Posted on May 7, 2012
Finding crap in the SQL Server database
Anyone who has ever maintained an old legacy code base often finds themselves working with a decade old database schema that now spans hundreds of tables, each of which contain dozens of columns. Trying to locate a particular… Read More
Posted on April 8, 2012
Why every developer should work for a startup at least once in their lives
Shortly before I graduated from the University of Washington, I joined the startup company Twango as a software development intern. We were a web 2.0 company whose premise was to provide a centralized place on the web where… Read More
Posted on March 5, 2012
Can’t we all just get along?
Good teamwork is vital for the success of any endeavor, whether it be winning an NBA championship, getting an A for that final group presentation in school, or running a business. This is especially true in the tech… Read More
Posted on February 9, 2012
Conceptual Integrity and the Design of Design
The Mythical Man Month is Frederick P Brooks’ famous book about software engineering, read by computer science students around the world. Of course, it’s not immediately obvious from the title what the book is going to be about,… Read More
Posted on January 3, 2012
ASP and VBS, how do I love thee, let me count the ways
Over the past year I have had to work on a large legacy ASP code base spanning millions of lines of code. Not surprisingly, I have developed a deep and passionate hatred of VB Script as a result. This… Read More
Posted on December 19, 2011
TSQL PIVOT
The TSQL PIVOT command is an operation that essentially rotates a set of table data. The end result is a transform that converts columns into rows. One common usage of PIVOT is to normalize denormalized data. This may… Read More
Posted on November 21, 2011
MCTS EXAM 70-433: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Database Development
This year I decided to get a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Database Developer Certification (MCTS EXAM 70-433). While I was doing consulting work at Avanade, getting at least one new certification was an annual requirement. I ended up… Read More
Posted on October 10, 2011
The Monty Hall problem
The Monty Hall problem is a well known math problem, famous among nerds around the world who have studied math and computer science. It has garnered somewhat of an infamous reputation, stemming from the fact that although the… Read More
Posted on August 28, 2011
A no frills AJAX uploader using ASP.NET and vanilla javascript
This is a tutorial on how to write a simple AJAX uploader. I’ve been doing more front end development at work lately, and I recently needed to write a page that processed a small file upload from the… Read More
Posted on August 1, 2011
Temporary workarounds are not so temporary
In a perfect world, development schedules would be based on realistic estimates, with plenty of buffer time factored in for the unexpected contingencies that always arise. But the real world is never ideal. Shit happens. Development cycles end… Read More