Rob’s Tech Blog

Wow – just attended the best codecamp ever. It’s gotten me so excited about silverlight, wpf and asp mvc. Jonas, who’s girlfriend is a silverlight designer, has some really great insights into how to do some funky silverlight stuff, go read his blog. I was also pretty impressed by Scott’s speaking style – he was a LOT funnier than I expected.

The fact that I got to speak wasn’t what made the day so great for me. No – it was the content of the other speakers and having such interesting conversations with everyone else who came. The people that turn up to these community things are the ones who really care about what they do.

My slides & source will go up here very soon I promise! I just have one thing to ask you guys: If you came to my talk, I’d love to get some feedback about how my presentation went. One of my colleagues told me I need to walk around a lot more – so thats some good advice for me to take on board. But I want to grow up to be a fantastic presenter one day, so please, leave me a comment or send me an email. All criticism will be gratefully, gracefully received. Unless you weren’t actually there.

Hello, world!

My name is Robert Fonseca-Ensor. I’m a software developer at Datacom Systems Limited, in Auckland, New Zealand. I’m planning to use this blog to post technical tips & tricks as I come across them.

I love learning about the neat & new ways you can get software to do stuff. I like to see elegant code, and I like to see clever hacks. My own approach to building good code is that the less lines you have to read, the easier it will be to pick up what’s going on. I can think of a few exceptions to this rule, but I try to stay away from the really gnarly one liners (when I can help it).

Technology wise, I do most of my work with Microsoft .NET. I’ve traditionally spent a lot of time building simple aspx websites and winforms clients, but now I’m really interesting in WPF, Silverlight and REST.

Time for some interesting links:

Martin Fowler talks about how to make http caching work for you in the case where you have a page with a little bit of dynamic content. I’m surprised at how many websites simply can’t be cached – people could save a lot of money, not to mention making their websites faster! Speaking of faster websites, it’s interesting to hear what Rowan Simpson has to say: “In other words, people would use Trade Me more if it was faster still.”

When I was playing with Deep Zoom and Ben’s iPhone, it really hit me that I enjoyed the user interfaces because of how reactive they were. I thought the couple who run the sparkling client podcast were a bit nuts when they talked about how our caveman instincts demand instant animations from user interfaces – but maybe they’ve got a point. Hence my interest in all things RIA!

If you want a deep dive on WPF, I recommend looking at Scott’s BabySmash. It’s an app that started out pretty naive, and lots of WPF gods have improved it, with comments & reasons all over the internet.