Category: Thoughts

Arcane Fun Fridays – Broadcast your Podcast

A little fun tip for today’s post. As long time readers know I love podcasts. They are a great way to capitalize on time, learning while doing other activities. As I was puttering around the house, I wished I had an easy way to listen to my podcasts without having to use my headphones, and also be portable. Then it occurred to me, I did.

When I drive back and forth to work, I use a cassette adapter to plug into my cheapy mp3 player into the my old car’s stereo and listen to my podcasts. Sometimes I travel on business, and these days it’s seldom I get a rental car with a cassette, so I picked up an inexpensive radio transmitter, similar to this one but a heck of a lot cheaper. Well, being an amateur radio operator (often called “ham radio”) I have a wide variety of power supplies lying around. I dug into my box and found one kind of like this. I mated them up, found an unused frequency, and plugged the other end of the transmitter into the speaker jack of my computer and boom I was listening to my podcasts through my various radios. Very nice, and I can see a lot of use.

I was pleased too with the range, I can hear it all over my house and even into my yard a bit. I could probably get a bit more range moving it out of my office basement.

One last hint for today, next time you go to various stores keep an eye out for a “clearance” area. They are usually tucked away in the back corner of the store, often near the restrooms. I know I’ve seen them in Staples, Radio Shack, Office Max and Office Depot to name a few. You can get some really good deals, for example I picked up my transmitter for 10 dollars, marked down from the original 49 bucks. Also check out sites like woot for “deal of the day” specials.

Where’s Waldo?

I have been a bit absent of late with the blogging. I just thought I’d take a second to explain. Last week my beloved wife had some pretty serious abdominal surgery. She’s going to be fine, but for a bit I’ll be playing both Mommy and Daddy, taking care of the kids, doing housework, etc. Thus my spare time for blogging, learning new technology and other geeky pursuits is quite limited.

I did have one pleasant surprise, during the three day hospital stay (yes I stayed with her) I found the hospital had free public wi-fi. When she was napping I was able to get out my laptop and handle a few work items, and communicate to the extended family about her condition. It was a nice “extra” that made the stay that much better.

It got me to thinking, there are a lot of places I go that it would be nice to have that free wi-fi access. Anywhere that you spend a lot of time, or need to do some sort of research. Around here I know several restaurants and coffee shops with it, as well as all the public libraries. There should be more though. One bookstore chain has wi-fi, but charges for it, another doesn’t have it at all. I mean, come on wi-fi doesn’t cost that much, and I would certainly be paying for it through my store purchases.

Doctors offices are another place I wish I had it, often you can spend hours waiting on a doctor. Sure would be nice to be able to check e-mail and let the office know “I’ll be here a little longer…”

What other public locations can you think of that you’d love to have some wi-fi in?

Does MacGyver Dream of Mark Miller?

For Christmas this year my family gave me a copy of MacGyver, Season 1 and 2 on DVD. My wife’s side of the family gave me a gift card which I used to get seasons 3 & 4. I’m a long time MacGyver fan, but my wife had only seen one or two episodes and my kids had never seen it at all, so we’ve been having a lot of fun watching. My favorite part of the series was the voice-overs, where you’d hear MacGyver’s voice as he explained what he was doing. It always started with some odd thought or story that led you through the thought process of how he came to the conclusion to build whatever wacky life saving device he was constructing.

I’ve come to realize in some ways these blog entries are sort of like the MacGyver voice-overs, my inner thoughts being created for you on the web. So I hope you’ll bear with me a few minutes while I relate a rather bizarre dream I had last night.

In my dream I’m standing on stage, in front of a fully loaded computer. It has all the bells and whistles, VS2008, SQL Server, and so on. On the other side of the stage, Mark Miller is there, in front of a similar computer. For those unfamiliar with Miller, he’s the genius behind CodeRush and RefactorPro, tools to help you write code faster. Some time back, when the product was first released Miller used to challenge the audience to beat him in a code writing contest. His machine had CodeRush, and he would use chopsticks to write code, his competitor could use their fingers but did not have CodeRush on their machine. Of course Mark always won.

So sure enough, in my dream there’s Miller, chopsticks in hand ready to go, and I’m the guy going up against him. Our task is to take data from table A1, create a mirror table and name it table A2, and then move all million rows from A1 into A2. As you might guess, in my dream, I win. How?

