February 2012
1 post
Episode #3 Porting Code
This week’s discussion is on porting, or converting code. While there are tools to automate the process, most often, manually converting the code ends up being the best option. This episode discusses my experiences in working with code conversion and common themes and considerations I have found along the way. via Posterize
January 2012
3 posts
SR Development Podcast #2: Technology Shift
This is show #2 of the Development Podcast. The search for a name that is not completely lame is on, and I am continuing my education in the art of podcasting. Along with software development, music and technology, I have a related interest, even passion, for audio recording and production technologies, which is part of my motivation for podcasting—combine things I love to do and work with, and...
Process
This is show #1 of the Shepard Road Developer Podcast, a.k.a. I don’t have a name yet. In this kick-off episode, in addition to an overview of the ideas behind it, along with some beginning podcaster rabmling, the discussion is on the importance of defining a development process and developing routines and habits around that process, whether you are a professional or hobbyist developer. ...
Evolution of Higher Education →
This article is an on-point description of the evolution of post-secondary education and the current state of the system. Old-world institutions that have thrived on a culture of entitlement, while failing to deliver dollar-for-dollar value, are rapidly declining toward extinction.
December 2011
5 posts
Google’s 3 Top Executives Have 8 Private Jets http://ping.fm/i42I2
CodeSOD: The Andy Pattern http://ping.fm/mrR0D
Sorting It All Out…
The past few months have been a time of craziness and chaos professionally, with a fair amount of frustration but also tremendous learning. There are so many light bulbs going off in this rapid-fire brain of mine that I am fighting the urge to chase each one of them, which is why I am trying to step back and put some perspective on all of these things—ideas, inspirations and a generally ...
T-SQL Table Column Lookup Query
Here is a quick snippet of T-SQL that I use to find the column names in a given table in SQL Server: SELECT ORDINAL_POSITION ,COLUMN_NAME ,DATA_TYPE ,CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH ,IS_NULLABLE ,COLUMN_DEFAULT FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME = ‘table_name’ ORDER BY ORDINAL_POSITION ASC; Just replace ‘table_name’ with the name of the table you want to get information about. This is...
October 2011
1 post
Subversion 1.7 is out
2011-08-31 — Apache Subversion 1.7.0-rc2 Released ¶ We are pleased to announce the release of Apache Subversion 1.7.0-rc2. This is the first public release candidate of Subversion 1.7.0 (rc1 was not publicly released). It is thought to be free of blocking issues, and if none are found will become the final release. For this reason, we encourage thorough testing in as many...
September 2011
10 posts
Outsourcing Is Not A Corporate Culture Change...
I need to preface this post by saying that I believe that there are times in the life of every company that require significant change—transformational change. In fact, this type of change should be at the core of any organization that wants to innovate and even survive in today’s world. Sometimes this means cuts when the existing resource base does not fit into the new model. I do not ...
Windows Live Writer 2011: Abstracting Content...
I have been attempting to put more time into producing and sharing content more often and more consistently. In doing this, I have been also trying to exercise restraint in looking at the tools I am using. My favorite tool for blogging, hands down, is Windows Live Writer…however, I am impatient in that there is no native support for Posterous (not sure why) and the recently released Google+ API...
4 tags
Log4Net--A Missing Link
OK, I’m not sure about you, but after about half an hour at the end of the day today I had Log4Net up and running like a champ, almost laughing out of my chair at how easy it is to set up. This definitely deserves much more coverage than this gratuitous post, so I will be sharing more tomorrow as I play with it some more—staring at the screen, like a fool, as I start and stop the...
Porting [insert_language_of_choice] to .NET
I am in the office not 10 minutes this AM, and I am called over to my neighbor’s cube where a couple of my teammates ask me, “how difficult is it to convert PHP to .NET?” Being the only developer on the team, I give the standard “safe” answer, “that depends…” I followed up with a comment saying I hope they (our vendor) did not rely on a tool to do the job, but of course, they did. Vendors are...
Windows 8 Developer Preview
Just got the Windows 8 Developer Preview installed into a VirtualBox VM. If you want to do this, here’s a link with steps to do this. Now I’ve got to find time to work with it. Here are a couple of screen shots… See the full gallery on Posterous
New Toys: Topshelf, Log4Net and Quartz.net
It’s Friday, and it took all week for me to be able to actually sit down and get my hands dirty with some code. I am working on building out a new design for how we deploy to and manage our application environment, which now has to support multiple instances serving multiple clients. This is the double-edged sword of growth—more business and more challenges; I love challenges, especially the...
Posterously Challenged Dev
That would be me… I am always tinkering with my online properties and tools, trying to settle on what to build and how to manage them. Plug my mind into an amplifier and you will probably need ear plugs…which is why I am working on defining a system that works and that most effectively promotes consistency. This is why some of my recent posts may seem discombobulated as I am...
WinRT demystified
via tirania.org
F# 3.0 Developer Preview Now Available! (65 points) - http://pulse.me/s/1Gogl
Why we should teach our kids to code (21 points) - http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/169225.html
July 2011
6 posts
Unit vs Integration Testing
Note: This post was originally posted on my other blog back in January, and has popped back into my technical subject “radar” so I am re-publishing it here. I have danced around with the idea of honestly implementing unit tests into my development toolkit and processes, but have struggled with getting my head around the concepts and their real-world application to my development tasks. I ...
Answering a Problem? Or Contributing To One...
I have spent the past couple of days beating my head against the brick wall of software development tracking tools that exists, only to come up empty handed. There is one thing that all of the applications out there have in common, and that is that they all do the same thing. They are comodoties, with nothing fundamentally separating them from each other. I have been using Axosoft’s...
