Fremus.co.za

My manager asked me today to give him some insight into the things I would like to learn more about, with a particular focus on my own development, and I thought it a good idea to spend a few minutes posting a blog on the topic. My personal interests lie in a few areas at the moment, and when I say personal interest the context is work, and more specifically the technologies that I work with. One area I really want to focus a lot on in the coming months is the C# language itself and in particular:

• Generics
• Delegates with the specific aim of better understanding Linq
• Linq to Objects
• Linq to XML

I would like to know and understand the C# programming language in a comprehensive manner. In addition to the language I would also like to understand design patterns and overall system design, with a very strong OO flavour. I think if I can spend the next 6 months learning C# I would be a better developer for it. In addition to C# I would like to learn a second programming language and I have been thinking Python is a good candidate in this regard. I would like to apply the knowledge directly into what I do though. So if I learn Linq to XML now, I want to start using it now. If I learn the yield keyword now, I want to use it now.

Other aspects that I would like to incorporate in my learning of C# would be areas of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. I really enjoy SEO (search engine optimisation) as well, I love the metrics and the art that goes with it. I believe I can develop many aspects of this in C#. I also believe I can develop a total marketing solution that encompasses email and social media.

I am interested in topics such as ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight, but I am also interested in developing full-blown client applications in WPF.

My manager also mentioned that each new thing that we learn should be set as a target for each day. You have set yourself some goals and stick to them. One way to determine a few goals is to reflect on yourself and see what you do each day, and through that reflection set some ideals and goals.

We are at work for a purpose after all.

One of the things that I see a lot on websites of other developers is a resume or CV section. It seems only logical that a developer would want to show off their pedigree, but I’m guessing a lot of developers would not mind some extra work (and extra cash). Creating a resume for your website is relatively straight forward, just create it! You just create some HTML page and add the information and its done, or is it? Well I found myself thinking in the shower (weird place to get an idea) and I thought that it would be really useful to write some code that made the maintenance of a resume or CV easy. Useful code does not have to be unnecessarily complex, because it achieves a certain function or purpose.

I consider maintaining my CV easy when I can edit the content of my CV and export the CV in as many formats possible. So basically I want my CV stored in one place where I can update it on a continuous basis, and when needed download it in Word, for instance. I’m sure that what I am doing has probably been done many times before, but I guess part of being a developer gives you the freedom to create your own solutions. And something I think developers should always do is use their own IP (intellectual property) to create solutions that they themselves use.

So for the CV solution I am thinking of using a very basic XML document with a very basic structure of sections and subsections. Think about it, a CV or resume is made up of sections and subsections. For instance I have a personal information section with subsections for my name, address, etc. Thus you can derive a quick schema:

Once the CV is in XML I can pretty much do with it what I want both in terms of modifying its content and exporting it. I actually started this idea by typing it out using Inkscape, simply because I dont have Word installed on my desktop machine, but also because it allows me to draw diagrams and go mad. I started off by defining some generic XML structure (without using XSD):

    
          
                CVSubsection Value
          
    

As you can see from the code that a CV could be made up of multiple sections and that each section could have multiple subsections. If you relate this structure to a more practical example:

    
          
                Fredrik
          
          
                Erasmus
          
    
    
           
                BSc Computer studies
           
    

It fits into the structure quite nicely. Each section will only have a single attribute called “name”, and each subsection will also only have a single attribute called “name”, but the subsection will have a node value, whereas the section name will not. The question begs though, what if you want to say where you got your qualification from? How would you structure that? Well you could add a custom attribute to the section called “institution”, which would change your xml:

    
           
                BSc Computer studies
           
    

The basic operations for the sections and subsections would mostly involve adding,editing and removing items. I think Linq to XML would perform this quite well.

