I’ve been looking through a few of my “Improve your Dev Skills” books:

• Refactoring
• The Pragmatic Programmer
• Test Driven Development in .NET

What are your favorite books in this genre? Why?

I wimped out on my ride yesterday morning (it’s hot and hard to sleep), so this morning I decided to tackle the infamous “Zoo Hill”, which climbs up Cougar Mountain near Issaquah.

Probably the worst hill that I’ve normall rode is Juanita Drive, which gains about 400′ over 1.3 miles, for a 5.8% grade. I hadn’t looked at the Zoo stats in a while, which turns out to be a good thing.

The climb starts immediately when you turn off of Newport, and it pretty brutal. It’s more brutal if you ride for 10 minutes, look down, and then realize that you still have one gear back at the back.

I usually run out of leg strength before I run out of aerobic capacity, but I ran out of breath lots of time on the climb. Definitely a good test of my capacity.

Overall Stats:

Length:    2.63 miles
Elevation: 1200 feet
Gradient:   8.1 % average

The average gradient is misleading. There are a lot of sections that are around a 5% grade, and even a few that are flat, so that means that the steep sections are up in the 15% range.

Riding down, I had to brake most of the time, because if I didn’t, I easily would have been in the mid 40’s. Next time, I’ll probably come down the next way.

Groupthink

A few people have asked me what training I did for my century ride.

I’m currently riding 4 days a week (well, I took 10 days off at JavaOne and on vacation). Monday/Wednesday/Friday, I do a 15 mile ride which takes about an hour. It has some up and down hills, and a steady 2.5 mile hill in the middle. I try to ride that hill at a somewhat painful steady-state, where my legs are hurting but I don’t feel like I’m going to die.

On the weekend (usually Saturday), I’ll go on a long ride. I started at around 30 miles in March, progressed to 50 miles in May, and then peaked at 70 miles the week before the century. I aim for a pace that will leave me tired at the end but not so I couldn’t ride more if I had to, which obviously varies based upon the distance.

For the century, I found it to be hugely useful that I had ridden the bulk of the course before, so that I knew where all the hills were and how steep they were.

I’m planning on adding more mileage as the summer progresses, and perhaps a new bicycle.

Oh, and I haven’t yet gotten around to getting a heart rate monitor yet, though that would probably be a useful addition. I bought Chris Carmichael’s book a while back, and I’m planning on trying some of his training drills – I would really like to be able to bump my average speed up a few miles per hour.

Century

n.

1. 100 years
2. An elaborate ritual practiced by a secretive cult, in which members devote themselves to extended periods of self-flagellation on their elaborate instruments. The group has an elaborate caste system, where members advance by demonstrating their ability to absorb punishment on a daily basis and their willingness to devote time and money to their obsession.
3. The subjective amount of time that it takes to ride a bicycle 100 miles.

I was feeling good. After a short lunch break (3:28, 56 miles), I had hooked up with a few riders and made good time from Monroe back towards the mid-point food stop. On the way I decided to make a pit stop at one of the rest stops. Clipped out of my left pedal, pulled into the gravel, stopped.  Went to clip out of my right pedal, overbalanced, fell over into the gravel. Unclipped, laughed, and thanked the other riders who came over to see if I was all right.

So, I was a little more tired than I thought. But I’m getting ahead of myself now.

Late last summer, my wife and daughter and I rode in the Headwaters Century, put on by the Tacoma Wheelman’s club. I did the 66 mile route, while my wife pulled my daughter on her trailercycle for 45 miles (a bigger accomplishment than what I did, actually).

I had a lot of fun on that ride, and decided to set my sights higher. The traditional progression for riders in the Seattle area is to do some sort of century, then do the Seattle to Portland (STP) ride in two days, one of the biggest organized rides in the country (they may sell out at 8000 riders this year). Then, if you want a much harder challenge, you can do STP in one day, or RAMROD (154 miles, around 8500 feet of elevation gain), or even the RAPSody (150 miles, 9400 feet of gain). Or, if you’re more serious, you could do a 1000 KM Brevet (though to be fair, that’s over 3 days).

After consulting with a few experienced experts, I decided to make my goal for this year to ride RSVP (Ride Seattle to Vancouver and Party), a two-day ride from Seattle to Vancouver BC. This ride got started the year that Mount St. Helens erupted, and STP couldn’t be held.  It’s much smaller than STP (900 riders max), and purported to be much prettier. It’s also a bit shorter, at 183 miles to STPs 200 miles.

To ride that distance, I needed an intermediate goal, so I chose the “Flying Wheels Summer Century”(“Screaming Thighs” is perhaps a better name), one of the toughest centuries in this area, because of the hills.  I’ve been pre-riding parts of the course for a few weeks now, and was pretty confident that I could finish the ride.

The ride itself was great. The one section that I hadn’t ridden turned out to hillier than I expected, but all else was what I expected. Pre-riding it was a very good thing to do.

I rode most of the first two thirds of the ride by myself. I hooked up with groups for a while, but their pace was just a bit too high for me to be comfortable. After the 66 mile stop, I hooked up with a guy who was riding the same speed, and we rode the rest of the ride together (misery loves company). That makes the ride much more enjoyable, and you have the opportunity to draft on each other, which gets you any where from 10% to 30% less effort.

