March 26, 2012
I dislike business reporting. I’ve been designing and building enterprise level business intelligence reports for the last seven years are so. I’ve never liked writing reports. Perhaps it is the formality of the report. Perhaps I wrote too many reports that I slaved over only to find out that the business folks either weren’t running them, or didn’t know why they needed them.
More...March 6, 2012
Tekfolio has been a side-project that I care a lot about. It’s also a playground for learning and testing new ideas. I’ve re-written Tekfolio from the ground-up a few times now (in MVC, Rails, Backbone). As a programmer, this was time well spent on something I think I’m great at (server-side shenanigans), and not something I suck at (UI design). Bootstrap allow me to focus on awesome functionality while keeping the site looking respectable.
More...I feel like this sometimes developing for iOS, Android, and .NET.
February 1, 2012
So I just updated a wordpress site that I created for the Nearby Now plugins. It’s just a basic site we put together to feature some of the various plugins we’ve built for Wordpress and Facebook, and to show examples of those plugins in action. I made a change that screwed things up for about an hour.
More...January 2, 2012
Here’s a quick rambling on my experience as a .net dev building Nearby Now for iOS and Android. I had a blast, learned a ton, and developed a love hate relationship for other platforms.
More...December 27, 2011
It’s nice to see something so basic, so trivial, that doesn’t require batteries or wifi to be incredibly useful.
More...December 10, 2011
I love a challenge and stepping out of .NET land to tackle another programming language for a couple weeks was a blast! So what about Objective-C & Xcode from a .NET programmers perspective?
More...September 26, 2011
Quick guide to downloading the view engine from NuGet and implementing it on your MVC3 site.
More...September 14, 2011
If you’ve never participated in a hackathon (hack night, code jam, etc) then it might be difficult to understand the point. Typically a hackathon is when two or more programmers get together to work on something interesting. For most hackathons there is no more than a very high-level goal (build something useful for example) and a pre-determined period of time (might be an all-nighter, might be a weekend event, might be a week long thing) to do it in.
More...August 26, 2011
I’m doing some screen casts next week and thought a new mic would be helpful. I tested it tonight on Skype and it works great. Not bad for less than $90.
More...August 22, 2011
I just spent the weekend updating CoovTech and Tekfolio with {less} css. If you haven’t heard of LESS, it’s a dynamic style sheet language that allows you to write much better CSS that compiles down to regular CSS.
More...August 2, 2011
I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn and Stackoverflow Carrers but there has been something bugging me about both sites for a while… They are all talk.
More...August 2, 2011
Pair programming has been one of my favorite agile software development techniques for the last couple of years. We built SideBox this way and it’s been some of the most productive programming I have ever done.
More...July 30, 2011
Someone insists that this is because of MVC 3, which cannot be indexed by main stream search engine…
More...July 11, 2011
I drove by an old Hollywood Video store this weekend I couldn’t help but reflect on the rise-and-fall of of both Hollywood Video and Blockbuster. If you Google these two companies you’ll likely read about these corporations as “casualty of the economy” or “casualty of NetFlix”. While some of that may be true, I think it is very likely that something else caused both to crumble.
More...July 10, 2011
When I hear people throw around terms like “web scale”, or “acid”, I usually face-palm
More...July 6, 2011
Here’s the problem that ends up killing company after company. All successful software companies had, as their dominant personality, a leader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leader forever. Either he cashes out, or he brings in management types who end up driving him out, or he changes and becomes a management type himself. One way or another, marketers get control.
More...June 30, 2011
I’m a big believer in simplifying every aspect of the software development process from “file new project” to deployment. Nothing should take more than a click-or-two, or a few keystrokes. I believe my focus should always be on the code, not the tool. Microsoft has done a great job at perfecting my primary tool, Visual Studio, and now AppHarbor has made web deployment automatic for my daily workflow.
More...June 29, 2011
I’m in the process of moving my blog over to GitHub…
More...June 14, 2011
Back in 2004 (about 23 internet years ago) I started working on a cool priority management project. We were trying to build a hybrid application that was part helpdesk, part bug tracking, and part priority management. We basically built an internal ZenDesk on steroids.
More...June 7, 2011
One of the features of being a contractor is freedom of movement. You can travel anywhere in the world, and as long as you have a laptop and a wifi connection, you can be productive. I’ve enjoyed the freedom of coding in a local starbucks, a local pub, even awesome co-locations sites like GangPlank.
More...June 1, 2011
Did anyone make any changes to [fill in the blank] code? This question makes my blood boil yet it’s a question that I’ve asked probably 100 times over for the last five years. If you are asking this question too then guess what, you don’t have source control and what you are using sucks.