At the moment I have two domains:

• Fremus.co.za
• Fremus.net

The difference between the two is that one runs on an Apache HTTP server and the other runs on Internet Information Services (IIS). Why two different web servers? WordPress is my favourite blogging platform, and although .NET has a few blogging platforms available (BlogEngine.NET and Subtext) I have been using WordPress for a few years now and have come to really appreciate it for its powerful simplicity. I also do not want to create two separate blogging systems, one for the .NET website and the other for the WordPress one. I want to show that both systems can work together to build a single brand.

www.fremus.co.za will focus on all aspects of blogging and will cover general areas of technology, .NET specific technologies and general interest. I may from time-to-time blog about personal issues and feelings.

So then why have a web server that runs on IIS? Well I am a C# developer by day, so I thought I would like a portal where I could publish or demo solutions I develop, and .NET just does not run on Apache (maybe Mono solves this) at the moment for me. Thus its clear from this that Fremus.co.za will act as the home for my blog and Fremus.net will be used for .NET development. What is not clear is how I will use the two to create some sort of brand. Clearly both serve a different purpose, but I feel both represent some sort of personal brand.

So with that in mind I decided to fire up my mindmapping tool, Cayra, and started to map some ideas on how the two websites will feed off each other. And basically I came up with a strategy that focuses the .NET side of things to have a homepage that is dedicated to the following items (areas on the home page):

• An ATOM/RSS feed of the posts from www.fremus.co.za
• An area dedicated to ‘Social Feeds’:
  • Twitter – Here I want to look at .NET technologies that provide cool ways to interact with Twitter. My thinking is to have my own status updates plus several Twitter threads. It might be useful to write some code that assimilates this functionality. I have been looking at LinqToTwitter for this purpose.
  • Youtube – I thought it might be a cool idea to list the videos that I watch. And there are API’s available for it.
  • Galleries – I would like to write some sort of gallery application that displays photos I have taken of places I have been to. I am going to be buying a digital camera soonish.
  • I will only have links to LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, have no immediate plans to use API’s
• I want to create an area that shows/tells of the projects I am currently busy with. I have two projects I am working on at the moment, which I will detail later

The goal is to create some sort of personal brand that represents me and what my passion is. The brand should ideally be reflective of how I would express myself and how that expression would materialize to the rest of the world, and technology is a part of that brand.

I got myself some .NET hosting today, simply because I want to do a few projects and I prefer C# and .NET. So I registered a domain, www.fremus.net and I will be getting stuck into a few ideas I have. .NET Hosting in my home country, South Africa, really sucks, there is no other word for it. We just do not match up.

Weird name for a blog huh, well weird at least to me, and maybe to other people as well. It’s basically a combination of the first three letters of my first name, Fredrik and the last three letters of my surname, Erasmus, which when combined gives you Fremus. The idea came as a suggestion from a friend, and to be totally honest, I did not like it too much at first, but I even mentioned it to my mom and she liked it too. Fremus was thus born. Fremus also refers to a lions roar or lions that roar…

I want to make an acknowledgment quickly – I am a lazy Microsoft Windows User, who does not like to struggle much with PC problems, and who generally steers clear of anything that looks too hectically challenging. I like things to be one-click solutions ALL THE TIME. Guess thats a bit dreamy, but thats how I would like things to be. Unfortunately they are not, which is good, because it forces me to actually do some work to make something work. Let me give you an example, a pretty ftp client vs a command line utility such as PSFTP. I have generally, 99% of the time, been using FTP clients such as Core FTP Lite for uploading web content, until today that is. Today I used a program called PuTTy, which allows you to connect to a web server through a shell, which then allows you to use a command line interface to manage files. I found this particularly useful, because I uploaded some content earlier using a FTP client and I placed some files in a wrong folder and wanted to change it and ended up creating a folder with a different name (but I actually wanted to use the original folder name). I couldn’t delete the folder because there was some hidden content in it which then prompted me to do some searching on shells, which lead me to PuTTY. Using PuTTY I could access and delete those hidden files. The point is that FTP clients can sometimes be buggy, and crash for some reason, whereas using a shell there is just no GUI, which means less bugs. Thats my two cents anyway..