Claudio Lassala's Blog

I’ve enjoyed Scott Hanselman’s “two must have tools for readable web” post, and have been following that kind of workflow for sometime now. I’ve tried Instapaper, but decided to just stick with Evernote for that as well. I use the Readability bookmarklet to get rid of the noise, and send the whole page to Evernote. I then apply a “read later” tag to it, and usually read things later on on my iPad.

I’ve incorporated Posh-Hg in my setup. It gives nice tab completion in Powershell for the Mercurial commands, and it also customizes the command prompt to display some useful information (such as what branch I’m currently on, how many files added/changed/deleted, etc.)

Favorite Things, according to the VBBers

I asked attendees about their favorites things they’ve either learned or shared at the Virtual Brown Bag. This is the kind of things I got:

• Productivity Tools (we’ve covered a good number of tips and tricks overtime on tools such as CodeRush, ReSharper, Executor, etc., and we’re certainly going to continue doing so).
• Feeling I’m on the right track with development
• Knowing I’m not alone in my questions concerning development
• I appreciate the help of those of us less experienced in development (great, we’ll certainly continue covering things for all levels)
• Git
• Rails
• Pomodoro Technique
• LINQ tips and tricks, like the .Any(x => x.Condition) instead of the .Count(x => x.Condition) > 0
• I love what you did replacing a switch using a Dictionary<DayOfWeek.Action>

Things that I’ve personally learned/enjoyed since we started:

• How people step up and help us keep the VBB’s going:
  • Zach Young: who allowed us to use the Virtual Alt.Net LiveMeeting room to host the VBB, as well as processing the recordings, posting it to Viddler, and listing it at the VAN site.
  • JB: who’s helped out being the host several times when I couldn’t make it (usually because I’m travelling). Not to mention the tons of things he’s shared, besides bringing www.VirtualBrownBag.com to life.
  • Ed Evans: who’s taken the initiative to create a wiki page for the VBB
  • Jared Lobberecht: who’s stepped up and automated the process of processing the videos, so they become available online just a few hours after the meeting has ended.
  • Brian Shroer: who’s been updating the wiki live during meetings, with timestamps, notes, links, etc.
• At one of the VBB’s over a year ago, I was showing SlickRun, and then somebody showed Executor, which I’ve switched to and can’t live without.
• A few weeks ago, somebody asked me if I could do an intro to Mercurial/Branch by Feature. That was fun. Even though I’m a total beginner with Mercurial, I think I was able to do it, which proves the point that Mercurial is such an easy source control system to use.
• Sharing both Evernote and the Pomodoro Technique have been fun for me, and I’ve noticed people on Twitter talking about it, so that’s great.

The Live Virtual Brown Bag session at the Houston TechFest 2010 was well attended, and I hope we’ll be getting more and more attendees every week now. At the TechFest we’ve launched t he official site for the Virtual Brown Bag, containing information on what the VBB is all about, links to the Wiki and Recordings, and a place for people to post their suggestions on things we could talk about. Make sure to check it out!