Well I didn’t write a program. Instead I first jumped into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and used its script generating capability to produce a create table script. Make a quick search and replace and boom I’ve got table A2 created. I then jump over to the Business Intelligence Developer Studio (BIDS) to create a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) package to do the data move. (Yes, I probably could have used the script generation of SSMS again to generate an Insert script, but I was showing off.) In about three to four minutes I had accomplished the task and moved all the data while Miller was pecking away at computer with his chopsticks.

I didn’t win because I’m a hot shot coder who is smarter than my competitor. Miller is a (some say mad) genius who can run circles around me in the coding world. As I told the folks in my dream, and I’m telling you now sometimes the best solution to a programming challenge isn’t to program at all! If you read yesterday’s post, Straining at Gnats, you may recall I said “…take some time. Push back from your computer and think for a moment. Think what the true outcome of your application is supposed to be. Not “what will the program do” but “what will the program do for the user???” Think about how best to achieve the user’s goals.”

When you are thinking about solutions, take a minute to look outside of your favorite programming language. Is it possible to achieve the goal without writing any code at all? What tool or tools do you have in your tool box that you can combine to get the job done? Here’s a great example that happened to me just before I took off on my holiday vacation.

As I’ve mentioned before at work we have a Business Intelligence (BI) app I work as the lead on, it imports data to a SQL Server 2005 warehouse via SSIS then uses SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to generate reports. The data is imported from a work order management system we bought many years ago. We also have some engineers who have a tiny little Microsoft Access database. This database has a primary key column; we’ll call it a part number for purposes of this example. There are three more columns, some data they need to know for each part but are not found in our big system. They’d like to add this data to the reports our BI app generates. Two last pieces of information, they only update this data once per quarter. Maybe. The last few years they have only done 3 updates a year. Second, the big system I mentioned is due to be replaced sometime in the next two years with a new system that will have their three fields.

A lot of solutions presented themselves to me. Write an ASP.Net app, with a SQL Server back end then use SSIS to move the data. Elegant, but a lot of work, very time consuming for a developer, especially for something that can go away in the near future. Write an SSIS package to pull data from Access? Risky, since we had no control over the Access database. A user could rename columns or move the database all together, in either case trashing the SSIS. Several other automation solutions were considered and rejected, before the final solution presented itself: not to automate at all.

Once per quarter I’ll simply have the engineers send me their Access database. Microsoft Access has a nice upsizing wizard that will move the table to SQL Server, I’ll use that to push the data onto the SQL Server Express that runs on my workstation. I’ll then use the script generating capability of SSMS to make an Insert script for the data. Add a truncate statement to the top to remove the old data and send it to the DBA to run. When I ran through it the first time my total time invested was less than ten minutes. In a worst case scenario I spend 40 minutes a year updating the data so it’s available for reporting. That’s far, far less time that I would have spent on any other solution.

The next time you have a coding challenge, take a moment to “think like MacGyver”. Look at all the tools you have lying around your PC and see what sort of solutions you can come up with. Once you are willing to step outside the comfort zone of your favorite coding language, you may be able to come up with some creative, MacGyver like solutions to your user’s problems.

 

PS – If you missed the announcement while on vacation, DevExpress just released CodeRush / RefactorPro 3.0. More than 150 refactorings and lots of new CodeRush features! Update yours today.

Happy Anniversary Commodore 64!

According to a report in CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/12/07/c64/index.html ), folks are gathering today to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64 computer. Those of you under 30 may not remember this gem of a machine. It wasn’t my first computer, but it was probably my favorite. The amount of hacking and modding you could do with these things was incredible. I cut my teeth on BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems) using my 300 baud modem. Yes, 300 baud, if you happen to recall what a baud is. For comparison, 56,000 baud (56k) is about the fastest dial in you can get today, and then it jumps to broadband.

I remember way back when I was the third person in my area to upgrade to a 1200 baud modem. And would you believe at first I didn’t like it? With my old 300 I could easily read my e-mail as it scrolled onto the screen. With the 1200 it zipped by so fast I had to go learn all the message scrolling commands for the various BBS’s I dialed into.

