With Reactive Extensions you sometimes need one observable sequence to run after another observable sequence completes. Perhaps the first one has side effects the second one depends on. Egads! I know, side effects are evil in this functional world, but it happens.

When someone says they want to write a technical book, I take a hammer and slam it on the aspiring author’s thumb and ask “How do you like that?” If the answer is, “Very much! May I have another.” This person is ready to write a technical book.

I was once accused of primitive obsession. Especially when it comes to strings. Guilty as charged!

Next week my wife and I celebrate our tenth anniversary in Oahu with the kids. It’s been a great ten years and I’m just so lucky to have such a wonderful woman and partner in my life along with two deviously great kids.

If you look hard enough at our industry (really at all industries), you’ll find many implicit quotas in play. For example, some companies demand a minimum set of hours worked per week.

Back in March of this year I had the honor and delight to give the opening keynote at CodeMania, a new conference in New Zealand.

Today on Twitter, I noticed this tweet from Dare Obasanjo (aka @carnage4life on Twitter) critical of a blog post by Rand Fishkin, co-founder and CEO of SEOMoz.

In one mailing list I’m on, someone ran into a problem where they renamed a controller, but ASP.NET MVC could not for the life of it find it. They double checked everything. But ASP.NET MVC simply reported a 404.

Sometimes, you need to scan all the types in an assembly for a certain reason. For example, ASP.NET MVC does this to look for potential controllers.

As a kid, I was an impatient little brat. On any occasion that required waiting, I became Squirmy Wormy until I pushed my dad to make the demand parents so often make of fidgety kids, “Sit still!”

Take a look at the following code.

A couple weeks ago I had the great pleasure to speak at the Norwegian Developer’s Conference (NDC). This is my second time speaking at NDC. The first time was back in 2009 and it was a blast!

In my last blog post, I mentioned that GitHub for Windows (GHfW) works with non-GitHub repositories, but I didn’t go into details on how to do that. GHfW is optimized for GitHub.com of course, but using it with non-GitHub repositories is quite easy.

For the past several months I’ve been working on a project with my amazing cohorts, Paul, Tim, and Adam, and Cameron at GitHub. I’ve had the joy of learning new technologies and digging deep into the inner workings of Git while lovingly crafting code.

Around eight years ago I wrote a blog post about Repetitive Strain Injury entitled The Real Pain of Software Development [part 1]. I soon learned the lesson that it’s a bad idea to have “Part 1” in any blog post unless you’ve already written part 2. But here I am, eight years later, finally getting around to part 2.

For a long time, good folks like Matt Podwysocki have extolled the virtues of Reactive Extensions (aka Rx) to me. It piqued my interest enough for me to write a post about it, but that was the extent of it. It sounded interesting, but it didn’t have any relevance to any projects I had at the time.

Changing a big organizations is a slow endeavor. But when people are passionate and persistent, change does happen.

Disclaimer: these opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent the opinion of any person or institution who are not me.

I recently gave my first talk on Git and GitHub to the Dot Net Startup Group about Git and GitHub. I was a little nervous about how I would present Git. At its core, Git is based on a simple structure, but that simplicity is easily lost when you start digging into the myriad of confusing command switches.

Conway’s Law states,