LosTechies - Latest Comments

Re: Presenters, Use Code Snippets for Live Coding

Alper Sunar — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:15:54 -0000

Having seen this technique in action, I can say that it is a brilliant idea. It allows the presenter to build the example step by step and makes it really easy for the attendees to follow what is happening.

Re: Presenters, Use Code Snippets for Live Coding

Carlos Ribas — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:53:34 -0000

I think that depends on the highlighting. Often, highlighting really hurts syntax highlighting and thus impairs readability.

Re: Presenters, Use Code Snippets for Live Coding

rsanchez1 — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:01:13 -0000

What if you have a wall of code, but you highlight it on the fly? As you go through the code, it gets highlighted so the audience can follow you at the pace you want.

Re: Presenters, Use Code Snippets for Live Coding

John Teague — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:46:22 -0000

The problem I have with code snippets in a presentation is that it's a little too much like magic. You're talking and then poof! There's Code!

The typos and the curly braces are not what gets you. It's when you don't know what direction you want to go. When people get in trouble live coding during a presentation is when it's the first time you've written the code. Doing live coding does not absolve you from being prepared. It makes it harder.

Re: Presenters, Use Code Snippets for Live Coding

Carlos Ribas — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:28:33 -0000

Very nice. This is one of the things I really like about watching Apple presentations (WWDC). They almost always do it this way. Hi, btw.

Re: Presenters, Use Code Snippets for Live Coding

Pedro Reys — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:26:10 -0000

I've used this ScriptManager in the past http://bit.ly/1OITpM

I will give AutoHotKey a try.

Thanks for sharing! :P

Re: Improve your LINQ with .Any()

scichelli — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 11:28:57 -0000

The above gives an alternative for the "if count > 0" scenario. Keith Dahlby just tweeted a nice way of replacing "if count > 1." He offers:

myEnumerable.Skip(1).Any()

https://twitter.com/dahlbyk/st...

Re: A Good Night’s Rest

Josh Elster — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 20:23:30 -0000

Ha ha yeah when the transition happens it almost seems like there's something wrong with your eyes or the display!

Re: A Good Night’s Rest

scichelli — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 18:25:23 -0000

Woah... amber-y! This takes some getting used to.

Re: A Good Night’s Rest

scichelli — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 10:43:45 -0000

Alrighty, @Josh Elster , I'm with ya. I just installed f.lux. I've been hearing about it for years; thanks for the nudge. :)

Re: A Good Night’s Rest

Josh Elster — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:55:46 -0000

Another important utility that I think not just devs but anyone who faces a monitor for long periods of time should use: f.lux. (http://stereopsis.com/flux/). As Sharon mentioned, light entering the eye participates in regulating a person's circadian rhythms - the physiological body clock. Cooler color temperatures (think blue-er) fool the body into releasing day-time neurochems, making it harder to get a good night's sleep. Simply modifying a display's color temperature from cool to warm (more orange-y) can mitigate that effect, which is exactly what f.lux does. It changes the color temperature of your screen based on the time of day. I've been using it for a few months now and I can say that it has helped, even if it is only to remind me that yes, it is getting late!

Re: A Good Night’s Rest

scichelli — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:13:38 -0000

Ha! Nerd metaphor, that's awesome! :D

Re: A Good Night’s Rest

John Atten — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:09:38 -0000

re: Learning continues during sleep - Yes, in fact I have heard the metaphor that dreaming is akin to a giant, non-indexed database forming reinforcing relations. Great post!

Re: A Good Night’s Rest

scichelli — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:04:07 -0000

@John Atten , oh, I hear ya. It's tempting to resent the fact that we need sleep, "all those wasted hours!" But console yourself, the time is not wasted, because sleep is when learning happens. I recall this awesome Radiolab episode on sleep (http://www.radiolab.org/2007/m... ), and I think that's where I learned: Sleep kind of paints a patina over the things you did that day, muting everything a little bit. And the things you practice and repeat, they're taller and more emphasized, so they're still prominent after turning down the intensity. Meanwhile, the other clutter is muted and wiped away. Without sleep, you'd never sort any signal out of all the noise of the day.
Speaking of learning programming, if you're in Austin, you're welcome to join our programming language study group, http://polyglotprogrammers.org...