I’m something of a packrat; I still have a lot of “ancient” computers in my home-office closet. TRS-80’s, Radio Shack Color Computers, parts of a Timex Sinclair, and a Commodore Amiga. But the one that’s still setup on my desk is a Commodore 128, with a stack of drives, software, and even a Commodore 1702 monitor. I find it relaxing to fire it up every so often and play some old fashioned arcade games, or play some of that old midi music.

Happy Anniversary Commodore 64!

Arcane Thoughts – Firefox Got It Right

We had a nerd lunch today, 5 developers at the round table of my favorite restaurant, Richards BBQ & Grill. We talked about a lot of different things, and spent a while ranting on what I can only describe as the narcissism of companies taking over our system trays with their stupid applications.

I’m not saying nothing should ever go in the tray. Software that needs to run 100% of the time to wait for my command, like SlickRun or TouchCursor, should have an easy interface and the tray makes sense. But there’s a lot of software that runs, but doesn’t need to.

Why, for example, does Adobe Reader need to install it’s applet into the system tray? What value does it add? Checking for updates? Yeesh, why do you have to run 100% of the time on the off chance an update might come out?

How about all the hardware makers who want to install interfaces to their hardware? Why do I need another program running all the time on the off chance I might perhaps possibly maybe want to tweak a setting? Isn’t that what Control Panel is for?

Firefox, on the other hand, got it right. When you launch the application, it quietly checks for updates in the background. When it’s downloaded them and has them ready to install, a little dialog pops up and asks if you’d like to restart Firefox to take advantage of the new updates. If no, it just says “Okey Dokey, I’ll install them the next time you run Firefox”. And that’s it, no harassment; it only runs when I run the app! No annoying system tray icon for Firefox.

There’s no reason why other tools couldn’t follow the same model. Adobe Reader for example, when I launch the reader, at that time and only at that time, it should head off in the background and see if there’s an update. Let me know if there is, and away we go. But if it’s six months between the time I run the program, then just lie dormant on my hard drive, don’t suck up my valuable CPU and RAM with your app that adds no real value to my system.

Well, at least there’s one company out there who knows how to handle updates correctly. I’d love to hear your examples of good software. Software that handles updates correctly and respects your system resources. Let’s give these makers an “atta-boy”.

.Net University – BizTalk

Earlier this week I was privilidged to attend the first .Net University for BizTalk. It was a very informative day long session, I feel like I now have a grasp on at least the fundementals of BizTalk and can talk intelligently about it. I have a long way to go, of course, but this was a great launching point.

If you are not familiar with .Net University, you need to check out their website http://www.dotnet-u.com/ . All of the slide decks, labs, and other courseware are availble not only for you to look at, but to use in doing your own presentation. Your user group or business could put on it’s very own .Net University using the supplied materials. Don’t worry if you are not a guru, they are even publishing videos of the sessions for you to watch and see how the “pros” did it. Currently courseware is available for .Net 3.0 and BizTalk, and the video sessions for .Net 3.0 were just released. They videoed the presentations at the BizTalk session I was in, so I would expect them to be released in the near future. Coming soon will be courseware for Sharepoint and Silverlight.

.Net University was the brainchild of Microsoft Developer Evangelist Doug Tunure ( http://blogs.msdn.com/dougturn/ ). Recently he and Mark Dunn of Dunn Training (http://www.dunntraining.com/) went to TechEd in Asia and used .Net U there. Mark Dunn recorded interviews and talked about it in a recent Dot Net Rocks episode (#288: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=288 ). Take a listen, they do a better job of explaining it than I can. Mark, by the way, was also one of the presenters at the BizTalk session I was in.

If your user group is looking for a good opportunity to reach out to the community, consider putting on your own .Net U. You can do it in one day, or break it into two or four sessions. Looks like there will be a lot of good material to get you started, and you can even get certificates to present to your attendees.

Little Bobby Tables

I love this cartoon from xkcd, it really emphasizes why you need to screen your data inputs to protect against SQL Injection Attacks.

http://www.xkcd.com/327/

By the way, there’s a WebLog Awards going on right now, if you also enjoy xkcd give them a vote. http://2007.weblogawards.org/polls/best-comic-strip-1.php Hurry though, voting ends November 8th.

