What Type of Mistake
I am not good at drawing; I wish I were, but I am not. I got a lot of practice when my kids were younger. We spent a lot of time drawing with chalk on our driveway and sidewalks. We often drew things my kids were into at the time: cars, families, and trains. For…
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Getting Started with Passport
An advantage of NodeJS is that there is a ton of available software. Probably more software libraries are available for NodeJS than any platform. One of those libraries is Passport, which can be used to handle authentication. Getting Passport set up and running isn’t difficult but does require a few steps. First, we must install…
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Perfect is the Enemy of Good
So you want everything to work out just right; get and keep everything in a perfect and clean state. I think many of us engineering types want everything neat and 100% predictable. I know I tend to be this way. But often, this tendency works against us. Pushing for perfect, or the complete handling of…
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DynamoDB Streams
AWS’s DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL data store (non-relational data store). Often, we will want some sort of audit or logging of who is changing data. This can be done using DynamoDB streams. DynamoDB Stream will send all changes to a Lambda function we write. First, let’s create a new Lambda function. The code just…
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Quick Look – RestSharp
It is very common to make REST API calls as part of our applications today. REST APIs are probably the most common API flavor out there. The ease of interacting with REST APIs is perhaps the biggest driver for REST APIs becoming so popular. You can make REST API calls using pretty low-level tools in…
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.NET Cold Starts
I love .NET and C#, and I think it is the best platform for writing software in many ways. C# was created to make it easier to write quality business software. And it has evolved to be better and better. But there is one thing that still isn’t fixed with .NET: Cold starts. In software…
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Avalonia
I am always on the lookout for new tools and frameworks for writing software. While I bump into many tools that I’ll probably never use, Avalonia is one that I actually hope to try out soon. For me, Avalonia is a spiritual successor of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), a framework that really needed a V2….
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Earned Value
Tracking project progress isn’t as simple as you would think. Common questions often include, “are we there yet?”, “are we going to end over budget?”, and “are we going to end past the schedule?” These questions keep people up at night. And the answer, “we’ll be done when we are done,” usually doesn’t fly. Earned…
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Pulling Calendar Items Using Swift
In a previous blog post, I took you through how to pull contacts from iOS or Mac. In this post, I will show you how to pull calendar items. This turns out to be very similar to pulling contacts. First, we must request access to the calendar. As part of requesting access, we must create…
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Scaffolding
Sometimes we just need a few screens to perform some basic data editing. Often this is necessary for an admin system. We could build full systems for that (which has some advantages), but we might be better off with some scaffolded UI. In software development, scaffolding is when some pre-generated code is used to get…
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