I'm self-taught, and I never feel "caught up." Don't forget to take stock from time to time of what you _do_ know and how much you've already achieved.

Re: A Good Night’s Rest

scichelli — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:52:12 -0000

@Peter, right on. Report back, let us know if it's helping. I feel like we (the dev community) can help each other on this. Good luck!

Re: A Good Night’s Rest

John Atten — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:38:41 -0000

Yup. You precisely describe the problem I have. I am learning development on my own, after work and on weekend. I constantly feel like I am "catching up" and trying to squeeze a few more minutes learning in. Therefore, I get to bed far too late, and whiloe I fall asleep right away, I sleep poorly through the night, and wake too early trying to squeeze in an extra hour or two of dev time before my workday begins.

Re: A Good Night’s Rest

Peter — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 05:59:59 -0000

Great tip! I've set this up: no excuses now.

Re: Accessible Markup: Provide a pronunciation tip to screenreaders

Carlos Ribas — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 19:15:47 -0000

Indeed. He had been using my app for quite some time and just coping with a few minor issues but then iOS 6 really hobbled it, so he reached out. Super cool. I felt the same way about using an iPhone without seeing it. It is actually pretty well done. If you have one and want to try it out, shoot me an e-mail and I'll share how to enable it :)

Re: Accessible Markup: Provide a pronunciation tip to screenreaders

scichelli — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 18:56:21 -0000

Oh, that's awesome, Carlos. Cool that your customer was open to talking with you about it. I'd love to be able to chat with someone and get that kind of insight. :) I'm having trouble imagining how one would use an iPhone without seeing it; this is really intriguing.

Re: Accessible Markup: Provide a pronunciation tip to screenreaders

Carlos Ribas — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 18:47:45 -0000

Cool post! This reminds me of a recent customer encounter. I received an e-mail from a blind user, asking for some bugfixes. Apparently, iOS 6 had changed some behavior and my app was interacting with that new behavior in a weird way, causing annoying alerts on every tap. It was so amazing to me to realize that people are using my product in a way I had no idea was even possible. We exchanged some e-mails, mostly so my customer could teach me how to use the device in accessible mode, then I spent a couple of hours going through it and adding voice-over hint text where needed, fixing weird ordering, and of course correcting that issue with the annoying alerts. When I released the next update, that same customer emailed me again thanking me for the fixes and improvements. Awesome.

Re: Accessible Markup: Provide a pronunciation tip to screenreaders

scichelli — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 09:27:25 -0000

Oh, ha, I should mention that the link to Texas ROSE goes to the "before" site. Their new site will go live after the Open AIR judging is complete.

Re: The post you don’t want to read on the topic I don’t want to write about

scichelli — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:46:59 -0000

Re: New Location for ReSharper Shortcut for Context-Sensitive Unit-Test Running

scichelli — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:12:09 -0000

Mine seems to be Ctrl-T, R, but yeah, it is automatically mapped.

So, taking Bob's point, now you know the name of the command to go look and see what yours is set to (and change it if you want).

Re: New Location for ReSharper Shortcut for Context-Sensitive Unit-Test Running

Bob — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 12:58:26 -0000

Isn't that automatically set by default to ctrl-t ctrl-r in resharper 6?

Re: ReSharper Shortcut for Context-Sensitive Unit-Test Running

scichelli — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 11:44:08 -0000

I'm glad you brought this up! I went digging and found that it has moved. It is now ReSharper.ReSharper_ReSharper_UnitTest_RunContext. (Note the extra ReSharper in there; that's not a typo.)