Category: Personal

See you in two weeks.

I really need to come up with filtering strategy, or get some long vacations to go thorough all the good stuff that’s there. Any ideas? How do you handle the discussion groups?

I just love living in Kraków. There are so many incredible things going on here all the time. Yesterday I went to Błonia, to see one of the most spectacular shows I’ve ever seen.

As a part of the 1st Film Music Festival, Błonia were changed to giant open-air cinema, where Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was screened. The best part however, is that the complete soundtrack was performed live during the movie. The orchestra + choirs summed up to total of almost 300 people on stage. You can get a taste of how it looked like on this video.

This video however, does not give the awesomeness of the spectacle.  The difference is I’d say comparable to playing a racing game, and driving a racing car. It was so incredibly breathtaking that I lack words to express it.

The music was so precisely synchronized with the movie, it was so… alive, it took the movie to whole new dimension. I’ve seen the movie like, four or five times before (once in cinema when it first came out, and then on DVD), but this was by far the greatest movie experience of my life. To say that I’m deeply impressed would be a huge understatement.

This week I received my most recent purchase from Amazon. (HINT: You can use the   link to see some more books I’d love to have… and even buy some for me ).

Here’s what I bought:

• Code Complete 2nd edition. With Jeff Atwood advocating it so much, it was not a hard choice. I actually wanted to purchase a book that would generally provide proven practices, and high level overview of programming in a language agnostic way. This seems to be it, and even more. The book is said to be one of all-time-classics of computer science, and so far (I’m in the 6th chapter) it lives up to this promise.
• CLR via C# 2nd edition. That’s the only platform specific book I bought. However, it’s not yet another “learn C#” or “Learn TreeView Control in .NET 2.0 sp1” kind of book with very narrow scope. This kind of books tends to get out of date very quickly. CLR via C# is a comprehensive insight into inner workings of CLR. It’s the book to read, to get thorough understanding of various aspects of the platform.
• I also wanted a book about agile development methodologies. That’s the topic of my master’s thesis, and also something I’m deeply interested in. The problem with most books on the topic however, is that they contain a lot of hype, and little real-life advice. The Art of Agile Development, seems to stand out from the crowd promising sober look at introducing and practicing Extreme Programming.

All in all, I’ve only skimmed through all the books, so I can’t say much about each of them yet, but I am content with the choice I’ve made. I’ll share more insight as soon as I read them.

So. What would you recommend for the next time?