10 Rules for Providing a Good User Experience

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I am not a designer, I don’t play one on TV, and I didn’t stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. But over the years, I have developed some thoughts around UI / UX that have resulted in some basic “rules” to apply when building systems. While this set of rules is far from…

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Things Need to Change in the Software Development World

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Warning: Minor rant below. I can’t say how my mind got on this topic, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about our industry’s approach to software development. In many ways, software development is getting better. It’s ahead of where we were when I started as a professional developer over 20 years ago. But while…

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Working for Beer

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Beer, Beets, Battlestar Galactica. Oh my! I feel it is safe to assume that beer is pretty popular here in the good old USA. Thirty years ago, everyone was drinking their favorite big brand: Bud Light, Miller Light, or — my personal favorite of the classic big beers — Coors Light. Now the world has…

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Book Review: A Whole New Engineer

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Engineering is just for geeks with pocket protectors, right? Engineering is all about math, formula, and intensive study of existing builds, right? I have done a good amount of software education over the years. Some as a student, and some as a teacher. The book “A Whole New Engineer” is a refreshing step back from…

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Executive Summary – Understanding Developers

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From the outside, developers are sometimes seen as trolls living under a bridge. Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh. How about this: strange wizards who wield unknowable powers to make things work. Or perhaps this: t-shirt-wearing loners who subsist on junk food and never go outside. Wrong on all accounts. They are actually quite normal…

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Quick Look – AWS Cloud9

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As I wrote in Part 1 of my REST API with AWS series, development coding shouldn’t happen within the browser due to the lack of good practices such as reuse of functions, source control, and continuous integration. But there is a slight caveat to that: AWS Cloud9. With this service, we essentially get a development…

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Using Vue CLI

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In my previous post, we stood up a Vue.js site as a single-page application where the entire site was a single index.html file. In this post, I am going to use the Vue CLI to scaffold out our solution a little more. First, we will need to install the Vue CLI. sudo npm install -g…

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Vue.js: An Introduction

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I have written a few blog posts on Angular in the past, mostly because it’s a framework I leverage quite often and am usually very pleased with how it works. But Vue.js is another framework that I’ve been playing around with lately, so I wanted to quickly write down some of my initial thoughts on…

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Client-Side Logging: Getting Started

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As software developers, we have become pretty good at logging server-side errors. When something blows up on the server, it gets logged to a file, database, or somewhere we can look at later. But what about errors that happen on the client side? What about an event occurring at the browser that we want to…

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Blazor in Official Preview and Other Fun Things to Come from Microsoft Build 2019

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Microsoft recently put Blazor into official preview. If you’ve never heard of Blazor, it started as a proof-of-concept project by Steve Sanderson with the goal to build a client web UI framework based on .NET and WebAssembly. With Blazor, we get the ability to run C# in the browser instead of JavaScript. Hence C# all…

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