I love automation. I’m pretty lazy by nature and the more I can offload to my little programmatic or robotic helpers the better. I’ll be sad the day they become self-aware and decide that it’s payback time and enslave us all.

Tony Hoare, the computer scientist who implemented null references in ALGOL calls it his “billion-dollar mistake.”

I wasn’t prepared to write an end-of-year blog post given the impending destruction of the world via a Mayan prophesied cataclysmic fury. But since that didn’t pan out I figured I’d better get typing.

Merry Christmas!

I have a confession to make.

As of today, I’ve been a GitHub employee for one year and I gotta tell you…

Once again, those crazy fools Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin are touring around this great country of ours in a big ass RV as part of their .NET Rocks Road Trip. Last time it was for the launch of Visual Studio 2010. This time it coincides with Visual Studio 2012.

The recent elections remind me of interesting paradoxes when you study the mathematics of voting. I first learned of this class of paradoxes as an undergraduate at Occidental College in Los Angeles (well technically Eagle Rock, emphasis always on the Rock!). As a student, I spent a couple of summers as an instructor for OPTIMO, a science and math enrichment program for kids about to enter high school. You know, that age when young men and women’s minds are keenly focused on mathematics and science. What could go wrong?!

In my last post, I talked about the MonkeySpace conference conference and how it reflects positive trends in the future of open source in .NET. But getting to a better future is going to take some work on our part. And a key component of that is making NuGet better.

At the end of last year, I wrote a blurb about the Open Source Fest event at Mix 2011. Imagine the typical exhibition hall, but filled with around 50 open source projects. Each project had a station in a large room where project members presented what they were working on to others. You could see the gleam of inspiration in the smiles of developers as they exchanged ideas and suggestions. I left this event completely fired up.

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!”