More...May 28, 2011
I’m a big fan of Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows. It’s my go-to page whenever I get a new machine. But I’m no longer a Windows guy. I’m a Macdows guy. I still code C# .Net (with Mono) on the mac, but a lot of these tools are cross-platform.
More...May 27, 2011
I need to work on the lighting in the office. I like the office dark some of the time, but it is difficult to bring in natrual light when I want it.
More...May 27, 2011
I was injured in a softball game on Wednesday night. It’s kinda of embarrassing how it happened. The guy batting before me hit an opposite field laser that exposed a shitty right-fielder that the other team had. I tried the same and when I hit the ball, I immediately felt pain on my left side. It felt like I pulled something.
More...April 26, 2011
Quick back-story. I was trying to reserve a car with my Amex points for a trip I’m taking to Virginia. My wife and I are going on a short vacation and I had some Amex points so I wanted to splurge a little and rent us a convertible Mustang. During our trip, we are driving up to New York for a day and that calls for a Mustang drop-top, right?
More...April 19, 2011
A few years back when social networking exploded, I was a little slow to catch on. I had a MySpace and Facebook account, but I thought social networking was sort of silly at the time. I was mostly posting pictures on Flickr, and blogging occasionally so my family could keep up with what I was doing. It was this post about my son that actually that kicked-off my desire to blog and and write as much as I could.
More...April 14, 2011
When i first started building the SideBox iPhone app, I tried to parse Json using native .net api’s. I failed. Why? Well mostly because I did not know what I was doing, but also because I was under a pinch to bang it out quickly. Back then I decided to go with a port of the JSON.NET library called Newtonsoft.Json. It has worked well for me up until recently. I began processing some nested json with weird arrays and such and my Json parsing started breaking down. Probably my fault, but I again was in a pinch and needed to bang out a quick solution.
More...April 6, 2011
My first ever hack-a-thon was a failure. Why? Because the battery on my laptop ran out after about 40 minutes… I suck. Here was the challenge… We were trying to come up with a way for customers to start using SideBox and feeding hyper-local search, even if our full-service product is not complete/polished, or customers weren’t ready to take the plunge.
More...March 31, 2011
After 10 years, 3 months, and 27 days (or 325,641,600 seconds for you geeks), today was my last day as a full-time developer for Concord. I resigned my position as Lead Developer to focus more on SideBox.
More...March 20, 2011
I needed a to generate a site map today for some cool things we are planning for SideBox. I turned to, you guessed it, Stackoverflow and found a question about parsing an Atom feed with Linq which is exactly what I was looking for.
More...March 15, 2011
I’ve been working on the iPhone app for SideBox for the last couple of weeks. It’s been fun, challenging, and engaging. I’m really beginning to understand Git, GitHub, and what social coding is all about. I’m using an open-source library called MonoTouch and MonoTouch.Dialog to write this app. I’ll write more about MonoTouch later. The quick-pitch on MonoTouch is that is allows us poor .NET developers to get in on the iPhone (and Android via MonoDroid) action. MonoTouch.Dialog, to quote Miguel de Icaza, takes the “administrivia” out of building views and lets you focus on getting things done.
More...February 19, 2011
I can’t think of a more efficient business than Quick Trip. From the gas pump, to buying a coffee, the entire experience is fast and hassle free. Consider some of the other convenience store chains (Mesa, AZ area) such as AmPm, or shell. It’s 20 questions at the gas pump and a slow as shit credit card interface. Nine times out of ten, the pump is slow as well.
More...February 17, 2011
This just in… I moved to gmail’s priority inbox. We haven’t officially moved to the Google app engine, but we were given some test accounts to work with. So I just moved everything over. It’s very simple to do and you won’t regret it. Here is how I moved over in what seems to be a very seamless transition so far
More...February 2, 2011
A couple of weeks ago I talked about some of the changes I was making in my life so that I could become more effective both at work, and in my personal life. I’ve significantly reduce the number of meetings that I go to, I’ve been at inbox-zero for weeks, and I’ve been extremely productive. I had an endless list of priorities that I’ve put a significant dent into including an 80 hour project, a 50 hour project, and a 30 hour project (don’t quote me on those exact number, just know they are close), all while working less hours. I’m still less productive while in the office because there are distractions I simply cannot avoid (like the cubicle assassins) but overall things have been great.
More...January 31, 2011
I was working on a project where I needed to display a confirmation alert to the user. I’m tired of the inline div’s and facebox dialogs but was having a difficult time finding an alternative. Then I remembered I really liked the way Twitter confirmed changes to the user profile so I thought I would make my own version that I can use in my asp.net mvc apps.
