Tekpub

I try not to work on the weekends and instead spend the time learning something new and, hopefully, different. To that end: Tekpub jas just released Hello NodeJS. What are you doing this weekend?

Tekpub just pushed its latest production: Hello PostgreSQL - and I invite you to take a look at some of the very compelling and interesting features this Open Source system has. No seriously - it's worth a look.

It's been a very fun year - hoping you're relaxing with friends and family ... or having some well-deserved quiet time to yourself...

Every year James and I try to do something fun at Tekpub for our users. This is year's no different.

OK maybe the title is a smidge dramatic - but it's the truth. I sweated over each and ever second of Tekpub's latest production and I really believe that it's the best work we've done to date. It's basically a This Developer's Life, in video.

I've always marveled at the geeks who can write good, clean Javascript. Not jQuery - Javascript. I've never cared much for the language - but my mind has been changed with all the great stuff coming out.

If you're running a startup there's some kind of cliche that you need to be up all hours of the night and working on weekends. While it's true that this can happen, it shouldn't. That's how you lose.

I'm not a big theorist and I don't care for Ivory Tower approaches to ... well anything. That said, when someone knows something, deeply, it's ridiculous to not listen to what they have to say.

This was a multi-day bug with 10 deployments behind it. I was tired, frustrated and hateful of the incessant problems Internet Explorer brings to the world. I was about to give up. To hack in Yet Another IE Workaround, when I noticed something strange in the response headers...

Thought I would take a minute or two and update Tekpubbers out there on what's happening in the near future....

One of my favorite movies of all time is Pulp Fiction. There are so many lines... so many scenes that it's hard to describe one as your favorite - but one that comes to mind often is Harvey Keitel as "The Wolf". When Ving Rhames says "I'm sending in the Wolf", you knew something good was about to happen.

One thing I've never seen anyone do, for real, is Test-driven Development. We've all sat through the demos of "Red, Green, Refactor" and the To-do list - but never have I seen the presenter do something "Real". That changed last week and it was pretty fun.

I just pushed the first video in our new series at Tekpub - Real World ASP.NET MVC 3. I'm putting my heart and soul into this one - it means a lot to me. It's carved right from my direct experience working in various startups over the last 12 years (minus my time at MS). It's another of our advanced titles - and I'm also letting a bit more of my opinion into it.

In the spirit of being as transparent as possible - I thought I'd follow up on our plans for the forthcoming Mastering ASP.NET MVC 3 series. Many people have asked what we'll be doing - so here's what I've put together.

Short and sweet - here's what's happening currently…

We just pushed the latest build of Tekpub - and it's a pretty massive rewrite. I bounced between frameworks during this rewrite, eventually settling with Rails 3. A few people have asked why. Here's why.

Steven Sanderson and I just wrapped up our last episode for Tekpub's ASP.NET MVC 2 series. I don't particularly like to write "pimp posts" - but I'm making an exception in this case as we've decided to Open Source the code and I wanted to talk about what's in it.

Back in August I wrote a post about building your own blog as a way of sharpening your skills and it was interesting, to say the least, to read the feedback. Well I’m happy to say that what you’re reading is the result of that post.