I really liked the Pragmatic Programmer, it’s on my recommended reading page for that reason. So when I saw a new book from the pragmatic bookshelf called “The Passionate Programmer” that promised to show me how to create remarkable career in software development and not just average career - I snapped up the chance to read it.

The book has 5 sections each dealing with an area of being a software professional: Choosing your market, Investing in your product, Executing, Marketing – not just for Suits and Maintaining your Edge. The chapters are short, each only 2-4 pages in length, and deal with a good variety of topics in those broad areas. The chapters are really accessible and easy to read, so it is easy to dip in to when you’ve got a spare minute or so, the sort of thing you can read while waiting for a project to build in Visual Studio.

I am recommending this book to anyone, whether they’re just starting out in software development or they’ve been doing it for years, whether they’re unhappy with where they are in their career or blissfully happy doing what they’re doing. That said the advice is applicable outside the world of IT because most of it is just common sense – I found myself nodding along with the ideas thinking to myself “that’s obvious, but I’m not actively doing that, maybe I should”.

For anyone interested in self improvement, getting on with their careers and not being content to drift where things take them this book has ideas and suggestions on how to take control of your career and make something remarkable.

The W3C launched a new version of their website on 13^th October, this follows the beta release in March.

The new site features a harmonized design, simplified information architecture, new style for technical reports, and new content, including calendars and aggregated blogs.

I like the look of the new site; it is clean and quite minimal in design, but then its main function is to present information rather than to look cool and I think it does this very well. I will have to relearn their navigation as they’ve moved sections around and nothing is where it used to be.

Rather ironically the CSS fails to validate, though nothing seems terrible with such a clean design I am surprised to find that it doesn’t validate. The mark-up successfully validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict, though to be fair I only checked a few pages.

Since installing Vista about 2 years ago I made the decision not to use any anti-virus software. I consider myself to be reasonably aware of how viruses spread, I don’t open attachments unless I know who they’re from and why they’ve been sent, I don’t go to suspicious websites, I don’t download much so don’t really see the need for an anti-virus solution.

In the past 2 years, and for at least 3 years before that, I have not had a single virus (you may ask how I know if I’ve got nothing to tell me) – occasionally I’ve used online scanners to run a full system scan or scanned my machine over the network from someone else’s computer. So I’d rather not install a bit of software that is constantly running and consuming resources on the off chance I might pick up a virus.

Back when I started out with a pc Norton Anti-Virus was quite good, small and with a relatively low memory footprint (the same is true of MacAfee, ZoneAlarm etc, I’m not singling anyone out here), but now the installers can be 400MB or more, which is why they’re so bloated. I simply don’t want bloated, rarely used and high-maintenance software. I’ve been safe since then.

But Microsoft Security Essentials changed my mind somewhat. I still don’t think I need anti virus, but the trade off, in this case, is not so bad. It seems to only require 11MB disk space and doesn’t intrude in to my other applications. For the most part I’m not even aware that it is running. The only sign is an addition to my Windows Explorer shell and the weekly scan I’ve scheduled to run when I’m unlikely to be using the computer. I also trust that it integrates with the other security features of Vista, but as I’m due to get my copy of Windows 7 tomorrow I’m hoping that’ll also prove to be no problem.

I’ve been using Bing as my default search providers since June and for the most part it has been pretty good.

However I have now reverted to Google simply because the results there seem to be more in keeping with what I actually want. This isn’t necessarily anything done wrong on the Bing side of things, it might just be that, over time, I have learned how to search using Google and so when using Bing I’m not giving it a proper chance / comparison. However I’m not precious about who gets me the results, all I care about is that I get results that help me answer whatever it was I was looking for.

DevExpress are working on a test runner that will be built in to CodeRush!

In a recent blog post “CodeRush: Unit Test Runner Preview” early screenshots show the UI changes that show the status of your tests. This looks really cool – at a glance you’ll be able to tell which tests are failing, ignored and which pass.

The test runner already supports VS Test, MbUnit, nUnit and is extensible so any other testing framework can be used.

Scheduled for release later this year I’m looking forward to giving this a go and will be very interested to see how well it stacks up against TestDriven.Net