During the last few months we (I and Alexey Kovyrin) have been working on a major Best Tech Videos site platform update. If you have not seen it before — it is time to take a look at it because really soon everything will change. I don’t mean that site idea would change (you would be able to find there the best tech videos), but usability, information availability and many small but useful things will be changed for good.

So, what are these major changes? First of all, design of the site has been changed and, I think, it is much better now. Here are some examples of the first page, login page and videos list page as they look on the test server now:

Video Authors (producers) could manually post their own videos on the server now. To make some video available to site visitors and users (onlooker), it have to be approved by one of the site’s moderators (instructor) or by some other author. Video posting page will look like following:

One more really great feature — now you could compose your own videos RSS-feed using some of the site’s feeds for tags and categories. You could simply choose tags and categories you like and get your own RSS feed with the best videos from your point of view.

Besides of view changes, we have decided to add some ‘sociality’ to the service, so now you could vote for videos you like, add videos to your favorite videos list and discuss videos with your fellow BTV users. Of course, you and your friends could get your favorite videos list RSS-feed.

By the way, I want to emphasize a bit on a technologies. Current version of the site was based on WordPress engine with some set of custom plugins. New version has been created from scratch using Ruby on Rails and now we have pretty flexible basement for further service development. So, if you have any ideas how to make the service better — your suggestions are really welcome.

And now I want to disclose some of our stats. As of today, you can find on our site 754 high-quality (custom filtered) videos in 100 categories which are more than 385 hours of video content! This collection grows every day. So, stay tuned — we will announce final release of the services soon.

Corresponding post in IRIS Design blog.

This site is interesting for me because I really like to see smarty people and listen their thoughts. Project is just started therefor video collection is not so large as I want, but it grows every day. I found interesting screencasts about AJAX, Web 2.0 and others here.

So, If you like to attend technical conferences and watch conference sessions on video, if you like idea of screencasts, etc, then this site is for you! Welcome to Best Tech Videos you’ll be impressed by amount of hi-quality and useful videos on the Net.

For the beginning I will describe books that I have read recently.

This is the best book I’ve seen about Microsoft .NET platform’s heart – CLR. I’m posing myself as .NET developer last two years and I read many books about C#, ASP.NET, threading in .NET and others but I know that only one book can explain what basis of all this thechnologies. This book is similar to his previous book Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming but much more detailed yet easy to read and understand. This book covers new to .NET 2.0 things like generics, nullable types and others, therefor if you new to .NET 2.0 – this book is must-read for you.

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
by Martin Fowler

Noted software engineering expert, Martin Fowler, turns his attention to enterprise application development. He helps professionals understand the complex–yet critical–aspects of architecture. Enables the reader to make proper choices when faced with a difficult design decision.

This book covers great and useful pattern concepts for enterprise solutions. Patterns like Domain Model, Data Mapper, Unit of Work, Identity Map, (Single/Class/Concrete) Table Inheritance, Layer Supertype, Value Object etc are nowadays most popular in the software design or even in framework design that can use any language to implement (C++/Java/PHP etc). Don’t be afraid of the word Enterprise in the title, this book is relevant even if you work only on small/medium size applications. Fowler covers lot of database and data related patterns and quite a good amount of material is related to browser-based client GUIs. If you want to know my opinion – this book is highly recommended for reading.

Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices
by Robert C. Martin

Best selling author and world-renowned software development expert Robert C. Martin shows how to solve the most challenging problems facing software developers, project managers, and software project leaders today.

The bulk of this book describes OO design principles. They’re presented in a readable, useful, and well-organized way. Often they just clarify and put a name to something you’ve probably been doing anyway. The standard Dependency Inversion Principle is there, for one. Others, like the Interface Segregation Principle, are less well known but reinforce lots of other good practices, such as data hiding and prevention of “interface leakage”. Robert does a wonderful job of explaining each design pattern, demonstrating their use through code, and placing them within the context of his design principles. The examples are numerous and, with a few exceptions, well written. One of the best books I’ve read, along with Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Gamma, et al., and Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler.

Another books I’ve ordered but don’t have them read are Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C# 2005 and Expert C# 2005 Business Objects, Second Edition (Expert). I’ll write about them soon.

I decided to stop learning C++ and therefor I’ve removed corresponding line from Objectives part. This decision was taken because I don’t have a lot of time to improve my skills in all areas I wish (such as C++ or Java). My primary platform now is .NET/C# and I really like it.

I’ve passed several brainbench certifications just for test my knowledge:

You can find my updated resume here.

At leisure I develop a bulletin board for a site www.ttki.ru. PHP5 and MySql 4.1 are used for development, and also Smarty template engine helps to separate code and design. An approximate development time – one week.