Barbaric Monthly is my attempt at building/improving a coding project per month so that I can experiment with old and new technologies, learn ad infinitum, remain excited about the craft and nurture my passion for software development. This Barbaric Monthly is about developing a windows phone application, in this case a simple quiz game called quiz4couples, and releasing it to market.

Yesterday was bittersweet. On one side, I did a huge sprint and advanced a great deal in the development of quiz4couples, moreover, the tiny app took such an interesting shape that I have even considered making it a paid app :O, go figure. On the other side, I was not able to finish it, not by a long stretch, I think it will take a good week to get it to a point where I will feel if not comfortable, at least not embarrassed releasing it. And therein lies the problem, I completely failed my own expectations and therefore rewarded myself with self-contempt and mental spankings.

Thank the sacrosant deities that I am a joyful and forgiving person, and this very morning I was so kind to forgive myself :). So moving on… I am going to extend the Barbaric September for at least one week, and we will see how it goes.

I am thirsty for shipping, so it won’t be long…

Welcome stranger, sit down by the fire and let us hear the epic deeds, the tales of joy, of woe and of note that occurred these past seven days.

Epic News

• GitHub introduces the command bar.
• Azure has its very own chaos monkey.

Epic Articles

• Everything’s broken and nobody is Upset.
• Android Niceties, or a collection of beautiful Android apps.
• How to test multilingual apps with the Multilingual App Toolkit (Video).
• Asynchrony on .NET.
• Websites with embedded CLIs.
• What’s the difference between doing this or that on C#?.

Epic Podcasts

• It’s Xamarin Not Xamarin at the Windows Developer Show : Extremely hilarious episode with Nat Friedman from Xamarin, Did you know that the iPad version of Bastion was made on MonoGame? Amazing.
• NodeUp: A Node.js podcast.

Epic Courses

• The Perfect Workflow in Sublime Text 2.

Barbaric Monthly is my attempt at building/improving a coding project per month so that I can experiment with old and new technologies, learn ad infinitum, remain excited about the craft and nurture my passion for software development. This Barbaric Monthly is about developing a windows phone application, in this case a simple quiz game, and releasing it to market.

The power of focus is absolutely amazing. I remember spending indefinite amounts of time exploring Windows Phone 7, learning every detail I could, making uncountable little exercises but never building anything for real.

A clear goal, a tight schedule and a near deadline later, I have my first app almost ready. It is a very simple app that is true, and I have cut scope like a maniac, but I think I will release it nonetheless and go iterating on it from there. It will definitely provide a nice foundation where to start from and continue playing with other different aspects of the Windows Phone SDK, WCF and Windows Azure.

That is all for now. Below you can appreciate a screenshot of this piece of mastery:

Now I just need to bend time and space during this week to have something not to embarrassing to publish :).

Malin and I have just watched the season finale of So You Think You Can Dance and it was so wonderfully beautiful. There is something magical, enchanting, something enthralling about seeing passionate people doing what they love most. Be it dance, be it music, be it writing, be it whatever rocks your world. Joss Whedon said it better than I could ever do:

Passion, it lies in all of us, sleeping… waiting… and though unwanted… unbidden… it will stir… open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us… guides us… passion rules us all, and we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love… the clarity of hatred… and the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion maybe we’d know some kind of peace… but we would be hollow… Empty rooms shuttered and dank. Without passion we’d be truly dead.

Please, do the world a favor and follow your passion. Enthrall us. Inspire us.

Welcome stranger, sit down by the fire and let us hear the epic deeds, the tales of joy, of woe and of note that occurred these past seven days.

Epic News

• Microsoft officially launches Visual Studio 2012 and provides Tons of demos of new features and .NET 4.5
• Apple announces the iPhone 5

Epic Articles

• Great Improvements to Windows Azure Websites : new low price for “shared” scaling tier to deploy cheap websites on the Azure cloud, improved domain support and continuous deployment with Git and GitHub or CodePlex. And don’t forget about the new Windows Azure Mobile Services!
• Browse what’s new on .NET 4.5 and Make Great Windows Store Apps
• Beware because hardware is dead!
• An interesting startup story
• Unsucking your team’s development environment, because you need to take care of what’s important in life
• 7 habits of highly effective programmers that would like to write Professional Code
• Unit Testing: Is there really any debate any longer?

Epic Podcasts

• This Developer’s life is back!

Books

• Smashing Node.js published!

P.S. Have you guys tried Pocket? It beats the crap out of Instapaper

P.S.2 Mental Note: Next time I will try to build a story from the weekly articles and news. Now that… would be a thing XD