WordPress, Markdown, and HTML – Oh My…

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted something – Basho and Riak have kept me quite busy since I started there. More to come in the near future, but as I was reviewing my old blog posts I realized somehow WordPress had mangled all of my posts, turning them into some hybrid of Markdown and HTML that has ruined most of the code examples. I’ll try to get to updating them soon, and sorry for the inconvenience.

IoT Day Norway talk on Elixir and the Internet of Things – 2014

So I can find it more quickly later, my IoT talk from NDC’s IoT Day in Norway is available. This version incorporates some of the conversation Joe Armstrong started in my Strange Loop talk into the presentation itself.

 

Strangeloop Elixir and the IoT talk video available

I love Strangeloop’s videos, as they capture the screen separately from the speaker and then merge the two together nicely. My talk on Elixir and the Internet of Things from Strangeloop 2014 is available:

Video from my Dayton Elixir talk on IoT available.

For those who would like to hear my talk on Elixir and the Internet of Things, it’s available on YouTube:

Now, For Something Completely Different…

As many of you probably know, I’ve been in search of a new job for a while now, and I’m happy to report that I’ve accepted an offer from New Context and will be joining their incredible Cincinnati team very soon. For some, this may come as a bit of a shock, as it’s pretty far afield from my decade-plus of .Net/Microsoft focused development. Which is certainly true.

However, I felt that it was the right time for me to push myself as an individual and grow some in my career, and, after spending a day with the folks at New Context pairing and just getting to know them better, I knew that this was the place for me.

At the start, I’ll be working on polishing my Ruby on Rails skills, but there’s also some iOS development in my future I’m sure.

Don’t think that I’ll suddenly stop showing up to the Cincinnati .Net Users’ Group or anything – I intend to keep participating. But I’ll also be a more regular attendee at Cincinnati Ruby Brigade and Cincinnati FP as well.

 

Windows Azure SDK 1.7 not completely Side by side installable

A note in case this bites you as well. Although the .Windows Azure .Net SDK versions 1.6 and 1.7 are side by side installable, the emulator is not, and the 1.7 emulator will overwrite the 1.6 emulator on your local machine. This may or may not be an issue for you, but it bit me when trying to rollback to the older SDK after a failed attempt at upgrading our application to the new SDK version.  The biggest thing for me when rolling back was that the new storage emulator doesn’t upgrade your existing storage database – it just uses its own local database, which meant I would have to recreate quite a bit of data. This would have been worthwhile if the SDK upgrade succeeded, but there are some other issues (which I’ll blog about in a short while) that have at least temporarily prevented us from moving to 1.7.

If you need to go back to the 1.6 emulator for some reason, a manual install is downloadable at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=28045.

#redneckcoder

Early today, Ryan Cromwell (@cromwellryan) tweeted:

If your source control solution is a set of bat files from 2004, you have a problem

This quickly started a new meme (well, at least with me and a few others) – #redneckcoder.  As I have apparently been on a bunch of “troubled” projects in my career, I have quite a few contributions to the thread, and I wanted to capture them in a slightly more permanent way than a twitter stream.  I’ll continue to update this post, and want to thank Ryan for getting me started on this rant-like series of tweets which allowed me to vent several years of frustration in a comical way.

And now, for my tweets on being a redneck coder:

• if your unit tests “pass” because they don’t throw, and have no asserts, you’re a #redneckcoder
• if your namespaces are named after parts of the human body (head, body, guts, etc.) you’re a #redneckcoder
• if after each request you call GC.Collect(GC.MaxGenerations) “because you know better than Microsoft” you’re a #redneckcoder
• if all of your .net classes have empty finalizers you’re a #redneckcoder
• if your identity fields in the database are strings that can store either GUIDs or “Joe Smith” you’re a #redneckcoder
• if every time you want to add a component to your system you have to add code to a giant switch statement you’re a #redneckcoder
• if you have a single class called “DataAccess” where all database access happens you’re a #redneckcoder
• if you have a method that’s 2500 lines long you’re a #redneckcoder
• If you make your code easier to understand by using regions you may have a problem. #redneckcoder
• If your version control system is the fileshare that your test systems use for live content you have a problem #redneckcoder
• If your version control solution is “manually rename the old one “oldfile.<todays_date>” you have a problem. #redneckcoder