No matter what your chosen career path society places constraints on what is an acceptable amount of interest you are allowed to show to a subject before you become *weird*. People working in IT face this more than most. In my life I have known a lot of really smart people,who are obviously in love with what they are doing, not sharing their excitement with others for fear of being thought of as uncool. However crazy this sounds from the outside one thing is true; they are holding themselves back from success.

I’ve been lucky enough to have access to a brand new Surface 2.0 (Samsung SUR40) recently, and wanted to try my hand at developing for the platform. As with most things, the easiest way to learn something is to set yourself up with a little project – I’m going to build a very simple Image “Attractor” to start. This will allow you to move, resize and rotate images and videos on the screen of the device. The Surface development community appears to be a little cloak and dagger, with very little information being shared; something hopefully I can positively contribute towards changing by documenting my journey.

The "www." prefix in a website's address was originally thought up by Tim Berners-Lee (The creator of the interwebs) to help us differentiate between a website’s address and that of a mail server, FTP, or Gopher server (remember those kiddies?).  The world has moved on from gopher servers and the like, but for different reasons has continued using this prefix without much purpose or reason. In the last few years many people have commented on their religious decision either way to support or ditch it. I put it to you: do you www. or not?

Microsoft developers hear a lot about tools that will make them write faster, more efficient, more refactored, more unit tested code all the time. People don’t often talk of tools that help you to visualise your project’s growing code smell though – among other reasons, everyone’s inner sense of pride may be a behind this, however unless you or your employer has forked out the $11,879 odd dollars for Visual Studio Ultimate Edition you don’t have much to go on without more than the basic reporting on Cylcomatic Complexity, Dependency Depth and Class coupling reports that come in the pro and premium editions. These don’t really help you pin point any of your architectural problems that well – something  where NDepend proves itself to be a diamond in the rough.

I’ve written about local conferences a few times before, but DDD Sydney is one of my favourites. There are few conferences that are so “For Us By Us” as DDD Sydney as it’s organised by Lewis Benge and contributed to by a whole swath of the local developer community from a number of different user groups, so it’s a great place to come down and meet a number of your local devs, learn something new or take part in the discussions – and for $25 it’s one of the cheapest conference tickets around!

I have been playing with the Windows Phone 7 SDK for a while now, however I have been lucky to still have a day-job while doing my tinkering and therefore haven’t sourced my main income from sales in the WP7 marketplace. There are others who don’t have the same luxury as me and have bet a considerable amount of their time on the platform to date. Whether these developers are aware of it or not they are fighting a silent battle that I want to bring more awareness to –  a problem that every smart phone ecosystem has faced to date: Piracy.

Often you need to test a website on an tablet device such as an iPad using a local development machine’s web server. For whatever reason the available Wi-Fi when developing your site may be on another subnet or network entirely to you development machine (such as in an office environment). Situations like these call for a bit of creative thinking and a different approach, so if this is a problem you face here’s my take on a possible solution.

During my development journey with Windows Phone 7 , there have been a number of things that I overlooked when writing your first app – things I wished I’d kept front of mind. None of these items are necessarily difficult or complicated things to cover off, so I thought I'd mention them here to save you the trouble, and at the same time show you ways to overcome each of them.

Part of my job is hiring people to build websites for advertising clients. Most of the things that we build don’t compete with brain surgery for complexity, but as anyone knows when working in software, having skilled people working on simple problems often leads to scalable, well built solutions – I hire accordingly. The problem is how do you define "skilled" and does it even have meaning in software out of the context of a company’s needs?

As Software Developers, our passion can sometimes be all encompassing. You can find a new language or framework and something inside you lights a spark and the obsession begins – it’s part of what makes a great scientist, developer, engineer or doctor. It can also be a part of what drives people insane. Recently I've wondered where the line is, when its time to back off, or even if you should.