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podcast Video podCast

LIVE! Episode Tuesday, January 30th, 2018

We have a whole new streaming solution that should fix all the issues we were having, so expect better audio quality this time. Join Craig, David and myself for the latest on Delphi, C++Builder and software development in general.

[YouTube]

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podcast Video podCast

LIVE! Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018

You can watch live right here:

During this episode we discussed:

  • We set up our own RTMP instance on Linode to bounce the 3 streams off of for the podcast. I used Craig’s Brolly script to setup the server, and followed this guide. I used my local machine that I was streaming from to composite as well, which may have been stressing out the poor MacBook. I’ll try adding another computer to the mix next time, possibly an Amazon Workspace instance like we did for CodeRage.
  • The Delphi powered game Blast-Off launched yesterday on Steam. It is a lot of fun and looks beautiful.
  • Speaking of beautiful games created with Delphi, check out some of the latest videos by Zudomon showing off the game he is developing in Delphi. You can support it on Patreon or follow along on the Facebook developer page.
  • The team over at Grijjy has an open source Cross Platform Cloud Logger available git the GetIt packet manager or on GitHub. The Broker and LogViewer run on Windows, but the client logging code works on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. It has a lot of great features and is very useful.
  • There is an art and a science to writing good questions. Eric S. Raymond started it with his How to Ask Questions the Smart Way back in 2004. I created a blog post Jon Skeet of Stack Overflow fame also made a blog post about Writing the Perfect Question, which he shorted into a checklist on Stack Overflow Meta. I’ve got a blog post on the subject as well. Following these steps are also good troubleshooting too.
    We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas.
  • We also discussed some DevOps best practices
    • You need a literal backup of all the machines
    • Keep all your code in source control
    • Be sure you also have an offsite backup
    • You need to be able to rebuild your development machine quickly
      • This includes bringing up a new developer
      • Same process is used to set up a dedicated build machine
    • If you use a database, you don’t have a database unless you have a script to rebuild it, and it is in source control
      • A script or some other system to manage the schema and lookup tables
      • Versionable
    • Use Virtual Machines to manage development environments
      You should have a dedicated build server – this proves your process to build a development machine works
    • Might as well setup CI too
  • When discussion version control hosting consider the following:
    • GitHub has free open source repositories with free collaborators, but you can pay for private repositories
    • BitBucket has free private repositories, and Jira integration, but you pay for collaborators
    • SourceForge just launched a huge new update
    • GitLab is an exciting new alternative that also allows free self hosting
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News podcast Video podCast

Join us for a LIVE Video Episode of the Podcast at Delphi.org

Tomorrow will be a live episode of the Podcast at Delphi.org

You can join us live on YouTube with your questions and comments, or catch the replay posted here. Stay tuned tomorrow for details on how to join.

This is our first time with this new format and would love to get your feedback. We’ll also appreciate your patience as we work out the technical details.

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Article News

Get Ready for the New Programmers!

U.S. News an World Report just ranked Software Developer as the best job for 2018. They use data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics to rank jobs based on pay, job security, mental engagement, stress, room to advance, satisfaction, and work-life balance. Since you are here, you most likely agree with that ranking and are surprised it took so long for someone else to recognize it.

Software Developer #1 Best Job

This means we will see a lot of people interesting in software development. Anyone looking for a better job is likely to start at the top of that list and work their way down until they find one they are interested in. Not to mention everyone who sees the headlines about Software Developer replacing Dentist as the #1 Best Job. Whatever the reason, software developers will get a lot more attention.

Everyone is Focused on Software Developers

When I’m talking to people about career advice I think it is more important to choose a career that suits the individual (internal factors) than basing the decision purely on external factors like pay, etc. That being said, I honestly believe Software Development is only going to get more important. Going forward, software development and related jobs (many of which aren’t even invented yet) will consume the many of the other jobs as automation and artificial intelligence take over more aspects of our life. It all depends on which side of the automation revolution you want to be.