Apple – The New "Evil Empire"

First, in the interest of disclosure let me state right up front that I’m a “Microsoft fanboy”. Sue me. As a professional developer for the last 20 plus years, I think they make some really great stuff, and do a lot to get the word out to the developer community.

I say this because I really get tired of the gushing lately over how wonderful Apple is and how evil Microsoft is. Hmm, let’s contrast a moment, and I think the recent product announcements of the new Zunes makes a good place to do so.

For those who haven’t heard, Microsoft has just announced the release of some new Zunes, the Zune 80 (80 gig HD) and the Zune Flash series, which will have flash drives and come in 4 and 8 gig sizes. The original Zune will now be known as the Zune 30. There are a lot of cool new features in the interface, such as Podcasting, and the removal of the 3 day limit on listening to wi-fi shared songs, not to mention it just looks easier to use.

What’s really nice is all the early adopters of the original Zune 30’s won’t be left in the cold. There will be free upgrades so the older Zune 30’s will have all the same new software features as the newer Zunes.

Let’s contrast that with Apple and its iPhone and iTouch units. The iTouch, supposedly just a stripped down iPhone, yet there are many features such as e-mail that could be there, but are lacking for no apparent technical reason that anyone can explain.

Then there’s the iPhone itself, locked down worse than Fort Knox. For those who believe that when they plunk down 600 plus dollars for something it should be theirs to do with as they want, the very first upgrade rendered the iPhone into a brick. And once it’s bricked, expect no help from Apple.

Now, I wouldn’t expect them to try and restore everything, but the least they could do is a factory reset to brand new condition. I’d say that was very reasonable. But nope, you’re just stuck with a brick.

From everything I have been able to gather, there’s no real technical reason for the upgrade to force the phone to brick status. I could understand perhaps forcing a reset to “new” status, or that some apps would not work, but the complete paper weight scenario seems like nothing more than punishment on Apple’s part.

Before someone points out there are online sites with “debricking” software, my point is not about the phone, but about the attitude from the company that puts it out. Further, I also realize that ‘hacking’ the iPhone falls outside the terms of service. Cancel my account, make me reset to factory new condition, maybe charge me a twenty five or fifty dollar service fee to do the reset, OK those all sound reasonable. But bricking my expensive phone? Seems a little harsh don’t you think?

So let’s see here, on one hand we have a company that is rewarding it’s early adopter customers by making sure their devices will have all the latest greatest features at no extra charge.

On the other hand we have a company that requires you to use your phone with only they software they approve of. Fall outside that use, and your punishment: to have the sexiest, sleekest brick around.

Hmm, now who is sounding evil?

The Speaker Dinner

As you have probably guessed by now, I’ve grown to really enjoy speaking at and attending code camps and user group meetings. There are a lot of benefits to being a speaker, but to me one of the biggest is the Speaker Dinner the night before the code camp. In case you don’t know it, there’s usually a dinner the night before most code camps. Admission to the dinner is speaking at code camp the next day.

I got home just a little while ago from the dinner prior to tomorrows (hmm, well today’s since it’s after midnight now) Alabama Code Camp. I got to hang out with some really ultra smart folks tonight, and talk about a wide variety of topics. I know there were at least 4 MVPs there, possibly more since I didn’t know everyone.

Dinner was a mini-education in itself, as I picked up on several new topics. I also got to laugh and hear some great stories. If you have ever thought about speaking at a code camp I would highly encourage you. The rewards are well worth the admission cost!

Arcane Fun Fridays

WHEW! All of this WPF / XAML sure has been a lot of fun. But I think it’s time to come up for air and see what else is happing out there in Dot Net land.

Alabama Code Camp is coming up in just a little over a week, Saturday October 6th to be exact. Still plenty of time to register and even just a bit of time if you want to get in on the Silverlight programming contest. First prize for that is a Zune! http://www.alabamacodecamp.com/home.html

devLink, the large conference for a cheap price comes up right afterward in Nashville, Friday and Saturday October 12th and 13th. http://www.devlink.net/ . You can tell I’ll be there, my name’s on the front page as a winner of a Barnes and Nobel gift card (look for the dude from AL !)

