About the Author

I’m not a typical C# developer, I think it’s fair to say. For the last five years, almost all of my time working with C# has been for fun—effectively as a somewhat obsessive hobby. At work, I’ve been writing server-side Java in Google London, and I can safely claim that few things help you to appreciate new language features more than having to code in a language that doesn’t have them, but is similar enough to remind you of their absence.

I’ve tried to keep in touch with what other developers find hard about C# by keeping a careful eye on Stack Overflow, posting oddities to my blog, and occasionally talking about C# and related topics just about anywhere that will provide people to listen to me. Additionally, I’m actively developing an open source .NET date and time API called Noda Time (see http://nodatime.org). In short, C# is still coursing through my veins as strongly as ever.

For all these oddities—and despite my ever-surprising micro-celebrity status due to Stack Overflow—I’m a very ordinary developer in many other ways. I write plenty of code that makes me grimace when I come back to it. My unit tests don’t always come first...and sometimes they don’t even exist. I make off-by-one errors every so often. The type inference section of the C# specification still confuses me, and there are some uses of Java wildcards that make me want to have a little lie-down. I’m a deeply flawed programmer.