Hello World!

After listening to Scott Hanselman interview 10-year old Carter Sande and his dad Warren on a recent Hanselminutes episode, I skipped over to YouTube and watched him give an introduction to PythonCard (see below). He's one precocious kid.

He and his dad have written a book called Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners. I decided to buy the book for my sons and see how they like it.

We've dabbled in some programming together previously, using Scratch. They seemed somewhat interested, but being typical 6 or 8 year-old boys, their attention drifted and I haven't seen them working with Scratch recently. The Hello World! book uses Python, which is very different from the graphics-oriented Scratch, so I have no idea how if their interest in programming will come back. We'll see.

(Not that I necessarily want my children to follow in my computer-programming footsteps, but I think that learning basic programming concepts is important in the same way as learning basic math concepts.)

Anyhow, I ordered the book from Manning.com with the 40% discount code you can find on the Hanselminutes podcast page. It's good until January 31st.

New Year, Fresh Start

Well, another year has rolled around, and before I know it the first month has already blown by. How time flies!

I started blogging last year and, not being much of a writer, I decided to try to inspire some topics by inspecting and changing the code of the very tool I was using to blog. So I started using BlogEngine.net both as a blogging platform and as a refactoring experiment.

As you can see, I'm not doing that any more. As I delved deeper into the BlogEngine.net code, refactoring as I went, I was also learning more about SOLID programming principles such as the Dependency Inversion Principle and the Single Responsibility Principle. As I became more familiar with the BlogEngine.net codebase, I was also becoming more comfortable with Domain Driven Design concepts such as Entities and Repositories.