Many years ago I worked on a program that had a serious problem: the users in one customer’s system were getting deleted periodically. When a user was deleted, any data linked with them was also deleted. We could restore the data from backups, but it was a difficult process, and having a system that loses data wasn’t great for our reputation, so we wanted to resolve it quickly. Our VP of developme...

Building applications can be tricky, and it’s inevitable that mistakes will be made. As a result, we programmers spend a lot of time fixing bugs. Sometimes they are easy, but sometimes they can be pretty tough to figure out. I’ve fixed a lot of bugs in my career, and to be honest with you, I usually enjoy the process. These days I am typically assigned the super urgent bugs that nobody else can fi...

Nobody likes bugs, least of all programmers. No matter how hard we try to catch them early, some will always escape into circulation. Until computers are smart enough to do what we meant instead of what we said, users are going to keep finding bugs, and we’re going to keep fixing them. Before a bug is fixed, it needs to be reported. Unfortunately it’s not uncommon to receive incomplete reports. We...

Developing software is an excellent career. Software has touched almost every aspect of our world, and its impact is always expanding. Many new things have become possible because of software, things that couldn’t have been dreamed of even ten years ago. The industry is continuing to expand. Tools are getting better. New opportunities are appearing everywhere… So why haven’t you gotten a promotion...

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 take...

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. Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development describe what happens when a team is formed. His theory has four stages:...

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. As a young adult, I tried loose tea on the advice of a friend. It was a total...

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 enjoyed Angular. It was straightforward to use, and allowed me to bang out a lot of functionality without much cumbersome boilerplate code. Jasmine, the testing framework set up in the bootstrap source, was also pretty slick. I really ...

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 ...

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. A member of our operations team was installing a Windows service I’d built to monitor some stuff in our production environment. I’ve made a few windows ser...