Web

I spent just shy of 9 years working on a suite of products that stored and processed environmental sensor data. This kind of data is naturally stored and processed as a time series. A time series is a set of data points, each with a time and value, and often more. They are common for sensor data, but can be used for pretty much anything that is measured over time such as prices, performance metrics, and analytical data.

A couple of years ago I switched this blog from a WordPress site hosted on GoDaddy to a statically generated site. The new setup is faster, more secure, and cheaper to operate. And it was easy to do!

Static vs Dynamic websites

WordPress is a very popular blogging platform. You can use it hosted on WordPress.com, or any number of other web providers that offer it. Because it’s open source, you can also host it yourself easily. In my case, I had a virtual server running in GoDaddy where I maintained the installation myself.

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 liked how I could nest a bunch of test blocks inside of each other to reuse common setup code.

I found my first 64-bit bug at work. I was moving a windows service built for the ‘Any CPU’ to a 64-bit server. It started fine on the new server, and gave no indication of poor health in the logs, but one key function was malfunctioning. I’m not exactly sure what the cause is, but I know that the hash of any binary file was resulting in the same value. The service does some direct memory manipulation which is a likely culprit.