Ramblings about software and mountain bikes.
DTE Trail, Chelsea, Michigan
I found an 8 year old draft about how I maintain focus and productivity. It’s still relevant and I still use it today. There’s nothing revolutionary here. A handful of well known small practices. The process follows a typical roadmap process, but on a microscopic level. Think of it as my internal process within the…
The Jenkins team has done a good job documenting basic pipeline structure and functionality. Kudos to them for that, it’s improved massively over the past year. I think it’s pretty easy to get started now. Let’s talk about the plug-ins. To do most anything useful in Jenkins requires plug-ins, lots and lots of plug-ins. Before the…
Background I’m coming from a 2012 MacBook Pro with a nearly dead battery. I was holding out for a 32GB laptop, but couldn’t wait any longer due to the dead battery in the 2012. Honestly the 2012 has been the best laptop I’ve ever used. I got 5 years out of it and will likely…
Early on in my career I complained to another developer about a particular tool. I don’t remember what the tool was, probably CVS. The response I received left me dumbfounded. “These are just tools.” JUST TOOLS? Doubts and questions flooded my brain. Was I needlessly obsessing over something unimportant? Licensing costs aside, the business owners…
Teaching myself a little ASP.NET over the weekend. Surprisingly vanilla ASP.NET seems to lack a lot of modern features found in other web frameworks. I ended up running into the ASP.NET MVC preview and installed that. So far I’m liking it. There are a few rough edges I need to sort out. I think I’m…
First post in a long time and it’s an echo. How useless! Still, I absolutely love this quote. An article posted on Reddit about how to hire managers, it’s an interesting article and definitely worth a read. Of course, the part I love is about programmer psychology. Psychologists have studied how people have a higher…
So it’s been pretty close to a month since I updated. Pretty poor effort on my part I suppose. I haven’t been playing much Gears of War… which as my wife will tell you, is a pretty clear indicator as to how much free time I have. There’s a lot of random stuff I want…
I spent most of Sunday picking up the basics of JavaScript. Overall it went pretty well, I even started writing a little Ajax application. Syntax is very C-like, but the overall philosophy of the language reminds me a lot of Perl (a million ways to do one thing). I found the following sites extremely helpful. Starting…
Database Modeling Made Simple I read this book as a primer to some more in depth titles. I was looking for a quick overview of the entity relationship model and this book served that purpose. I wanted something I could read and comprehend quickly over a weekend. The book is 144 pages and includes some…
Been a busy couple of weeks. I attended a career fair at my school. I was able to scout the participants early on and narrowed my focus to just one company. Most of the companies there were looking for helpdesk or software support staff. Been there, done that. Anything other than an internship in software…
WPF and WPF/E are the first step. I watch a lot of Channel 9 videos. In the past month or so I’ve seen not one, but two open admissions that Microsoft is looking at bringing C# and .NET to other operating systems. Doing so would, in my mind, remove THE major barrier for .NET adoption. Of course it’s possible…
I enjoy school in a lot of regards, it has been and continues to be a life altering experience. However, I feel like the academic world just doesn’t understand what businesses are looking for these days. Last spring I read Code Complete and How To Win Friends & Influence People. Where are the courses on…
Google hosts all sorts of presentations, ranging from wilderness survival to nuclear power proposals. Fortunately they record and post the videos on Google Video. The presenters are for the most part really good. Even if the topic isn’t particularly interesting to me, the presentation techniques usually are. One thing I’ve learned is that humor is…
Recently I’ve felt a need to get myself out on the web. I have another site, but sharing the URL always forces me to explain it. This site will attempt to carry a little more professionalism without being overly stuffy. I hope to post about what’s going on in my life, specifically my hobbies and…