Thursday evening seems to be “the night for blogging” for me, so here goes:
I saw this cool programming challenge over on Aaron Skonnard’s blog (from day 1 of Code Camp that Pluralsight are running).
Programming challenge: at the end of the day, we held a contest that required students to write code to chase a technology trail. It was a race. They were to start by sending a specific HTTP message to a specific endpoint (it required a special header so you had to write WebRequest code). The HTTP response contained the name of a private queue on the network that they subsequently had to read a message from. The message contained a WSDL document from which they had to generate a WS proxy class. Invoking the WS proxy returned the address to a .NET remoting endpoint, for which they already had an interface assembly. The .NET Remoting call returned a secret, identifying the winner. It took the winner about 20-25 mins. It required them to use every communication technique that we discussed in detail today. Hard? Easy?
In other news from this week Darren Neimke has joined Readify. I haven’t really blogged about it yet (‘cause I try not to blog about work stuff) but I joined Readify 2 months ago and have been very happy here. Last time Darren and I worked for the same company it didn’t last very long - hopefully this time will be different.
At the end of this month I will be traveling to Japan and Italy (my spiritual home, which consumes about 14 billion espressos annually, and where you can get a decent doppio on the train) and won’t be on-line much. Does anybody have any book suggestions for an extended period off-line? I’m keen to “travel light“ 1-2 books, and no 1000-page monsters. Code-intensive books make me want to code, and that will probably just lead to frustration. Does anybody have any good ideas?
With that in mind, i’d have to recommend my personal favourites: anything by Stephen King, Brian Lumley, or Terry Pratchet. Hey, you never said you wanted IT stuff!