A few statistics:

Slowest speed: 6.5 MPH, riding up the first big hill (12% grade).

Fastest speed: 43 MPH, screaming down a hill at 90 miles into the ride. I got passed

Calories Expended:  3000-4000

Water: Around a gallon

Food:

            24 ounces of gatorade

            8 fig newtons

            2 Balance Gold bars (Chocolate Mint, yum yum)

            1 banana

            1 package beef jerky (about a gram of sodium, very important)

            2 Carb-boom gel packs (Apple Cinnamon). Pure glucose gel

            ½ bagel

            4 bunches of grapes

            2 handfulls of pretzels

Distance: 101.75 miles

Time: 6:49:22

Average Speed: 14.9 MPH

Elevation Gain: 2900 feet

My goal was to finish 100 miles in less than 7 hours, which requires an average of 14.3 MPH, and I’m very happy to have finished earlier than that. Though I could have ridden more, I definitely didn’t want to ride any more at that point.

My long-term readers know that I’m in training for a couple of bicycle rides later this summer (a century in June, and a two-day double century in August). The rest of you haven’t had the joy of reading endless descriptions of my cycling exploits, but I’m sure you’ll get  a chance to do this in the future.

Anyway, I’ve been slowly upping my mileage to about 90 miles/week, including a 45-ish mile trip around the top half of Lake Washington, including a ride across Lacey V. Murrow memorial floating bridge (otherwise known as the I-90 bridge). That in itself is a experience, riding across a lake 20 or 30 feet off the water, both for the view and for the risk, given that a big chunk of the bridge sunk in the early 1990s due to an impressive display of cooperative incompetence between the state and the renovation contractor. The route around the Lake is really nice on a sunny day, but involves a lot of starting and stopping north of the University of Washington on the Burke-Gilman trail.

Last Saturday, I decided to vary my route. After riding about 25 miles and feeling good, I decided to ride on the east side of Lake Sammamish (lots of lakes around Seattle), which I hadn’t done before. I had one of those rare moments when everything seems to be working currently, and I rode for about 15 minutes at 21-23 MPH (about 4-5 MPH faster than normal), and then another 15 minutes flying (for me) up a 2-5 mile hill.

Overall, I did 48.6 miles in just under 3 hours, averaging a little over 16.2 miles per hour.

Which makes me very slow compared to more serious cyclists, but much faster than I was before.

Jay wrote a post entitled Properties? Not my bag, baby.

When I first started writing C# code, I used properties for everything. But recently, I’ve felt that I was wasting a lot of time writing trivial properties. Yes, I know that in Whidbey I’ll be able to use expansions to write them easily, but that still means that I have to deal with the property bodies cluttering up my code.

So, that got me thinking about whether it makes sense to be writing properties in the first place. After a bit of thought, here’s my current position:

Properties are a great thing for component libraries. There are certainly cases where you would want the future-proofing and decoupling that properties gives you.

But when you’re working on a single project that gets built all at once, I don’t think you’re getting any future-proofing benefits, and you have to pay the “property tax” the whole time.

This may be heretical, since “use properties” has been the common guideline.

What do you think?

Josh writes:

I’ve been working professionally with C# for about 2 years now and am just blown away by the things I can do with it. Lately though, I’ve felt like I’ve plateaud at this beginner to intermediate level. Every book I look at is either “Hello, World” or beyond my level of expertise, I feel like I’m always one step behind the game and my code is becoming stale.

That’s a very interesting question. I’m not longer a professional programmer (though I was for a little over a decade), so you’ll also want to listen to the comments that others are sure to write.

If you haven’t read them, there are a couple of books that I’d definitely recommend.

Code Complete
The Pragmatic Programmer

Both of these are currently on my bookshelf (actually, they would be if somebody hadn’t walked off with my copy of Code Complete).

To expose yourself to some new ideas, I’d also suggest:

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
Extreme Programming Adventures in C#
Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET

Whether you agree with these approaches or not, they are certainly thought-provoking.

The best programmers that I’ve known always have a few side projects going on, where they’re exploring new areas, new environments, etc. If you’ve never done network programming, try writing some socket code, or play around with remoting, or DirectX. Play around with tools, like a profiler, or measure the performance of different options. Get a book on .NET IL and spend some time under the covers (Richter’s book is a good guide here).

Finally – and this may seem like weird advice from a C# guy – spend some time writing some code in a language such as Perl. Scripting languages lead to a different mindset that can be useful in language.

I got this reference from http://www.theserverside.net, but since they require login to get to the link, I’ll instead refer you to the book page

I took a look one of the sample chapters, and I thought it looked pretty good, except for the fact that the first interface in the chapter is named “Environment” (the others are fine). 

Let’s see:

• Never been convicted of a felony


• US born


• 40 years or older


• Resident for the last 40 years.

I can run for president!

…

Darn. I just checked Wikipedia, and found out that you only have to be 35. I’ve been wasting the last 5 years.