Author Archives: Sharon Cichelli

About Sharon Cichelli

I am a Headspring Senior Consultant, developing custom enterprise software for our clients and leading training classes on the latest Microsoft technologies. I blog about .NET development, best practices in agile software development, and my nerdy hobbies.

The post you don’t want to read on the topic I don’t want to write about

I’m going to give you a phrase of power. Use it wisely. Ready? I want to hear what you have to say. If you know a developer who ought to be presenting at conferences or writing blog posts and isn’t, … Continue reading 

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Coding with Friends: You should be here, too!

Come hang out with us this Thursday. Polyglot Programmers of Austin is a co-working study group for people learning a new programming language (or their first), 2nd and 4th Thursdays. We bring our laptops and work individually or in pairs … Continue reading 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Why go to a Prolog talk?

I’m famous!* At this year’s CodeMash conference, O’Reilly Media interviewed CodeMash attendees about our languages and technologies of interest, and I’m in it. Now take note of my face starting at 1:15, when I’m asked what programming language I’d like … Continue reading 

Posted in Conference | Tagged | 5 Comments

PluralSight videos: How to change the playback speed

Once I discovered the secret of how to adjust the playback speed of PluralSight’s training videos, deciding to subscribe became trivially easy. It was never the financial cost that stayed my hand, because the content is excellent, relevant, and plentiful; … Continue reading 

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Running JavaScript… With Sneakers!

Code-review time. I haven’t written significant JavaScript in forevs, but I hit upon a use case well suited to it, had a blast coding it up, and am confident that I’ll be completely mystified by it three months from now. … Continue reading 

Posted in arduino, JavaScript, refactoring | 5 Comments

Come to my Arduino talk: Home-built video game console

This Thursday at CTXNA, I’ll give an intro to the Arduino microcontroller, including a walk-through of how I followed PragPub’s instructions to build a video game console. Please join us! No experience necessary. Interactive and fun. Bring your Arduino projects … Continue reading 

Posted in arduino, electronics | Leave a comment

An Object Lesson in Binary Compatibility

A riddle for you, friends: When is changing a method from return void to return Something a breaking change? If you already know the answer, then why hadn’t you told me? Could’ve saved me a fair bit of embarrassment. Ah … Continue reading 

Posted in Open-Source Software, refactoring | 4 Comments

Using Syntax to Model the Domain

I’m fascinated by the small syntactic decisions that bring code closer to representing the business domain. Never mind the class inheritance examples from text books (“Dog IS-A Pet,” which has nearly never been relevant), I mean using properties, methods, and … Continue reading 

Posted in DDD | 6 Comments

Diffing Files to Avoid Easy Goofs

A good habit learned at my last job has saved me a lot of embarrassment and bugs (same thing): Before committing a set of changes to source control, I look at the diff of each file. Look at the changes, … Continue reading 

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Microcontroller Projects and Source Code

Welcome, Ignite/Dorkbot Science Fair Party Goers. Here are details on the two projects I had with me at the Science Fair. I used the open-source Arduino microcontroller. Arduino programs are called “sketches.” I keep my Arduino sketches on the collaborative … Continue reading 

Posted in arduino, electronics | Leave a comment