Being Professional

Top 10 Mistakes to make in class

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 19 Aug 2010 - 7:26am

A recent post on Paul Randals blog lists the top 10 mistakes people make when attending a course:

  1. Take a phone call during class
  2. Sit at the back and do email/surf and then ask questions
  3. Persist with a tangential rat-hole
  4. Bring your smelly lunch into the classroom
  5. Come to a class where you don't understand the language it's being taught in
  6. Come to a class without the required experience and knowledge
  7. Don't take notes
  8. Ask questions to try to make it look like you know more than the instructor
  9. Argue that the instructor is wrong
  10. Come to class looking for "the answer"

Go read the entire list. Are you guilty of doing any of these? Do you want to change?

Specialist Classes

Submitted by Bevan on Sat, 22 May 2010 - 8:00am

Sometimes, you can simplify a complex class by extracting out a specialist helper class to provide dedicated assistance. And, sometimes, old lessons turn out to be the most relevant.

Attack of the Lazy Coder

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 20 May 2010 - 4:32pm

I'm having such a great time dealing with lazy code. Check out these gems I've found just today ...

var periodError 
    = string.Format(
        "The Survey Return does not contain a valid Reporting Period");

Why format something that with no parameters? I changed the code to this:

var periodError 
    = "The Survey Return does not contain a valid Reporting Period";

Simplicity

Submitted by Bevan on Wed, 19 May 2010 - 8:09pm

Listening to Udi Dahan on Deep Fried Bytes Episode 49, I heard Udi say something very simple, but very important.

When people hear the word "simple" they translate that in their head to easy. So when someone talks about "Keep it simple" they think the message is "Keep it Easy". But, keeping things simple is not easy at all.

Process Improvement

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 - 7:00am

It's interesting to see how different people react to the idea of process improvement. Most people fall into one of two camps - I'll term these the Conservatives and the Radicals.

Conservatives don't see any need for change at all: "That's just the way we do things around here, we get the job done, and I've got work to do anyway." They put no effort into process improvement, and therefore realise no improvements. They never make things worse - but they never make them better either.

Syndicate content