(By the way, anyone know of a good dog repellent? My nephew is coming to house sit and is bringing Marshmallow and Buttercup, his twin Dobermans along because I have a big back yard they can play in. Last time though they ate the garden hose, chewed the handle off my shovel, and bit through one of my lawnmower tires.)

There’s a new add-on for SQL Server Management Studio I’m eager to try out. It’s still in Beta but looks promising. It was blogged about at http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/mladenp/archive/2007/09/20/SSMS-Tools-Pack—an-add-in-for-SQL-Management-Studio.aspx or you can download it directly at http://www.ssmstoolspack.com/ .

If you are a fan of NUnit, you’ll appreciate the new xUnit. Read James’ announcement at http://jamesnewkirk.typepad.com/posts/2007/09/announcing-xuni.html .

In a recent Dot Net Rocks episode, Carl Franklin announced they would be taking over Shrinkster.com. Shrinkster has been down due to spam abuse, as soon as Carl gets everything setup we’ll be able to go back to using short links again!

Speaking of Dot Net Rocks, I especially enjoyed show 274, where the new features of VB.Net and C# for the 2008 release were discussed. Entertaining and lots of good tidbits. I think my favorite feature so far has got to be C#’s extension methods. http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=274

During my long drive to the Tallahassee Code Camp last week, I put together a podcast theme session, and copied a bunch of related podcasts onto my cheapo SanDisk mp3 player. This time I went with a “Millenator” theme and got all the episodes of Dot Net Rocks that Mark Miller appeared on. Good stuff, lots of thoughtful material combined with some humor. Next time you go on a trip, copy a bunch of past episodes of your favorite podcast that are in the same theme and make that long drive go much quicker.

There have been several updates to the world’s greatest Visual Studio Add-In, CodeRush, over the last few weeks ( http://www.devexpress.com/Home/Announces/CodeRush25.xml ). Apparently Mark Miller and the boys have been busy! If you’re not on 2.5.4 go update yours today.

Speaking of Mark Miller, I love his intro slide for his VSLive session coming up in LasVegas. Take a look, pure genius. http://www.doitwith.net/2007/09/11/MyLastVSLiveSessionEver.aspx

A final note, between getting ready for Alabama Code Camp and going to devLink my blogging may get spotty for the next few weeks, bear with me and I’ll have full reports from both code camps and lots of fun new stuff to share.

Tallahassee Code Camp A Blast!

I got home a little while ago from spending all day Saturday at the Tallahassee Code Camp. And I have to say, it was a blast! Despite a six hour drive, which included driving through the remains of a tropical storm, it was well worth my time.

The day opened with me actually giving a presentation on SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition. I always like giving my presentations in the first slot, as the attendees are awake (mostly) and energized (or at least heavily caffeinated). They typically ask great questions, and this group was no exception. After my presentation, I was able to spend the rest of the day relaxing and learning about all sorts of great technologies. I attended sessions on Silverlight, LINQ, Windows WorkFlow (WF), and Ajax. All great, and very informative.

The Tallahassee User Group really knows how to put on a good show. Registration was extremely fast, they had more than enough doughnuts and coffee at breakfast and great pizza at lunch. The rooms were nice, all in all quite well run.

And the swag, baby! I have to brag and say I scored some great stuff, primarily a stack of new books on various .Net 3.0 technologies. My best score though came from Joe Healy (http://www.devfish.net/) who gave me one of those cool oval Microsoft stickers which I’ve now proudly affixed to the top of my laptop, just under my Coding Horror sticker.

I also have to give and extra special thanks to my long suffering wife the Southern TinkerBelle ( http://southerntinkerbelle.com/ ), who bent over backwards to arrange things so I could attend. Thanks sweetie!

Thanks again to everyone for a great time, and I look forward to going back next year!

Arcane Searching

I think we’d all agree the internet is one of the greatest productivity tools around, allowing us to find vast stores of information. I’m sure you’ve also heard it’s the greatest time waster, with lots of distracting sites or useless pages that get in the way of the results we want.

I find it really valuable to have a good search tool, one that focuses on the content I need, and limits the scope of the search to relevant areas. Of course we’ve all heard of Google, the 500 pound gorilla of search engines. While the do a pretty decent job, when your search phrase returns half a million hits it can be difficult to narrow down.

