Teaching Programming to Middle Schoolers

I can't believe that there is no programming instruction at my sons middle school. How can this be since developers are basically ruling the world these days. So, I am going to take matters in my own hand and start a Code Club this Fall. I have a few months to crate the content and curriculum. I found this site called Codecademy and am thinking of generating the content here as the students could then use the site to code from home or school. I am looking at teaching them javascript as it is very versatile from creating websites to creating servers with node.js. I was teaching my son some node.js and he was thinking that this was cool. So this is what I am looking at doing, I think it would be cool to create a simple chat server with node.js and put together a basic game with chat. I am looking at mangojs for the game engine. I will generate the content myself that way no need to worry about copyrights. Maybe we can even get into git and github in the advance version in the year. Too much? I am always a little over ambitious, but you don't accomplish great things without pushing things a bit right? I will keep everyone posted on this as I go along.

Fall Code Camp 2011 was a Success

My presentation on REST API Design at the Philly.NET Fall Code Camp (www.phillydotnet.org) went well and most all of the speakers made it! That is a plus when you run a speaker track. I feel my presentation went really well, at least I felt the audience was engaged. I posted the presentation at: REST API Design Presentation

I look forward to seeing everyone in the Spring.

Thanks @markmag for the picture:

Facebook Like Me

I was wondering if I can Like myself.

If you like Mitch, go ahead and click. Remember there is a hot debate about a dislike button and it does not exist yet so this is your only option. =D

Measuring Quality in Agile

People keep wanting to measure defects in the agile process. It doesn't necessarily make sense to me how this relates to quality since the whole team participates in doing what is necessary to move small stories to done. It may measure productivity as fewer defects per story would mean that the team was being more productive. Anyways, agile is about collaboration and getting to done, so I don't think this is very relevant. For quality, measuring the number of issues found in production after release or tracking the over defects per system in production and seeing that track down over time would be better indicators of quality. Thoughts?

Playing with Git

I have two projects that I want to get up and going with a few friends and am thinking of using Git as the repository. Looks interesting.

http://learn.github.com/p/intro.html

Pivot from Microsoft for Silverlight

This is a cool way to represent vast quantities of data and then narrow down on what you are interested in. I think I want to use it to represent a bunch of programs -> Projects -> Stories that make up many of the things running in a company. This may be a good feature for the Portfolio Management application that I am working on.

Go to - http://www.getpivot.com/ for more information and a demo.

Planning to Create a Beginners Guide to VS 2010, .NET 4, etc.

I want to look at this through the eyes of someone that is new to the .NET world and where they would begin with the slew of technology, libraries, frameworks, etc. available. I want to go beyond the "Here is some cool technology and here is a cool example" to here is how you would write some quality code, including unit test, acceptance test, build automation, useful patterns. In short, teach the things early that often scare newbies and are needed to deliver quality code. If you have any suggestions, please comment here. Otherwise, I will be beginning with an ASP.NET MVC application or Silverlight most likely, while utilizing as many of the principles to quality development in the training.

Take the Pledge and Ship Great Code

As a software craftsman, you need to take pride in your work and do a good job. Here is a pledge that will get you started:  http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=7588

Microsoft Supports jQuery Even More

It is great to see Microsoft supporting jQuery with their announcements at MIX. I have been a fan of jQuery for about 3 years now and this only can make it better.