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My Favorite Podcasts for 2018

It’s been nearly a year since I listed my favorite podcasts and it’s time for an update. So here’s my favorite podcasts for 2018. There have been a few additions and subtractions. The rest of the list (which I won’t repeat here) remains the same. New Favorites Cross Cutting Concerns This is my favorite new podcast by one of the smartest people I know in the Columbus area, Matt Groves. It’s a generally weekly podcast that covers a broad range of mostly developer focused topics. And the best part is that it comes in a very digestable “drive to work” 20-25 minutes in length.

    Wednesday, August 29, 2018 | 3 minutes Read
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    Take Time to Breathe - A Few Minutes to Better Code

    In a previous blog post, I talked about taking time to unplug in order to avoid burnout. That’s not what this is about. This is about getting in the zone. It’s about those times when you are so deep into the code that you just keep going and going. This is about those times when you get an idea and you dive headlong in and don’t come up for air for hours. Stop it. Stop it right now. Take a step back. Take a moment to breathe.

    • balance
    • burnout
    • productivity
    Wednesday, July 11, 2018 | 9 minutes Read
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    Using C# and Azure Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis To Respond To Customer Complaints

    I’m a dev. I just make apps. I only deal with customers when something breaks and my support teams can’t fix it. They’re just an annoyance, right? Wrong. I’m going to show you how Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics Sentiment Analysis can help you retain customers and look good while you’re doing it. Anyone who has worked in a customer service related field will tell you that it’s far less expensive to keep an existing customer happy than it is to win a new customer to your product or service. This is an unavoidable fact and yet so many companies get it wrong. They put little effort into their existing customers until it is too late. Another fact is that all of these customers have friends and social media accounts of their own. And they will share that experience, be it good or bad, to the detriment or glorious success of your company. One lost existing customer is 100 customers who will never even give your product a try. One mad customer that you’ve made happy and kept around is 10 potentially new customers who will be willing to give you a try. (Yeah, I know, people complain far more than they praise. We’re funny like that.)

    • azure
    • c-sharp
    • dotnet
    • sentiment-analysis
    Saturday, June 16, 2018 | 8 minutes Read
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    Devs: Are you giving back, or only taking?

    A couple of weeks ago I attended my favorite annual developers’ conference: Stir Trek. The reasons I like Stir Trek are many. It’s a fantastically run conference. It’s entirely a volunteer, non-profit effort. Over its history I have only missed two Stir Trek events. This year, as the time for Stir Trek registration approached, I made a decision. I was going to attend, as usual. This time I intended to do something more. The dev community has been good time. I thought it time to give back more.

    • giving
    • javascript-friends
    • stirtrek
    Wednesday, May 16, 2018 | 7 minutes Read
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    The Problem with StackOverflow/StackExchange

    The StackExchange sites are a collection of websites on various topics where people can ask questions and get answers from members of that community. People can also up-vote or down-vote both the questions and the answers, as well as add comments regarding either. People receive ranking points, called “reputation”, for asking questions and on how many up-votes/down-votes their questions and answers receive. It’s intended to drive an active (and interactive) community of people around each subject area. The first and most popular of the sites is StackOverflow.

    • civility
    • gatekeeping
    • inclusivity
    • stackexchange
    • stackoverflow
    Thursday, May 3, 2018 | 10 minutes Read
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    The Mysterious Vanishing Hard Drive

    I was having an issue with the main PC that we use at home. Over the last couple of months, from time to time, one of us wouldn’t be able to log in. It was the famous infamous Windows 10 black screen. When they logged in, a cursor would appear over a black background and then nothing else. The only thing people can say for sure about the black screen of death in Windows 10 is that there are a figurative crap-ton of things that can cause it. It can be anything from video drivers to Microsoft Store corruption. Or it may be failed Windows updates or firmware issues. It has many causes, and no quick solutions.

