I’ve been a little busy lately, but I’m going through all my saved articles slowly but surely and reading up. Hope you enjoy these!

Why “I’d just Google it” is not an acceptable interview answer - Anyone can use a search engine. It’s not a reason to hire you.

Understanding Garbage Collection in .NET – I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to understand that while garbage collection is a great thing, you are in for some hurting if you think it’s nothing but magic. I have seen my share of out of memory exceptions from code written by people who didn’t understand how this garbage collection thing works. Yes, allocating a ton of strings you never use DOES matter. The Fragmentation Of The Heap section is vital to understanding out of memory exceptions on systems that appear to have a lot of memory left.

8 reasons why Model-Driven Development is dangerous – there are many approaches to building an application. It’s always worth knowing the pros, and cons, of each to decide which is right for your project

How Newcomers Can Influence Established Groups – if you’ve got a new job, or want to get one, you need to read this. Programmers are people first and programmers second. Learn more people skills and it WILL help your job, no matter what your job is.

It’s time for a little LINK LOVE…posted in the order I read them  =)

Friends Don’t Let Friends catch (Exception) – I’m guilty of either not handling any exceptions or catching Exception when I post examples. This is why production code should NOT do what examples show. Catch what you can handle, and bubble the rest to the main handler.

Why Are You Asking Me This Question? - If you want to give the right answer, you need to get them to ask the right question.

Do you know these Excel 2007 Productivity Secrets (Hint: Coffee is not one of them) – More help with how to do things in Excel 2007. So THAT’S what those little boxes do…

Help and How to Ask For It - An interesting post from All Things Workplace, it applies to life in general as well as work

The Better You Program, The Worse You Communicate (4 reasons why) – I don’t know if I agree with this hypothesis, since I’ve met great coders who communicate well and terrible coders who communicate terribly. I DO agree that programmers should be able to communicate with the less technically savvy folks they’re writing that code FOR.

Listed basically in the order I thought to put them here. Here’s what I’ve been reading lately…

px – em – % – pt – keyword – informative post from CSS Tricks about font sizes. Loved the explanation on em!

How To Lock Your Computer With USB Drive – i haven’t tried this yet, but it sounds like a seriously neat trick. You’re in trouble if you lose your flash drive, though.

CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death – Older article, but if you don’t know about CSS sprites, or need to brush up, it’s a great read

The Stack Is An Implementation Detail - Microsoft blogger talks about value types vs reference types (C#.NET)

If I could ask only one job interview question – I agree with the spirit of this post so much, I can’t express it. A must read for new and junior developers, especially considering the questions I see asked on forums time and time again…

What I’ve been reading lately…

Advanced Regular Expressions in C# – neat tricks, including how to comment the expression

Understanding JavaScript’s this keyword- this post (and subsequent comments) helped clear up a couple things for me.

Table Layouts vs. Div Layouts: From Hell to… Hell? – Another awesome Smashing Magazine post helping those of us who aren’t the best at the front-end design use semantic layouts instead of relying on tables.

Pilot and Tech Support – One of the more amusing posts over at Scott Adams’ blog lately. Great for a laugh.

Need Something Changed On Your Website? Treat Me Like a Six-Year-Old (Really) – I run into this same issue with our corporate website.

Are You an M.O. Snob? - Programmers need to effectively communicate with humans, too. This post reminds us that not everyone thinks like we do. Not specific to programming – worth a read for anyone.

What ASP.NET MVC Can Learn From Ruby On Rails – Informative post about what ASP.NET MVC lacks. Is there even a point to an MVC framework that lacks a decent model?

Fire your best people…reward the lazy ones – I’m the lazy one.

8-year-olds should test my code – it’s always good to have people who are not you test your code

Walkthrough: Creating and Using ASP.NET Master Pages in Visual Web Developer – Walkthrough that is pretty basic, but includes the answer to a commonly asked question — how to share content between master and content pages

6 Words That Make Your Resume Suck – because in this economy, the more help we can get, the better. I know I’ve used these words (phrases) before.