There are few things more refreshing than a cold glass of good iced tea. I’ve tried iced tea from a lot of places, but the best I’ve had to this day is my own recipe. It’s so easy that I can’t in good conscience keep it secret. It’s also far cheaper than anything you can buy in a can or bottle, and a lot healthier because it doesn’t require any kind of sweetener. The only down side is that it takes a few hours to cool.

It takes some time to integrate into a new team. I always feel like an outsider at first. As I build friendships and trust, I’m able to contribute with increasing effectiveness. Having noticed some patterns, I’ve been able to make the process faster and smoother using a few simple tricks.

When I was a child, I drank tea because my parents wouldn’t let me drink coffee. I would soak a tea bag in hot water until it made a dark, bitter liquid, then dump in milk and sugar until it was overly sweet, and mostly flavourless. I would sip it to fit in with adults, but I wouldn’t say that it was something I enjoyed.

I recently tried AngularJS for a pet project. I watched a great tutorial about the platform, then dove in head first. You can see what I built here: MysterySolver

I’ve spent the last several years working on multi-user server systems in two different companies. Both those companies had a giant monitor hanging off a wall showing a graph of connected users. It won’t give you detailed diagnostic information, but it is a good indicator for the health of your servers, and your product generally. If you learn to notice certain patterns in your user graph, it can also save you precious time when things go wrong.

I had a frustrating issue at work this week: one that was easy to fix, but embarrassingly difficult to find. I came pretty close to giving up, which is not a solution I often explore, but in the end we figured it out and got everything working.

During the summer I started a difficult but important journey to reorganize my life. The first step was organizing my daily tasks. I was successful, butbecoming productive again hascreated new issues.

One of the best things about working in the software business is the high rate of change. Not only do we work with machines that radically change in capability every few years, but new techniques and technologies are constantly appearing on the scene. It is a fascinating new frontier that never gets dull.

I’ve been fortunate to take some serious down time during the summer. After working pretty much non-stop for ten years, things have piled up. I took some time to rest, then got to work on some personal projects that have been neglected far too long.

Or: The Most Impressive T-SQL Script I’ve Ever Written

I was recently working on a new application. After three months in the field, users were starting to complain about performance issues. We had done some limited performance tuning for the first release, and more as part of the second release, but new issues were popping up as more data got entered into the system. We could have continued fixing issues as they came up, one release at a time, but we wanted to get ahead of the problem, and the client wanted to know that the system would remain usable without developer intervention for a few years at least.