The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

Head First Design Patterns

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One of the perks of where I’m working now is being able to work with talented developers again. I don’t mind the occasional solo projects, but you can learn a lot more by working in a development team. One guy I’m working with is very big into design patterns and I’ve actually become very interested in them myself.

I tried to learn some design patterns for C# about six months ago, but found them to be very complex. I was also working with some people who didn’t really see the point of them. The last contract I spent trying to convince the developers that they shouldn’t be using inline SQL in a page source. So, I didn’t have much luck learning it on my own very well. Now, I got loads of code to marvel at and compile.

When I mentioned my difficulty picking up Design Patterns to my colleague, he told me he had trouble with some of the concepts too until he read “Head First Design Patters“. He recommended it as a first book on the subject.

Head First Design Patters is a book about Design Patterns in Java, but the concepts all work with C# and seem to be the same GangOfFour patterns used by .Net developers.

The book is very easy to read and a lot more eye-opening than a lot of the other computer books I’ve read. If you are interested in learning Design Patterns, let me pass on my friends recommendation and suggest this book.

Do I trust Google?

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I spent last week moving my wroolie.co.uk domain over to Google Apps. I read about moving your “life into the cloud” in a Scott Hanselman post a few weeks ago and wanted to give it a try.

This is a great feature which will allow me to host all of my email, documents, calendar, etc for my business domain from the gMail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar application. I’m really impressed with how well it works and was planning on moving the really important Overpass.co.uk domain information over based on that success.

But then Click Online on BBC News did a story this weekend about why Google is storing so much information about us. I’ve always known about Google and privacy issues, but chose to ignore it. You can read the article here.

Then I also found “Master Plan”, a short movie about Google which lasts only a few minutes. It speculates about the deeper motives behind Google’s give away. Look at the Master Plan here: http://masterplanthemovie.com/.

I love the Google Apps functionality and would really like to have my email available to me wherever I go, but now I wonder: Is it worth it to give Google all my information?

Wikinomics

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One of the books I’ve read this Summer is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I read this as I was helping a small company set themselves up for working in a distributed virtual team environment for their software development (the kind of stuff I’ve been using with Overpass), so I found the book to be very relevant to what I was working on at the time.

Wikinomics is the authors’ term for the new economy of Web 2.0. It centers around open source, open APIs, and collaboration between companies and customers. The book talks in great depth about the new trends and technologies that have been emerging in the last two or three years.

Web 2.0 is a strange term that I don’t really like very much. It’s something that marketing people and senior managers like to use to impress each other. But after reading this book, it is easy to see all the changes in thinking that have occurred in the past few years. It’s been gradual, but the world has changed significantly since 2004–at least as far as the internet is concerned.

I highly recommend the book. It’s not aimed at software developers, but it really opened my eyes to what other developers are doing out there. It’s definitely worth a look if you have the time.