My Introduction

A couple months ago, wanting some motivation/inspiration for my coding projects, I decided that I wanted to create a blog with a coworker to document our software development efforts as well as our semi-informed opinions about various technologies, etc. I figured it might be fun to also add an audio and/or video podcast, which has become so common these days.

There's no shortage of software development blogs on the internet, but reading through these I often get lost or intimidated, feeling like a n00b due to my lack of knowledge of the subject being discussed. But I also regularly encounter many newbie programmers who are just scratching the surface of professional software development, and I can imagine how intimidating it must be for them.

Being stuck between these two groups, I find myself in a unique position to be a bridge between these classifications. I can learn from the experts and will regularly read their blogs and listen to their podcasts, but I have a lot to offer newbies, and would likely be much more approachable than the alternative. My co-author D-Roc can do the same, though he'd likely deny any hint of n00bness for his ego's sake.

So it seemed natural that the primary audience for our blog/podcast besides ourselves would be these newbie developers, and I was set with the idea. Whether or not we gained a huge following didn't matter so much, because one of the primary goals was self-motivation. Thinking that my friend and coworker D-Roc would surely be on board, I approached him with the idea.

"That sounds gay," D-Roc responded, all-too-familiarly.

I may be embellishing a bit, because it's hard to keep track of whether he called an idea "gay" or "retarded" or just "stupid", but you get the jist. He didn't like the idea at all.

I pressed the issue in the weeks that followed, with no change in his response. I didn't want to do this solo, because two people working together can feed off of each other's motivation. It just wouldn't have the same dynamic without someone to bounce ideas off of.

I had all but given up on the idea when one fateful day, in a far-too-common type of scenario, another coworker (a development lead) sent an email to the group with a link from a post at codinghorror.com. In this post, Jeff Atwood writes a list of ways to improve one's coding skills. One of the items was: "Write a blog."

Not an hour later, D-Roc announced to me his brilliant idea: "I'm going to write a blog! I think that's a really good idea!"

...

As I mentioned, I've encountered this scenario far too often in my life, in which someone else takes credit for embracing an idea that I all but force-fed down their throat previously.

So, despite trying to get feedback from D-Roc about his preferred blogging site/technology/blog name for the past few weeks without any response devoid of the word "gay" or "retarded", that random email sparked D-Roc to create this Blogger account. Further, he had the gall to claim that the reason "we" didn't have a blog was that I was incapable of initiating things, despite the fact that the creation of the blog was entirely contingent upon him accepting the idea, which he didn't until a few days ago.

Needless to say, the name/host of this blog may likely change, but for now I have to settle with the mediocre amount of cooperation I have from D-Roc.

Seriously, why do I code with this guy?

WPF a must for Silverlight

If you're interested in Silverlight, be sure to learn WPF first. Or you could do everything backwards like me: traverse the logical tree and set Dependency Properties by hand in C# code (don't do it).