Scott Hanselman

I think everyone has these feelings. There is always someone you admire knowledgewise and there are just so many things to learn. Don't forget, the internet you are connected to contains hundreds of millions of people and we all follow the same 10 k top performers? And I think 10 k would even be generous, perhaps it's 5 per niche ( eg. dotnet, python, gamedev, unity, ... ). The dificult thing is to not completely compare to them. Eg. Scot Hansselman ( https://www.hanselman.com/ ) is a great evangelist of dotnet but also works for Microsoft. He has more easy access to many resources and he shares those. John Savill also teaches at Pluralsight and has a great youtube channel for Azure weekly updates ( Eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUcbSNK6LGg ). But he also works at Microsoft as a Principal Cloud Solution Architect, so it's also easier to accomplish what they are doing ( i'm not saying it's easy though)

.NET definitely has a messy past but someone arriving today probably has the easiest time ever getting started because so much has changed to become a single streamlined product. All these opinions are weighed down by the very history that beginners don't have. The expansive standard library, web/desktop/mobile/gaming output, Visual Studio (Code) IDEs, fantastic in-depth guides and documentation [1], dev evangelists like Scott Hanselman [2], and constant stream of content from MS team and community [3] makes it not only easy to get started but also continue until you're an expert. I find it strange to complain about a 12 year old stackoverflow answer when other environments like nodejs are a nightmare once you get past the toy project stage. Anyone can write a simple tutorial for a to-do app, but it's how well you can grow that to a real complex system that determines how well-designed and productive an environment really is. And I've yet to find anything better. 1. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/ 2. https://www.hanselman.com/ 3. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/platform/community

First off, you picked a great time to ask this question because this week there's a free, online conference going on at https://www.dotnetconf.net/. There's a lot of good ASP.NET Core content, so you can see for yourself. One of my favorite things about the ASP.NET team is that a lot of them were community leaders - speakers, writers, open source library authors, etc. - before being hired at Microsoft. So it's hard to pick just one or two community leaders on the team, as pretty much everyone regularly speaks at conferences, publishes open source code, blogs, etc. So it's really hard to make a short list! Hopefully this is still useful to someone. As several others have mentioned, you really should start with Scott Hanselman (https://www.hanselman.com/ and @shanselman). [Disclaimer: he's my boss, but I joined his team because I was a big fan long before either of us worked at Microsoft] The ASP.NET Weekly Community Standup is a great place to connect both with the team and with the leading members of the developer community. It's at https://live.asp.net/ with Damian Edwards, Scott Hanselman and me. Damian Edwards (https://twitter.com/damianedwards) is the program manager for the ASP.NET team. During the show, I usually share 10ish links to top posts, open source projects, etc. by the community. We feel like the ASP.NET Community is made up of developers both inside and out of Microsoft, so you'll see a mix. The links are usually in the show notes, and we also tweet the…

I've seen a lot of people sharing similar sentiments just because it's Microsoft executives. These executives came up through engineering. These are not MBA's. Russinovich famously founded Winternals (now Sysinternals), and got bought by Microsoft. Building tools for the OS that the OS vendor didn't think to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysinternals Scott Hanselman is similarly prolific: https://www.hanselman.com/about/ These are not faceless execs, if you follow the company. These are the people who advocate for the real and good stuff.

It's great to see awesome work like this making a difference. Scott Hanselman has blogged[0] and spoken at some length on tech and living with T1D going back to 2002. [0] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/category/diabetes

I once spoke to Scott Hanselman [1] on a conference. He is diabetic and also makes talks about IT and diabetes. I liked one point he made: people without diabetes should not buy these products, as it only brings the prices up, meaning that not everyone by can afford them. Edit: forgot to specify link. 1: https://www.hanselman.com/

I have two DigitalOcean sites on the same VPS just serving from kestrel behind an nginx reverse proxy and then one site on a Hetzner VPS where I was playing around with k3s. For digitalocean I followed this post which is probably way out of date now https://www.hanselman.com/blog/publishing-an-aspnet-core-website-to-a-… For the k3s site the source is here https://github.com/EliotJones/LetsShip/blob/main/kubernetes/deployment… though worth noting I have set up LetsEncrypt incorrectly but that's my lack of k3s understanding.

