university - but fail at leading a team finishing a project in real life. I experience it in my own skills, that I may know all the ideas, but in the short time, I haven’t worked with 1% of what the gurus talk about. We didn’t get taught that at university - and if you try to teach it to yourself, you’re doomed to fail (for some time at least). Try pair programming alone. Or getting the idea behind version control - alone. Try to write structured code - if you’re the only person reading it. Try learning programming as the one guy not having programmed for 5 years besides two others who have. They won’t wait for you, and you won’t learn.

Image via Wikipedia

All just Buzzwords? Well, what about those fancy Design Patterns? Architecture? MVC? Unit-Testing? To be true, I know that the gurus are right. Many gurus also think about these issues. I work for a real guru who also understands that the fresh programmers need to learn, and he’s a good teacher and patient with us learners. And I try to get used to all the best practices, the agile development, the continuous learning, the new tools. But I think that 80% of the developers out there just want to do what they were trained to do, not knowing that at school or university, they just saw 5% of what they really need to know. And they truely have no intention to learn even more - as 8 hours of work a day certainly is enough!

But are CS-students software developers? Or do those developers come from somewhere else? India comes to my mind. But no, thats not what I meant. I believe good software developers are born from themselves - no school is gonna bring you to developing good software, the only thing that will help you is an unlimited thirst for knowledge. I heard the word “Infovore” somewhere, and thats exactly the kind of people that transcend into those good developers. Enjoying learning new stuff.

I don’t mean SuperBrains. Well, there are the few geeks that came on this world with the fun to code and which were born with a linux-kernel in mind, but please try to realise that software development tools and techniques need to be usable. And that at universities more practical work needs to be done. And people should have more basic-courses. Learn programming more. Get lessons on source control, on getting to know different IDEs. On learning using basic libraries. Get told more was object oriented means instead of giving them a definition and telling them “this is better than goto”. WTF is goto? Show them! Let them make some Basic or Pascal code. Let every wanna-be developer do a lot of projects with different focusses. And let them explain their code afterwards, so they’ll do it themselves. Instead of people from China who just earned 20 bucks.

There are only so many people speaking binary even if they’re developing software. I heard Linux has reached 1% market share. By making better GUIs. Go figure.

At the end, I want to give you the link to a really great post by one of the wiser programming guys: Confessions of a terrible programmer. You may think this is all BS. :-) See ya.

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Hi people. Just a small notion: I won’t blog a lot as long as I’m employed, so if you wanna keep informed with what happens here, use the RSS feed with a RSS Reader.

Since I’m going to work by bike and need between 15-20 minutes, I begun listening to podcasts on the way. I like tech stuff and software development stuff - so if you like that I’ll give you some hints here. The podcasts I listen to usually go between 1 and 2 hours.

Software Engineering Radio | The Podcast for Professional Software Developers: A nice english podcast (from the accent I think everyone can guess that these guys are germans after all) about software engineering in general. Mostly interviews, nicely prepared, no queer stuff, interesting interviewees. My favourite podcast at the moment. Gets updated all two weeks.

Z! - Zeitgeist, Entwicklung, Technik - der Technik Podcast: A german podcast from two guys about tech-news that I like a lot - updated about every two weeks. Decent and well structured usually. I prefer this one to the next…

Bits und so: … which is another german podcast about techie news. Nevertheless I listen to both of these, to keep myself informed and listen to different views on the things that go on in our binary world. This podcasts most of the time sports about 4 people, so even if they’re pretty good organised sometimes it’s quite a mess. Another negative factor is a lot of commercial stuff in there and a focus on the Apple side of software - but its entertaining and the “picks” where tools get recommended is nice.

.NET Rocks!: As fresh .NET newbie I tried out this english podcast and was pleasantly surprised with its quality. Its fun, updated once to twice a week and usually sports a lot of .NET - tech and interviews with .NETters.

Die Drei Vogonen: I only tried this german podcast once so far, so this is more of a honorable mention. When I looked on the duration of over 6 hours, I was appalled a bit, but took the test nevertheless. First, it was only 3 hours long, then the whole show began anew - to technical issues on this one. Then the guys were more relaxed, also talking about personal stuff like where they went for vacation … and it was also pretty unorganised, despite a well structured layout with picks (same as in Bitsundso), short news (that are too short compared to some beekeeping-hobby-tales) and “deep thoughts” where a certain topic gets highlighted (but in the case of GPG the speakers just didn’t have a clue what they were talking about). So preparation minus, organisation minus, nice ambience plus. As time is limited (in fact the most limited resource in our short lives), I’ll ignore this one till the others have no more stuff for me.

I also tried the chaosradio, but I didn’t like the style and attitude of this one. Oh, and I need to try out TentacleprOn by tante soon.

Just read through some articles on the iPad, Apples new touch-tablet-device. These are my thoughts.

CON: I don’t want Apple’s iPad for the following reasons:

- I got a laptop, an iPhone and an e-book reader.

- The diplay is not e-ink - reading books on it therefore just doesn’t do it.

- It doesn’t fit in my pocket. Its not a phone nor a MP3-device.

- It uses the iPhone’s OS. But when I use a computer, I want multitasking. And I won’t want to have no mouse.

PRO:

- It has a decent resolution for games. The iPod touch / iPhone is already very sucessful, but it has enough space to make complex input fields possible. The iPad can do that. It will be a game machine, I hereby predict.

- It has the “I could buy it my mother, and she’d use a computer for the first time”-effect. It will be a great gift. This is maybe the most impressive factor.

- The programs Apple delivers with it are touch-optimized. But that won’t mean they’re better.

Summary:

Who needs an iPod touch that won’t fit into your pocket? Who needs a touch laptop without multitasking? Nuff said, lets wait for the iPhone OS 4 and what it brings to the iPad, because after all they’re running a standard iPhone OS without iPad optimizations. I guess there will be more usecases after the update, but at the time being I won’t buy one even if the price was 100$. Well, maybe as a present for my mom. Here are some more interesting links by Zemanta …

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