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...

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, but becoming productive again has created new issues. When you change from trying to do everything to doing what’s most important, you need to decide what important means. Figuring this out for myself has proven difficult. I still don’t have all the a...

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. One of the worst things about working in the software business is the high rate of change. If...

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. What I’ve learned, however, is that it takes more than time to get things done. After about a month, pretty much all I’d achieved was completing a cou...

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 fixin...

For the last ten years, if you had asked, I would have told you with some conviction that a “critical path” is a kind of test script that tests the essential functionality of a system. If the app passes it’s critical path test, I would have said, it may not delight users, but it’s unlikely that they’ll storm your basement with torches and pitchforks. It came up at work during a discussion about in...

I’ve taken a big step in my career. I’ve become a software consultant. The decision to leave my job of three and a half years wasn’t an easy one. I was working with some fantastic people, building the best software we could, but at the end of the day I wasn’t learning. The work was challenging, but the challenges were mostly non-technical. In this business, if you’re not moving forward you may as ...

I was conducting technical interviews recently for a senior developer position. I like to talk about a bunch of things, but there is one question I particularly enjoy asking each candidate. Write an implementation for this: 1234int Average(int a, int b){} It’s a great question because it’s a simple problem, and anyone that comes through the door should know the formula without having to...