 

When I was really young (like 3rd grade) I knew I wanted to program computers for a living. A family friend told me that I should look for a different job because by the time I entered the career market computers would be programming themselves and there would be no jobs. I remember thinking once that happens there would be no jobs, and someone would need to teach the computers how to program themselves better.

Just recently I was in Tokyo for the 10.2 launch event. I was talking to members of the press, and one of them made a similar assertion “What is the point of releasing better developer tools when soon computers will be programming themselves?” I shared the story from when I was a kid and said that “Yes, AI is automating and consuming other jobs, but the programmer will be the last to go. Once AI’s no longer need humans to make them better there will be no jobs for anyone!”

Congratulations, you choose wisely.

So what does this mean for you, as a software developer today? Congratulation’s you choose wisely! But be prepared for a lot of people to come to you for career advice. Remember that Delphi offers a great Free Starter edition, and Embarcadero Academy is full of content for people learning to program.

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Article News

Law of the Instrument and Curse of the Programmer

If you aren’t familiar with the Law of the Instrument, otherwise known as Maslow’s hammer/gavel, or the golden hammer it is often expressed as

If your only tool is a hammer, you treat everything as like a nail.

My understanding is that the law of the instrument means you are limited by instruments or tools you know how to use. For example, if you have a screw, some wood, and a hammer, then you might successfully get the screw into the wood, but a screwdriver would be a better alternative.

Law of the instrument
Image from Pixabay by Steve Buissinne

The law of the instrument also means an obsession with the perfection of the instruments you know. I remember back in the day when I was convinced there was no reason to bother with any other programming languages because Delphi was the best. Now I’ve spent some time using a lot of other programming languages, and so I can confidently say Delphi is the best, while I can see the value and use of other programming languages.

I believe it is worthwhile learning about new technologies, frameworks, languages, or methodologies. Then you can pick the correct one for the job. This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert in all of them, but you should know enough that you are confident in your choice.

The reverse of this is the obsession to chase new and exciting technologies and recreate things every few years. This keeps the developers entertained, but doesn’t really provide business value. Again I believe Delphi does a good job with this as it respects your existing code while moving forward to new platforms, features, and frameworks.

So what is the Curse of the Programmer?

When I’m talking to other programmers I see two behaviors. The first is, every problem they encounter in life (at work and beyond) they respond with “I could write a program to do this,” or some variation. By extension, they also cast a critical eye toward any software system (even those developed by themselves) to see how to do them better. This results in a huge backlog of projects that they create to fix problems, fix a problem better, or just out of curiosity to see if they can.

This is similar to the Law of the Instrument, but I see it more as your learning the flexibility and power of programming results in your seeing many opportunities to apply it. I’ve talked to people in other industries, and I think the general tendency is fairly universal, it is just that programming is (in my opinion) so much more powerful and flexible than many other applied technologies.

The second behavior, which is something to be more cautious about falling into, is the urge to create a “library” or “framework” instead of finishing the program at hand. For example, you are creating a program to solve a problem, and in the process, you create series of libraries just in case you need to solve similar problems.

There is value in having reusable libraries, functions, components, and frameworks. The trick is to not let the creation of them get in the way of shipping. The best way I’ve found to deal with this is to only create the library when you need it. Write your code with the appropriate level of coupling to solve the problem at hand. When you need to reuse a bit of it elsewhere, consider refactoring it into something reusable. Then as you use it in more places you can keep refactoring it and expanding it until you have a full blown framework.

How do you see the Curse of the Programmer in your life? What do you use to prevent every project from spawning a series of reusable frameworks?

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News

Some of my New Year’s #CodingResolutions

The joke goes that, when asked, the software developer responds that their New Year’s Resolution is “7680×4320” or 8K. Joking aside, tradition has it that at the turn of the year we evaluate our lives and look for areas of improvement. Here are a few of my software development related New Year’s #CodingResolutions!