Technology Cannot Fix Stupid
Sitting in a weekly team meeting this morning, I had to ask for clarification after hearing with disbelief how not one, but multiple vendors of ours process membership applications. Here is the long and short version of this:
The vendor receives an XML file containing applications submitted through an online application form. Next, the data from each of these records is used to create a...
A Beautiful Example of Win/Win for Tech Company...
Novell/Xamarin Partnership around Mono This is what makes the world go ‘round: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Jul-18.html That’s all I can say right now…definitely more to come. //T
Finding Integrated Tracking and Version Control...
Up until the past couple of weeks, I have essentially been a one-man development shop, making the task of tracking requests, bugs, issues, etc…and managing version control relatively simple. Business is growing rapidly for us, requiring more development resources to be brought on board to support the resulting projects, requiring a new set of processes and tools for managing our new,...
I Find Your Lack Of Faith... Invigorating
wekeroad:
Sometimes I link to controversial stuff and a weird thing happens: it’s as if I wrote it myself! I linked to a post by Ken Egozi earlier today and pretty soon I was being told that I’m feeding the troll mill, that “I know a guy who left .NET and came back” etc.
I can dig it. I didn’t have the intention of skewering .NET really - to me it’s a given that people are gravitating away...
December 2010
3 posts
1.0.9 Management
devlife:
In this episode Scott and I talk to technical folks who have moved on up to Management - and what it means to them.
Mark Freedman shares his story about clawing his way out of a successful career as a manager at a rather large, growing company. A good job, lots of respect, and he hates it.
Bertrand LeRoy talks about charting his own path right at Microsoft after graduating with a...
1.0.8 Motivation
devlife:
In this episode Scott and I talk to 2 people with fairly different stories, about what motivates them:
Scott talks to Brad Wilson, Senior Developer on the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC team about what motivates him to get out of bed and come to work every day at a high-intensity company, surrounded by brilliant people.
Rob talks to Rob Sullivan, a database administrator at a large company,...
1.0.7 Audacity
devlife:
In this episode Scott and I talk to 3 developers who have pulled off some pretty audacious maneuvers:
John Resig, Creator of jQuery, decided to write yet another javascript framework when there were already quite a few to choose from. Not only did he succeed, he changed web development forever.
Alex Payne, former API Developer Lead at Twitter, talks about the (somewhat insane) move...
November 2010
1 post
Ten Thousand
This does not surprise me in the least. I feel privileged to count Patrick as one of my long time friends. Congratulations, brother!
minimalmac:
Thank You.
Just a short post to thank each and every one of you. Just hit ten thousand followers on Tumblr. No words could ever be sufficient so I will have to leave it at that.
October 2010
4 posts
1.0.6: Abstraction
devlife:
In this episode Scott and I discuss “what you need to know” as a software developer. How many layers of abstraction do you need to understand? How many geek trading cards should you have in your collection? To find out more, we talked to 3 prominent, living-history developers:
Ward Cunningham - creator of the Wiki and major figure in Agile/XP programming
Charles Petzold - author of...
1.0.6: Abstraction
devlife:
In this episode Scott and I discuss “what you need to know” as a software developer. How many layers of abstraction do you need to understand? How many geek trading cards should you have in your collection? To find out more, we talked to 3 prominent, living-history developers:
Ward Cunningham - creator of the Wiki and major figure in Agile/XP programming
Charles Petzold - author of...
patrickrhone:
Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Chokehold of Calendars
The problem with calendars is that they are additive rather than subtractive. They approach your time as something to add to rather than subtract from. Adding a meeting is innocuous. You’re acting on a calendar. A calendar isn’t a person. It isn’t even a thing. It’s an abstraction. But subtracting an hour from the life of...
“So here’s my suggestion to you: find a system that works for you; don’t place...”
– The GTD app for the rest of us: Pen and Moleskine? | Macgasm
Words to live by.
(via patrickrhone)
September 2010
1 post
This Developer's Life: 1.0.2: Fame and Notoriety →
In this episode I talk to 2 developers about the fame and how it relates to their career as developers. In the first story I talk to John Sheehan, a developer who’s active on Twitter and is establishing himself in the Open Source community.
The second story comes from Scott Hanselman - one of…
August 2010
6 posts
Minimal Mac: Via: The Endangered Species →
I want to talk about something very important. Something that, I feel, has gone increasingly unnoticed – in fact abandoned in many cases – on the internet today. It’s increasing disappearance is akin to that of an endangered species. It’s so small that, when its population dwindles, people stop…
It’s No Cars Go In San Juan, Puerto Rico, Makeover http://ping.fm/vhnbh
Year One http://ping.fm/5RzRg
Minimal | Simplifying the experience →
minimalmac:
Apple makes it easy for people like my mother to buy a computer without feeling stupid. They make it easy by having fewer products (quality vs quantity), having products names that are easily recognizable and easy to remember (do you know what the Dell Latitude E5400N is?) and finally they have a website that makes it easy for you to understand the differences between the models and...
Save images from your browser http://ping.fm/hgX3N
Bury My Heart at Conference Room B: Sweat Time at Microsoft http://ping.fm/ipdlg
May 2010
1 post
Big News for Gary Vaynerchuk, Virgin America and... →
gary:
Gary Vaynerchuk is the new wine guy for Virgin America. Click the link above for more details!
April 2010
1 post
What are you looking for in a website you want to make?
January 2010
1 post
movie #3 tonight and going to sleep
December 2009
3 posts
“Content == data, and web sites are software applications. Without quality...”
“A software application without data is like a car without a road…it may be...”
“It’s still all about content…the shape, look and feel may be...”