More...January 22, 2011
For the two times each year that I print… This is one of those things with a high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). She likes to print, and I like gadgets.
More...January 20, 2011
I’m a huge fan of the book REWORK by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. It’s the first book I read on a Kindle and it’s the only book I have actually read in its entirety. Anyone who knows me is probably at a loss for words right now because I’ve probably never read anything longer than a blog post.
More...January 13, 2011
I’m building a new performance analysis system for our web traffic and was considering different ways to display the data. Anyone who knows me well knows that for the most part I despise reporting. Mostly because time and time again I’ve been asked to build reports that never get used. This time is different. This time I’m the audience so I get to build the report the way I think it should look.
More...October 19, 2010
In order to post form data that the model binder understands, we need to setup our form to match the schema of our model. In this example, the contact name would be a “Name” input, and the contact phone numbers would be a “PhoneNumbers” input and a “PhoneNumbersType” select. Because the Contact contains a list of PhoneNumbers, we need to make sure our phone and phone type inputs have an index number. Here is how that html might look
More...August 12, 2010
I relate to this song on so many levels. I think I’ve watched this video 20 times. I downloaded the song and will turn it into my ringtone. I thought I’d throw it on my blog so that I’d have it forever! Here is a link to the audio file if you want to download it.
More...June 16, 2010
Let’s face it, we humans (well most of us), don’t like doing repetitive tasks. Things become tedious and tedious creates burnout. This can be observed by watching me clock-in at work. Sometimes I remember, sometimes I don’t. Well, most of the time I don’t. I forget to do it. I forget to do it because I think the process is silly. With all the integration possibilities, I often wonder why one of us hasn’t hooked into the badge system to build an auto-clock-in interface with our timecard system.
More...May 22, 2010
One of the most complicated things in life is working for people that don’t care for what you are doing. I’m not talking about working for a shitty boss; imagine playing for the last-place NFL team & getting booed off the field. That’s what I’m talking about.
More...March 6, 2010
Were you sucked in with the controversial title? Allow me to explain. I think meetings are the foundation of business. Meetings are where decisions are made. Meetings are where things get done. In a conference room, at a bar, on the golf course. I’ve been in meetings at each of these places and have seen amazing progress made.
More...February 28, 2010
When all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for a team of software developers determined to deliver a quality product.
More...February 18, 2010
For two years now I’ve been studying David Allen’s Getting Things Done method for productivity. I’ve tried out various tools from a GTD Outlook plugin, to Remember The Milk (RTM), to my own custom To-Do list application. So far, with my current setup of RTM as my inbox and next actions, and Evernote as my digital file locker, I’ve been able to stay ahead of the game in nearly every aspect of my life except work email.
More...February 15, 2010
I’ve used three source control plug-ins for Visual Studio. Microsoft’s Visual Source Safe (VSS), Redgate’s Vault, and Subversions VisualSVN (SVN). Each have their pros and some have their cons.
More...February 13, 2010
Raise your hand if you like to vent out loud? I sure do and so do millions of twitter users. I’ve tried to be cautious with what I vent about on twitter because it’s public and permanent. You don’t want your foul mouth rants following you where ever you go. Sometimes, though, you get frustrated enough that all bets are off and the venting flows freely.
More...February 13, 2010
This is what happens when you don’t make database integrity a priority
More...January 14, 2010
I did a side project once and a customer asked me why all their pages had “.aspx” at the end of them. I explained what it was and offered to “fix” that issue for a small price. After all, I was “solving” a problem. Since that conversation, I’ve always been bitter because I didn’t have a good answer to that question and I hate saying “just because”, as if some magical voodoo was forcing my into compliance with how my URL’s looked. I dislike URL “Rewriting”.
More...January 9, 2010
I’ve built tag clouds so many times recently I’ve been getting bored with it. The concept is simple. You have items that are tagged and you calculate the tag popularity based on a weighed average of the tag to items, then you apply a style based on score. The more one tag exists on what ever items you have (pictures, blog entries, etc), the heaver its weighted average will be and its style may pop-out more.
More...January 8, 2010
I was working on my MVC blog engine when I needed to write a query that would return blog entries that contained a tag name. This query is simple to write in SQL. It’s a query from the blog entry, to the blog entry tag, to the blog tab tables.
More...January 2, 2010
I’m an amateur photographer. I’ve enjoyed taking pictures ever since I was a kid. About two years ago I purchased a Nikon D40 and started using the Flickr photo sharing service so that my wife and I could share our memories with our extended family. Since then I have uploaded over 15,000 high quality images to Flickr.
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