I worked from home today and towards the end of the day Julie, my amazing fiance (update: wife!), said "Oh! I know what your next presentation should be!"

She ran and grabbed one of our massive sitcky-note flipcharts... and here's what happened.

Continue Reading

If you work in any IT related field you must be ready to embrace change and new technologies. You must be willing to learn. Constantly. You must also be willing to think. Thinking critically and solving problems is the reason I get paid, and the reason I can pay our mortgage!

Anyone who works with data or databases has probably heard the term "NoSQL" more than once. I've read about it over and over and over. There are debates, cage matches, and more. I'm not going to talk about what NoSQL is or why it's good or bad. Personally, I think some very interesting things are happening with the technology and I will keep reading about it, but just because something is interesting doesn't mean it's for everyone. For example, I have gone sky diving and I'm addicted to the adrenaline rush and can't wait for my opportunity to go again. I also think base jumping is interesting, but I will likely never do that!

Maybe one day there will be a good reason for me to deploy an application based around a NoSQL database, but for now I will happily take advantage of ACID and the relational model.

Continue Reading

I have been working on getting a whole lot of our internal systems in place since January and all my hard work is starting to pay off. I'm constantly trying to improve my code and beef up my programming skills. I'm happy to say I'm the first to know that my entire code base is pretty crappy.

I'm happy to say that because I know how much better it can get and I know I've set myself up well to do so.

First: I've been pretty good in the past couple of months to put FIXME: comments in my code throughout so I can remember my ideas, and nag myself to fix them! I have also been pretty good about fixing the more important ones when I see them later, but the little ones I always let slip because I didn't have an efficient way to track them. But now that we've been using Mantis as our bug tracker for over a month, it's time to start entering the FIXME's in with everything else.

// FIXME:  This isn't scalable.  This will natrually be improved
//      by simply pulling this data from the database.  This will also
//      simplify the maintenance between the build server itself and this
//      library.

I will likely continue adding new FIXME's in the code because it's more fluid when developing, but as I enter them into Mantis I will simply replace the notes I left in the FIXME with a URL to the issue in Mantis! This should help keep duplication down a bit as well.

That's all for now!

Continue Reading

I make a lot of mistakes, and I don't want that to change!

Continue Reading

Do you have an organized library of maintenance scripts? If you are like us, you might be long overdue to create yours... that's what I have now started!

Continue Reading