Since the gift buying season is officially upon us, I thought I'd pitch in to the rampant
consumerism and list some of the toys I've had a chance to play with this year that would mean
fun and learning for the programmer in your life. Plus, the thought of it sounded fun.
I still like
last year's list,
but I've tried some new toys this year that I think can be equally fun. Here
they are, in no particular order other than the one in which I thought of them this morning:
- An Arduino microcontroller. Thanks to RAD,
I learned about Arduino, which gave me the ability to program hardware. It's
something I've always wanted to do but never knew where to get started. I have one now, and I hope to
complete an in-depth personal project next year.
- Apple's iPhone. Not because of the music, videos, and photos, but so they can deploy their creations
using the iPhone SDK.
Who doesn't want to make their own light saber battlegame utilizing GPS and accelerometer data?
- A trip to a software development related conference. A conference represents fun to be had learning and socializing with other geeks,
and an opportunity to see what cool things other people are working on. Pick one according to the type of work they do, or the language they use most.
Pick one unrelated if they want some adventure.
This year I attended Lone Star Ruby Conference
and had a great time learning things I never would have thought about to begin with. Even more fun were the conversations
with other programmers who I'd met online, and some I'd never talked to before. (Here's a link to LSRC, whose
website is down at the time of writing.)
- Books are always a good idea.
This year I've especially enjoyed Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
and The Mythical Man-Month
.
Founders at Work was great for its insight into the minds of companies' founders (I especially enjoyed the interview with Steve Wozniak).
Mythical Man Month is worth reading several times because of the wealth of timeless advice found in its pages.
- Parts to build a new computer. Many developers are - shall we say - frugal, and
would love to have new equipment to work on, but never seem to justify the cost to themselves. Get them a motherboard, processor,
video card, hard drive, optical drive, and tons of RAM and let them go to town building their own. Just make
sure all the parts are compatible (and ask if you don't know!).
After swearing off desktops last year,
my MacBook Pro display went kaput recently this year (which Apple so graciously fixed out of warranty for no cost, except haggling),
so I built a 64 bit dual quad PC with 8GB of RAM. Now I'm having fun writing programs without the 4GB memory restriction. Bloatware here I come!
(Just kidding of course. The extra RAM and cores come in handy for bioinformatics research).
Plus, the languages, platforms, and frameworks I use don't scale, so I need the extra processing power.
Those are some things I've enjoyed playing with this year.
T-Shirts didn't make my list.
What's on yours?
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