Over the past year or so I've been getting more and more interested in the various forms of automated testing. I've been a developer for verging on 20 years, and yet it's only been these past few years where I've seen a much larger interest in automated testing in the industry as a whole. It's obviously been around for a while, but it's never been as popular as it is today. Especially now the tools and libraries are getting better and better. In the past, it was a rare exception where a developer would heavily write tests as part of their code. Now, it's frowned upon if you don't.

A month or so ago, I tweeted my favourite audio podcasts, and realised that it was worth a blog post. I mostly listen to podcasts on the way to and from work in the car. Some of them I've listened to for quite a while, and some I've only recently discovered but wish I had come across sooner! Hopefully this post will help others discover these great podcasts! Please comment with your favourite podcasts too if I've missed any good ones out!

I quite often use keywords surrounded in parenthesis in my code as temporary todo markers for Resharper's Todo Explorer. One common keyword I use a lot is (nocommit) to indicate something is temporary and shouldn't be committed to source control. This is where Git hooks come in very handy to stop me accidentally committing these temporary changes.

So, I've written a few posts in the past about storing code snippets and my various attempts at finding the right tool for the job. I've tried plain text, TWiki, and Evernote in the past. However, I've now finally(?) settled on Workflowy for both this as well as many other things. I really think I've found the sweet spot here for code snippets.

I use a couple of different Bitbucket accounts, and in the past have mostly just used HTTPS to connect, but did find that I was getting prompted for credentials more often than I would like - even after telling SourceTree (my GUI of choice) to save those credentials.

Today I had to track down a performance issue on a live site where the CPU usage was abnormally high. I couldn't reproduce it locally, and didn't want to install profiling tools on the live server (not that our IT team would have allowed this anyway!).

Time tracking is usually required for most projects. I've had to do it with both my freelance work, where I charged per hour; and also in my full-time position where we each submit a weekly timesheet.

You may have noticed that the domain name to my blog has now changed. I've been umming and arring for a while about the name www.coderhell.com. I liked it when I first registered it a few years ago, but more recently I've liked it less and less. Especially when verbally telling it to someone. The name was originally derived from Jeff Atwood's blog Coding Horror. However, whilst there's times when I would describe something I'm working on as a coder hell or coding horror - I also love programming and see it as a hobby and passion as well as a career, so the old name perhaps wasn't very suitable, and not all that professional.

Last night whilst was watching a PluralSight video by Shawn Wildermuth, one of the chapters mentioned a plugin called Zen Coding. I've heard about this in the past, but had forgotten about it until now - which was a mistake!

Okay, so don't take the subject line too seriously, as I love books and reading. But as far as learning new technologies are concerned, which would you rather do: spend large chunks of your time reading massive manual-like books ...OR... sit back and watch an expert in their field show you how it's done? Words and screenshots don't even begin to compare with watching an expert explain and demonstrate it in a video.