  • Unit Test More: DUnitX and TestInsight being my tools of choice. Most of the code I write is integration code, integrating component A with control B, and I use that as a justification to not unit test it. But when I do write library or component code, I try to create a unit test for it. I find it very useful to do so and am always working to be more consistent.
  • Take a course on Embarcadero Academy: There are a few free courses, as well as some premium courses from the top trainers in the community. Something there for everyone to learn from.
  • Get better at using version control on personal projects: Version control is a must when you are collaborating with others on a project. I remember the first development job I had where I was working with other developers. We emailed code back and forward. We used the archived history of emails if we needed to roll back to an earlier version. The lead developer maintained the “authority.” Needless to say, this was a mess and didn’t work very well. RAD Studio has a great history feature that automatically backs up the last few versions of your files when you save, and you can set it to save on execution (a great idea), so it might seem like version control isn’t as necessary on non-collaborative projects. This just isn’t true. The IDE will integrate into today’s top version control systems, so there is no excuse not to. I signed up for a paid Developer account on GitHub, which is where I keep all my projects. BitBucket is another popular choice, which offers private repositories for free, but charges you for collaborators (the opposite model of GitHub). BitBucket offers Mercurial too. Which system do you use?
  • Setup my own Continuous Integration server: If you don’t have an automated, repeatable build process, then you don’t have a release. Designating one of your developer’s computers (even if that is you) as the build server is not a valid solution. If you are going to have a Build Server, then you might as well have CI (with automated Unit Tests!) so you know your build is always good. Craig Chapman provided a recent webinar on setting up your own Continuous Integration system with SVN & Jenkins. Jenkins is a popular solution for CI that even offers a RAD Studio plugin, but if you want to simplify things, take a look at Continua-CI from VSoft.
  • Automate more with DevOps: Version Control and Continuous Integration are the first steps in DevOps as a developer, but there is more. Everything that can be automated should be automated.
  • Pay attention to Warnings, Hints, Static Code Analysis, Audits and Metrics: One of the beauties of using a compiled language is we have a compiler that will immediately detect a huge number of errors, which we must fix if we want to even use or test our programs. The compiler also provides a number of Hints and Warnings that frequently indicate your program might not function exactly like you intended. I have a policy of always addressing Hints and Warnings too. I’m also a big fan of FixInsight, which really expands these compiler messages in so many useful ways. Our favorite IDE also includes more options to keep your code fresh and maintainable: Code Toxicity and Audits and Metrics. The Code Toxicity is available in all editions and provides some simple static code analysis for things like Cyclomatic Complexity. Keeping an eye on these is a good way to make sure your code is maintainable and less likely to have unintended behaviors. The Audits and Metrics takes this to the next level with a lot more detail. And it’s included in Enterprise and Architect editions.RAD Studio Audits
  • More focus on best practices and software security.
  • Do more with RAD Server. I’ve done a lot of building REST clients and they are great. I’ve done some basics of building REST servers but would like to do more. RAD Server is a great solution for building REST services.
  • Deploy RAD Server to the Cloud. I’ve done a little with Amazon Cloud Services and that is what I am thinking about doing, but there are a lot of other great cloud hosting options out there to consider.
  • Keep Exploring the Amazing 3rd Party components from all the great Technology Partners. The GetIt Package Manager makes it easy to install a new component or library. 
  • Build some Neural Network and Artificial Intelligence solutions with Delphi. This is something I’ve always been interested in but never implemented. There are so many advances in this field right now, which makes it even more exciting. Additionally, there are so many promising libraries available for Delphi. Boian Mitov of Mitov Software has IntelligenceLab. Dew Research has a great looking math engine. And then RiverSoft has a serial of libraries for Genetic AlgorithmsFuzzy Logic, and an Inference Engine. You can check out a video about IntelligenceLab today. I’d love to see an IDE add-in that uses neural networks for static code analysis and help with writing code.
  • Beyond all of that, I want Blog, Podcast, and create more training videos.

How about you? What are your New Year’s #CodingResolutions?