I hardly do anything in Windows anymore. My work machine is Ubuntu, and my personal machine is a Mac. The only Windows computer I ever really use is an old machine at my church. However, that doesn’t protect me from having to deal with files made in Windows. And those things are starting to become the bane of my existence. Continue reading »
Apparently, there’s some managerial best practice out there that says managers and the employees that work under them should meet once a month 1-on-1. I think the goal is to have some sort of fairly informal time set aside for anything the employee might want to talk about – concerns about management, workplace issues, problems with co-workers, etc. My biggest problem of these things is that I never know just what there is to talk about. Continue reading »
1 of the things I work on regularly was originally created with a fairly consistent data set. We had a very good idea of what fields were going to be in the data. As a result, we thought we knew where exactly we needed to check for null data, and when we didn’t need to know. Then the data set expanded, and the new data wasn’t nearly as consistent as what we started with. That’s when we realized that we were very much wrong in thinking we knew what needed null checks. Continue reading »
Dogfooding is an important part of software development. Google “dogfooding blog post” and you’ll have reading material for weeks. But what do you do when it’s tough to dogfood your own product? What do you do when dogfooding your own product isn’t even a viable possibility? Continue reading »
I’ll admit to being guilty of making this joke. You know, somebody questions why things work or function a certain way, and then there’s that snarky little line, “you’re hunting logic”. It seems hilarious, until you realize just what you’re pointing out. Namely, “Yes, this is stupid, and yes this doesn’t make any sort of discernible sense, but we’re going to keep doing it anyways.” Not so funny now is it? Being told that “you’re hunting logic” is basically an admission that you’re right, but that nobody wants to take on the hordes of people who put things into this situation. Continue reading »
Not to be a shill in this series, but there are vendors that will print addresses on the outer set of wedding invitation envelopes when you place an order (the one the post office uses to deliver mail). Well, at least David’s Bridal does, which is who we happened to use. I’m not going to go so far as to say you should spend money on this kind of thing, just that we decided the convenience was worth it for us, and this is how it played out on our end. Continue reading »
As I mentioned earlier, I noticed a few things during my wedding planning process that I thought were worth sharing now that all is said and done on that front. While I mentioned having a Google Drive spreadsheet in my last post, I wanted to discuss it some more because we managed to get some neat uses out of it that are worth documenting and reusing. Continue reading »
Whodunnit has been my guilty pleasure show all summer. It had a cool premise, 12 “guests” went to a mansion to play a murder mystery game, only to find a guest “murdered,” and be told that 1 of them is the “killer” (obviously a TV show isn’t going to actually kill people, but if you suspend the disbelief, it was a fascinating concept). It was reminiscent of another “reality” show that was also a guilty pleasure of mine, Murder in Small Town X (same basic idea, except the suspects were all a separate group of actors and not the contestants). The finale just aired not long ago, and when it was all said and done…my wife and I spent a solid hour and a half, ranting, raving, and coming up with a better version of that type of show.
Having just gotten married recently, I tried a lot of stuff to help make the planning process easier, and had a few thoughts on things that did (and didn’t quite) work that I wanted to share. The first thing I wanted to mention were thoughts about planning and organization. As it turns out, wedding planning isn’t just a 1-person process, and so some degree of organization and coordination winds up being needed. Continue reading »
One thing I’ve noticed the more I work on anything is that reusability is everything. Even if you’re slapping together some simple little script that is intended for 1 specific thing to do some piddly little task, odds are you’re going to need to dig it back out and adapt or convert it for something else. In short, you’re always going to need it. So what does this mean to you as you write any sort of code? Continue reading »