I think you will find a lot of these people doing embedded, desktop, or enterprise intranet stuff rather than slick web/mobile products or massively scalable backend APIs. Using dated and uncool stacks. Dated and uncool practices. Windows centric. Hiring more about years of experience with particular framework versions than LeetCode or system design interviews. Two perrenial favorite pieces on this website include Dark Matter Developers [0] and We Only Hire The Trendiest [1]. [0] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-unseen-99 [1] https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

I am following /r/antiwork on reddit.com, where it is common to read threads regarding low pay and abusive work conditions. The people posting it are from all walks of life there, including the tech sector (devs, system admins, devops), which I did not expect. And not all of them are working on old, antiquated systems either, many use contemporary tech. It's best to understand that what's generally represented on social media (I am including HN and Reddit, as well as blog posts and LinkedIn) is not representative of the industry as a whole, we only congregate around the posts that get all the attention, and we don't care about the 'dark matter developers': https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-unseen-99

to be fair there's not much on the air these days to pick up using a crystal anymore (around me at least) but an SDR would let you teach much much more about whats going on in the invisible :) https://www.hanselman.com/blog/software-defined-radio-is-a-great-way-t… https://smile.amazon.com/NooElec-NESDR-Mini-Compatible-Packages/dp/B00…

Rather than rehash, I'll point you to Scott Hanselman's excellent (and old, but still valid) article on Windows backups. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/is-your-stuff-backed-up-recovering-from… Check out his YouTube videos as well, for a more visual walk-through. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL-fHOdarou-CR2XUmK48Og

> Those are layman’s concerns. Programmers love to learn new things and are typically good at it. If a given tech has merit and some unique advantages. I don't think that's true, I believe most programmers are either dark matter developers [1] or people doing Java (or equivalent) all their life for a software service company. There is nothing wrong with that, but that would explain why less popular languages and ecosystem still have lots of stuff. For example, Rust has ~60k crates on crates.io, while Maven Central has ~400k packages. I believe Java is used by more than 10 times the number of people that use Rust. But the people writing the libraries in the first place are usually the people that are open to trying out new languages. [1]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-unseen-99

I'm not sure even "Senior" software developers will be able to understand badly written code at first glance. However what experienced developers will most likely do is make a copy of the code, open it up in a good IDE add a breakpoint and run it. Add your own comments to the code as you go along and figure things out. And don't forget to take some notes separately too. As others have mentioned in the comments, you might be suffering from "imposter syndrome" but don't let it get you down. Some of the best out there have been through what you're experiencing [0]. [0] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/how-do-you-even-know-this-crap

I remember Joel too. Especially also the forums where you could get in contact with (among others) industry leaders. One of today's (tech) luminaries? For me it's Scott Hanselman. Always worth reading, even if you're not particularly on the Microsoft stack. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/

Back in my Windows development days I used to LOVE Rock Scroll. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingRockScroll.aspx It made the scrollbar a literal screenshot of the code.

This looks pretty impressive: Terminal.Gui - Terminal GUI toolkit for .NET https://github.com/migueldeicaza/gui.cs Written by Miguel de Icaza. Hanselman wrote on it here: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/Its2020AndItIsTimeForTextModeWithGuics.… and here: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DotnetDependsIsAGreatTextModeDevelopmen…

The new terminal with PowerShell is quite lovely. I recently had to move my work from macOS to Windows and am pretty happy after setting it up like this: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToMakeAPrettyPromptInWindowsTerminal…

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToMakeAPrettyPromptInWindowsTerminal… Been using terminal and 2 row powerline. It’s amazing. Hard to go back to conemu or similar in windows.

Really sorry to everyone who is out of work now :(, I wish I could do more then just give you some links and thoughts but hope this helps. 1. If you're looking to ramp-up your skills Pluralsight is giving away a free month of training this month: https://www.pluralsight.com/offer/2020/free-april-month 2. Large companies are still hiring I growth areas, I am not 100% sure but If I was a betting man anything at Google, Amazon or Microsoft that is cloud related is probably still booming to get people on board 3. If you wind up finding some work that is remote in this situation and don't have WFH experience check out this great set of tips for WFH by Scott Hanselman: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/LoveInATimeOfCoronaVirusTipsTricksAndBe…

