Different Oh My Posh color scheme per day
Briefly: what is Oh My Posh Oh My Posh describes itself as “a prompt theme engine for any shell.” Basically, your prompt, or the line that shows up in your ...
Posts by Year
2023
2022
Get your jam on
Jam time Every year GitHub sponsors a game jam during the month of November: GitHub Game Off. I’ve dabbled with making games my whole life and I’ve found ex...
About this mess
Here we go again Every so many years I look at my blog or personal website and get that urge to tinker with it and try something new. And that time was rece...
2015
Why developers don’t explain every last bug fix in release notes
I’ve seen a lot of frustration by smartphone users when app release notes are vague about what’s actually being updated. We’ve all seen the dreaded “bug fixe...
The customer may not always be right, but they’re still our customer
One summer in high school, I had a mandate from my parents to get a job. If I was going to work thirty-plus hours a week, I wanted more than minimum wage. Gr...
Story of the utility developer
A few years into my career, I noticed I was only working with the (even then) outdated “classic” ASP. I certainly did not want to work with ASP forever. This...
2014
Quickly switch to a “Presentation Mode” in Visual Studio
As I prepared to give a presentation tomorrow night, I stumbled upon a great article explaining how to setup Visual Studio for a “presentation mode.” Present...
The cult of the one-★ review
Playing the game Like any many fixed systems, the supposedly fair system of user reviews is horribly broken. The process was ripe for gaming. And gamed it ha...
Technical debt: now or never
I started a new project at work a few months ago. Literally, a new project, as in File -> New Project. It was very liberating (and scary) to not worry abo...
2013
Two Factor Authentication with the same email address
Update Google Authenticator no handles this situation correctly, and this article is less useful than it once was. Original Article Microsoft recently add...
Integrating TortoiseHg with Visual Studio
If you use Visual Studio, you don’t get integration with version control unless you use Team Foundation Server or install a plugin. This is an adaptation of ...
2012
A simple introduction to HTML5 game development with Crafty
As browsers become more and more capable, and JavaScript proliferates to all corners of the software development world, it was only a matter of time before w...
Errors of omission
I’ve long maintained that the hardest errors to find in a software application are those of omission. Omissions can be many things, but ultimately are missin...
Checking out from LinkedIn
My newest co-worker challenged recruiters to step up their game. He’s found a job he likes (and I’m biased, so I’ll just nod and smile) that provides some of...
Integration, always last
It’s likely that your application doesn’t live in a vacuum by itself. At a minimum, it either sends or receives data to or from another application. More lik...
Over-optimized?
Recently, I’ve been dogged by a Subversion issue (and generally dogged by Subversion — Mercurial and Git are my new friends) that stumped me on and off for a...
Task switching isn’t always bad
There is an (admittedly small) upside to working on something in small bursts. While there is a huge cost to task switching, a regularly scheduled task that ...
Running a JavaScript function when subscribed events stop occurring
Maybe this is well-known to the JavaScript coding community — below is a simple technique I’ve found that runs a block of JavaScript when subscribed events s...
Location known, but still lost
A started a new job in late 2010. At first, it seemed like something that was too good to be true at the time. It had a lot of awesome perks (to me, in no pa...
Patching vs. merging
One of those “fun” activities developers look forward to is merging code from one branch to another. The scenario I personal use most is merging changes from...
How reading user reviews and triaging software defects are similar
User reviews saved e-commerce — the power of the Internet buying masses, crowd-sourced into a win-win situation for both retailers and consumers (B2C!). The...
Inbox One, the pragmatic approach
The Getting Things Done methodology encourages behavior such as Inbox Zero, the concept of dealing with all the items in your inbox and keeping a zero count....
2011
The importance of releasing
An “old” adage in development is “release early, release often”. This is a form of iterative development which allows for lack of functionality initially, an...
Removing IDE distractions in Visual Studio
I’m not sure where I first read about “distraction free Visual Studio”, but it’s a thing, and I quite enjoy it. This article explains how to take to the extr...
If Nuget won’t update, try this
The newest version of Nuget, version 1.6, wouldn’t update on either of my computers from within Visual Studio. I’m not certain why, but the fix is simple. Ru...
Obvious observations: ask good questions
I was on a call with a client the other day and realized I wasn’t getting good answers. Instinctively, I wanted to blame the person answering the question....
Volleyball for programmers
Reflecting on the year, I learned a valuable lesson about what I can and can’t do. The things I could do ten years ago, but haven’t really done since, are st...
Waterfall development, a slow dulling
I’m sure this comparison has been made before, but repeated use of the waterfall development model has a slow, dulling effect on software teams (and the syst...
Changing again
Once again, I’ve decided to change blogging platforms. It’s a hassle I’m learning to not like, but this transition went a lot smoother than the last. This ti...
Lessons learned from changing blogging software and moving to a new host
I recently decided to move my personal website to AppHarbor. (If you are a .NET developer and haven’t had a chance to check out AppHarbor, stop reading this ...
Matty and the upside-down mouse
Ah, Salley Hall, part of the prestigious suite of dorms at FSU that were voted top five “dorms like dungeons” during the late nineties. It was during my time...
Why you have to get a paper document signed to update the database
A term I’ve used to describe various IT organizations in the past is “maturity”. A more mature IT shop will have a standards, practices, and other safe guard...
Can Any() of you Count()?
LINQ, which stands for Language Integrated Query, isn’t new anymore. It was introduced in .NET 3.5, which saw its release in November 2007. At this point, I ...
Presentation considerations
I’ve had the opportunity to give numerous presentations at work, and recently, have started giving presentations at the local .NET user group. I’ve gathered ...
Simulating TFS shelvesets in subversion
Update A proper SVN Shelve feature is tentatively scheduled for Subversion 1.8 Original article Having worked with Team Foundation Server for version cont...
Learn a foreign language (and spy on your enemies)
Besides coming up with corny jokes and blog post titles, I spend a fair amount of time reading about new technologies. Recently I have found that I am readin...
Programming with a purpose
Often times, I find myself dabbling at home on a new technology. I usually run into one of two situations: I have a hard time getting started or I quickly r...
Finding unused CSS with Google Chrome
With the advent of jQuery and its selector engine, I’ve gotten a lot better at writing accurate stylesheets. But I’m never 100% sure if all of my CSS rules a...
2009
Word 2007 and em-spaces
Developing custom solutions for Word 2007 over the last year, I’ve run across some bugs that are particularly nasty relating to em spaces. What’s an em space...