Recently I’ve found the Microsoft engine, Windows Live ( http://www.live.com/ ), has gotten a lot better, especially when looking for .Net related developer content.

My favorite so far though, is Search.Net ( http://searchdotnet.com/ ), a site put together by coding legend Dan Appleman. Dan ( http://www.desaware.com/ ) created a Google powered site, but maintains the list of sites it searches so you know that you are only combing sites devoted to programming and not Happy Harry’s House of Wild Women.

Another site I just learned about this week is Koders ( http://www.koders.com/ ). It’s a site devoted to searching through source code. It also has some helps that will let you zoom in on what you want. You can pick the language, or specify your search word needs to be in the class name, method name, or interface name. This kind of search is valuable when you are looking for an example, or trying to avoid reinventing the wheel.

A similar site is Krugle ( http://www.krugle.com/ ). It has similar paradigm to Koders, allowing you to search through code.

The final code search tool I’ll mention is Google’s new Code Search engine ( http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en ). It allows you to search using regular expression syntax, which is a nice feature (I just wish regular expressions weren’t such a pain in the underwear to use).

I have to give a quick thanks, most of these I learned about through either my listening of Dot Net Rocks ( http://www.dotnetrocks.com/ ) and HanselMinutes ( http://www.hanselminutes.com/ ) or through Scott Hanselman’s new forum site, which I blogged about yesterday.

Those are the list of place I go when I need to find something, how about you?

Happy Programmers

According to the Secret Society of Happiness (http://www.sohp.com/) today, August 8th is National Happiness Day. It got me to wondering, as a developer or IT professional, what makes you happy?

For me it can be the little things. When I added a third monitor to my setup at work, I was happy.

When I get “that” problematic section of code working, I’m happy.

When I learn about a new .Net class and learn it’s in’s and outs, I’m happy.

When I get to learn some new tech, such as SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), I’m happy.

When I get to hang out with other geeks and get into really arcane conversations about the nuances of some technology, I’m happy.

When I’m driving down the road, with no accidents to block my way, listening to a new podcast, I’m happy.

Most of all though, is when I meet with a user to find his needs, then in a few hours can come up with a solution for him. To hear the user say “wow, I spent hours gathering that data every week, now I can get it in a matter of minutes. You’ve saved me hours of work.” That makes me happy.

What makes you happy?

As a side note, I also have to wonder, if it’s a “secret” society, why do they have a website?

Just Code It

Jeff Atwood has an interesting post on his Coding Horror site entitled “Yes, But What Have You *Done*?” ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000809.html ). Programmers, Jeff says tend to be natural introverts, and left to their natural devices will migrate toward head down coding.

“But it is possible to go too far in the other direction, too. It’s much rarer, because it bucks the natural introversion of most software developers, but it does happen. Take me, for example. Sometimes I worry that I spend more time talking about programming than actually programming.”

I know how Jeff feels. In my role as a development lead I spend a lot of time in meetings, or talking to other developers about their projects. As a result I wind up spending a lot of time late at night doing coding, just to keep up with the latest and greatest techniques.

The need for code experience directly resulted in one of my “How To Be A Better Developer…” ( https://arcanecode.wordpress.com/2007/07/13/being-a-better-developer-in-6-months/ ) pledges.

I will work all the code samples in the book. Reading is one thing, but doing is even better. Personally, I find I get a better understanding when I actually type in the code samples and run them. And not just run what’s in the book, but tweak it, experiment with it.

I’m amazed at the number of times I meet some guy who comes across as a self proclaimed expert on a subject. When I quiz the person or try to ask tough questions, it turns out said individual read a book, but never actually wrote any code. Book learning is great, I certainly buy enough books every year to know, but there’s no substitute for doing.

When learning something new, start with the samples. Work it, tweak it, understand it. Then, if appropriate use it on your project at work. If it’s not appropriate, find someone else’s project that it would be a good fit for. Offer to work a few hours unpaid overtime and contribute some code to their project. They’d probably be grateful for the help, and might repay with some pointers and critiques.

Can’t find an appropriate project at work? There are thousands of open source projects out there, find one where you could contribute. Or look around the community; find a charity that needs some programming done.

It’s easier than you think to find some real world places to apply your coding skills. So what are you waiting for, just code it!