Back when WSL was first released I tried getting my ruby environment set up using it, but at the time I still used a graphical text editor and getting it talking to the Linux filesystem was too much of a bother. Nowadays I use vim so I gave it another chance a couple of weeks ago. Together with the new Windows Terminal app [1] it's been a great experience. I can run my editor and my code on Linux and then visit the webapp from the browser in the Windows environment. Note: There's also better support for talking to the Linux filesystem from Windows nowadays, but I've not needed it so I can't comment on how good it is. Scott Hanselman has a good blog post on getting it set up though [2]) [1] https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal [2] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/RubyOnRailsOnWindowsIsNotJustPossibleIt…

Who would you prefer doing daily standups or long stretches of remote pair programming with? The one with the low resolution, low contrast, washed out, low fps video that makes it hard to read emotion or even detect where his/her attention is? Or the one with sharp features, pleasant colour rendition, high resolution, and maybe even a pretty bokeh in the background? Humans love pretty pictures. See OKCupids[1] image analysis vs attractiveness for example. Shallow DOF = More attractive. See also hanselman's[2] thoughts on the matter of having a high quality setup for remote work. [1]: https://theblog.okcupid.com/dont-be-ugly-by-accident-b378f261dea4 [2]: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/GoodBetterBestCreatingTheUltimateRemote…

idea_heroin... love the name. I'll try and approach this objectively (since I also start tonnes of projects with no financial upside). Consider that there are millions of ideas out there and most will never ever be realised. You CANNOT DO THEM ALL... so you will need to prioritise what ideas are worth working on. The criteria you choose is up to you; financial gain, social gain... just thinking about this is a good way to moderate yourself. There are a finite number of keystrokes left in your hands before you die. - [1] Scott Hanselman [1] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DoTheyDeserveTheGiftOfYourKeystrokes.as…

Descent II felt made to be controlled with the SpaceOrb 360. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceOrb_360 I’m shocked there’ve been no kickstarters to revive the perfect input device for 3D games. If you’re not familiar with this input device, this calls it the greatest game controller of all time: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheBestControllerForFPSASpaceTecSpaceOr… Also happens to be a pretty good hacker (maker) story.

> Run it right now with: docker run --rm -it nbrown/lynx lynx http://hanselman.com/ Or run it right now with: lynx If your use case for trying an established browser involves docker, we might want different things from a browser. I like the idea of browsh too, but it is not a browser.

I shared it primarily because it is an open-source UI project managed by Microsoft that has to support an "API" that is cross-platform, but it also meets this portion of your original criteria: > as long as you can host the language a given UI framework is built in, you can use it to create UI elements in whatever platform you want (The work has already been done to host React/JavaScript cross-platform alongside .NET: see Edge.js http://tjanczuk.github.io/edge/ previously mentioned elsewhere in this thread. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsJustASoftwareIssueEdgejsBringsNodeAnd… As an aside, I recommend you include some details summarizing reasons for rejecting existing solutions when initiating future discussions so all participants can begin on the same page.

I know this is nitpicky but the author's website doesn't follow their own advice: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/URLsAreUI.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/URLsAreUI --> 404

You are describing an aspect of Impostor Syndrome. It's super common among programmers – and IMO, all people who have a modicum of self-awareness. Just search around, you'll see that feeling overwhelmed puts you in great company. :) https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ImAPhonyAreYou.aspx (also talks about Dunning-Kruger effect, which is related) https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/your-money/learning-to-deal-with-th… http://www.thebookoflife.org/the-impostor-syndrome/

I have followed: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/PublishingAnASPNETCoreWebsiteToACheapLi… Worked like charm had site up and running in 20 mins which is kind of "production" ready. With supervisor and reverse proxy. Or just do docker? You are overthinking a bit also with the terms, you don't need to know those terms by heart.

Great points all, especially about the "simple downloadable .tar.gz." We will fix that. Until then, I wrote it up for you. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TryingNETCoreOnLinuxWithJustATarballWit…

If you're looking at dotnet core just keep in mind that its been evolving quite a bit and can be a little frustrating when major changes happen. Though I think its starting to settle down a little. There's a lot of good documentation for it here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/articles/core/index Hanselman always has good posts on his blog: http://www.hanselman.com/ Outside of that, we'll need to know a bit more about what you're looking at to give you better advice.