What I Wish I Learned as Junior Developer
After ten years or so of working in technology, I thought it was time to put together some thoughts.
There’s a lot of things that matter as a technologist, but writing code is only one of many.
10 Tips to Become a better Node.js Developer
It’s no secret that I absolutely love JavaScript and Node.js. For those that don’t know Node.js is a framework that is built on top of JavaScript.
Node.js is an open source JavaScript runtime environment that runs on pretty much everything. It’s a great environment for building fast scalable network applications.
Node.js uses an event driven model that makes it really efficient and really good for real-time applications. Paired with serverless computing it’s fantastic for a lot of modern use cases.
In this article, I will go through the best practices for becoming a better Node.js developer. Over the last two years or so, I’ve interviewed and hired a lot of developers for the startup I’m working at.…
How to be a more Efficient Debugger
For the last 10+ years or so, I’ve been programming professionally. Even with ten years of practice, I still am unable to write a bug free applications. In this blog post, I have put together some tips on how to be a more efficient debugger and how to actually resolve the issue. A lot of my bugs aren’t as obvious as they used to be, but they are definitely still there. In the book Code Complete, Uncle Bob Martin, suggests that every error is an opportunity to learn.…
How to Improve as a Developer
As a software developer, it’s really important to take time and improve your programming skills by learning new technologies and techniques. By constantly trying to improve as a developer there’s potential to become a highly sought after developer. …
Apex: Converting Lists to Sets, and Sets To Lists
As many Salesforce Apex programmers know, in Salesforce it’s pretty much an unchallenged best practice that all code should be able to handle bulk inserts, updates, etc. When adhering to this best practice, it’s really common to use sets, or lists as parameters in functions. Sometimes, there’s a need to convert between lists, or sets, or maybe even maps. …
Book Review: Practical Salesforce.com Development Without Code
Practical Salesforce.com Development Without Code written by Phil Weinmeister has been recently released. I think the book really targets those new to the Salesforce platform and does a wonderful job of providing examples and providing a reference that will be useful in the future. Phil Weinmeister has done a phenomenal job putting together some different…
How I became A Developer
Computers have interested me virtually my entire life. I don’t remember when I got my 1st computer, I remember my dad and mom taking about how my dad would play computer games or use a bbs and have me sitting in his lap. Around the time I was six my dad was given a computer…
Clean Code: Compiler Warnings
It’s no secret that I work as a freelance software/web developer and often jump around between languages. I, continually, run into projects where the developers are ignoring warnings produced by the compiler which can lead to some very sloppy code along with some very interesting situations that occur as the code runs in production. In…
Book Review: jQuery in Action
jQuery in Action, First Edition is written by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz and is probably the simplest and easiest to understand programming book available. Target reader is somebody that already is using javascript in projects and is looking to push the limits of their web applications by using jQuery and many of it’s great…
Handling Programming Errors
Error messages should be clear and include what the error is, why it was caused and how to resolve it.
How To Post Great Freelance Gigs
I have been trolling Craigslist and Kijiji lately in hopes of finding some additional freelance work to add to my portfolio before I become a full time freelancer/consultant. Read the advertisements has proven to be a terribly frustrating experience. Advertisers need to always remember that the more details they provide will lead to a much…
Learning Drupal
For the last couple of weeks, I have began playing around with Drupal because I’m so sick of fighting proprietary CMS. The proprietary CMS suffers from the vendor updating only updating the CMS when convenient for them and this ends up holding the purchaser hostage. Overall, I know that drupal has enough of the functionality that I need in modules and the core to significantly improve the efficiency of my programming and possibly offer a large learning opportunity on software architecture.
Determine if Skype is Installed
The easiest method of checking whether Skype is installed is actually to check for a Registry Key. We, of course, can’t check C:Program Files for a Skype Directory because the user could have installed elsewhere (or maybe if 64 bit the operating system did?) Skype’s API Document provides us with the following information: To check…
Mouse Overs For ASP.NET
Have you ever wanted to have the ability for the colour of a row to change when your user moves the mouse over top of a particular row, and then change the colour back whenever the cursor is moved back off? Well, this process isn’t very difficult in fact using some knowledge of JavaScript &…
Creating a Simple RSS Feed
RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and is an XML specification published by the W3C. RSS became a standardized specification around June 2000. This is meant to be a very simple primer on developing an RSS feed. Please note that this is not meant to replace a detailed book or the specification created…