Evans Codeworks is Hiring!

Filed Under Evans Codeworks | Leave a Comment

Check out our posting on Craigslist for a .NET developer.

Aug

13

The easy way to learn .NET

Filed Under .NET, Programming | 1 Comment

InnerWorkings is one of the best resources for learning .NET that I’ve come across. They have 500+ hours of training material, all hands-on development, not just reading or watching videos.

The process is very effective. You purchase and download a training course. You’re then presented with a programming challenge. You click a button in the InnerWorkings interface to open up Visual Studio with the basic project code. You then write the code needed to complete the challenge.

During the coding process you’re aided by a VS add-in which allows you to easily refresh yourself on the challenge. When you’re done, you click another button to submit your solution to be verified. Your solution either passes, in which case you’re done, or doesn’t pass, in which case you’re given the opportunity to correct your solution.

A couple of things are particularly nice about this.

You’re given a very clear task. Anything that helps you stay focused while learning a new environment is tremendously helpful. When everything is new I find it tremendously hard to stay on track. I constantly discover new and interesting things elsewhere while going through documentation that pulls my attention off the task at hand. “Guard rails” so to speak I find very helpful.
You’re given starter code to work with. This helps you in two ways. First, it shows you how to get started, teaching you some best-practices along the way. Second, it alleviates a lot of the tedious startup work involved in starting from scratch.

I’m looking forward to working through a few of the challenges.

Aug

8

Cornell entrepreneurship on MySpace

Filed Under Cornell, Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment

Cornell entrepreneurs are everywhere!

Here’s a link to the Cornell Entrepreneurship group on MySpace.

Aug

7

Speed up Rails apps with RPM

Filed Under Ruby on Rails, Software Performance Tuning, Web Development | Leave a Comment

New Relic has what looks like a really nice tool for monitoring Rails applications. It’s called RPM and it looks to give some really good insight into where performance bottlenecks occur in a Rails app.

37signals reported some excellent results after a round of performance tuning based on their findings from RPM.

Your mileage may vary. But RPM looks to be one of a very small number (perhaps the number 1) of tools that can help in this way with performance analysis, which is the first step to performance improvement.

Definitely worth a look if you’re doing any Rails development.

Aug

7

Inbound marketing

Filed Under Online marketing | 2 Comments

Just learned about inbound marketing after a call with some of the folks over at HubSpot.

Their value proposition is compelling. Definitely far more valuable than plain old Google Analytics or Mint.

Aug

7

Excellent screencasts available on .NET MVC

Filed Under Web Development | Leave a Comment

There is an excellent screencast tutorial on .NET MVC available for anyone interested in web-development with asp.net. The MVC screencasts are at the bottom of the page

I think this collection of screencasts will be particularly helpful to anyone coming to .NET from Ruby on Rails or other strongly MVC paradigms. .NET can be a bit overwhelming at first, without a solid entry point/introduction to the framework. These tutorials should help you get started on the right foot.