    • hard-drive
    • troubleshooting
    • windows-10
    Wednesday, February 28, 2018 | 3 minutes Read
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    "Visual Studio debugging - SSL Connection / Connection Reset with IISExpress - Stack Overflow

    Sometimes it can be a huge pain in the rear to work with SSL on local IIS or IIS Express in Visual Studio. I was trying to debug an issue with my authentication flow and just could not get my auth server to run locally. I finally came across this StackOverflow answer and discovered that I was running into the issue where my port for IIS Express was something like 66234. I didn’t know that to get it to work right, you have set the port between 44300 and 44398. And like Jason’s answer, absolutely nothing I could see either during setup or runtime told me that.

    • iis
    • ssl
    • stackoverflow
    Tuesday, February 20, 2018 | 1 minute Read
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    C# Advent Calendar 2017 - Using C# and Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics to Identify and Relate Text Documents

    One of the tasks that developers sometimes face in large companies (or even small ones) is trying to figure out how large sets of data relate to each other. If that data is text based, C# and Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics functions make this extremely easy to accomplish. In this post, I’ll walk through identifying language and parsing out key words and phrases that we can use to help match blocks of text together.

    • azure
    • c-sharp
    • c-advent
    • cognitive-services
    • dotnet
    • text-analytics
    Tuesday, December 19, 2017 | 11 minutes Read
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    Hey Devs, You Are Not Expected To Know Everything

    There was a tweet that entered my timeline yesterday that really caught my attention: If you’re a new programmer I just want you to know, me and all of my colleagues with years of experience Google the most basic things _daily_ Accounting Shower Curtain and Unusual Bedroom (@oliviacpu) December 13, 2017 It seems one of the most basic concepts. Yet it gets completely hidden by the developer community. It doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have in a particular language. There are still things you will have to look up EVERY SINGLE DAY. I really started to think about it. Why are we ashamed to admit that publicly? A couple of reasons came to me pretty quickly: Ego and envy.

    • career
    • development
    • productivity
    Thursday, December 14, 2017 | 5 minutes Read
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    Mentoring Junior Developers

    One of the biggest struggles of the development community is the mentoring, encouragement and development of entry-level and junior developers. A couple of years ago when I was adding people to my team, two of those I hired were women essentially right out of college. I found myself faced with a struggle that many dev managers and leads have faced over the years: How do I encourage, train and develop junior developers? I certainly didn’t want either of them to go through the same struggles I went through. When I was hired out of college, I had both advantages and disadvantages. I was a career changer in my mid-30’s. I had worked for more than a decade in various jobs, so the work mindset was not new to me.

    • mentoring
    Friday, December 8, 2017 | 15 minutes Read
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    Deploy Database Updates With FluentMigrator and VSTS

    One extremely handy open source library for .NET developers is FluentMigrator. This package allows you to script out your database changes as C# classes. The concept is similar to the code first migrations of EntityFramework, but allows you a bit more fine tuned control over deployments and doesn’t tie you to any specific ORM or other database interaction model. For example, it’s easy to control which environments the updates go to with tagging. This can help prevent accidental database updates to production and has already saved me from database restores on a couple of occasions.

    • database
    • deployment
    • fluentmigrator
    • libraries
    Thursday, November 30, 2017 | 7 minutes Read
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    Deploy To A Private NuGet Feed From VSTS

    If you work with multiple related projects that exist in separate solutions, one of the more useful features of Visual Studio Team Services is the ability to easily implement private NuGet feeds. This service lets you keep development of various pieces more separate and yet still make it easy to integrate your private libraries into your other applications. Create Your Feed The first step is to create your private feed. Go in to VSTS and open the project that you want put into a feed. Under the “Build and Release” menu item, you should see a secondary menu item called “Packages”. If you don’t see this entry, you will need to install the Package Management Extension from the VSTS Marketplace into your VSTS account. It’s free if you have fewer than 5 users in your VSTS account.

    • azure
    • devops
    • nuget
    Saturday, November 18, 2017 | 5 minutes Read
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