May 2012
1 post
April 2012
5 posts
Paper
I posted a photo here already that looks like a little 10 year old doodle. It’s actually me doing some doodles using this insanely awesome iPad app called Paper. Try it.
4 tags
Visual Studio 11 by Default
I installed Visual Studio 11 a few weeks ago to try it out when it came out. I didn’t have too much time to play with it plus I was running it side by side with Visual Studio 2010 and it just didn’t sit well with me especially considering they changed the color them and it changed some of my icons in Visual Studio 2010 which looked odd.
This weekend I finally wiped both Visual Studio...
March 2012
1 post
3 tags
I'm Loving Rdio
A while back when Spotify was coming to the US, I started getting excited. Finally a subscription based music service people were paying attention to. With it’s simplistic design, and vast array of music it was an obvious choice for me who did not like buying music that I was only interested in hearing a few times until it faded into memory. DOn’t get me wrong, I love the classics and...
February 2012
2 posts
Flexible Work Hours Inspires Performance
During the first ten or so years of my professional life I worked for a company which had “flexible” work hour options. Let me break down what this really meant from my experience of pushing these rules to the limit over the years.
Getting reminded every morning when I walk in what time it is
Getting phone calls or emails every time I’m rushing to make it in by 9:30
Having to...
1 tag
Karma Police
So over the past six months or so I’ve had to defend remarks I’ve made both on Facebook and Twitter. Most of what was said was taken out of context in extreme ways, but what I got to thinking about more was about how things are interpreted online these days. One outburst among some people was a remark regarding the removal of the former CEO of HP Léo Apotheker noting that maybe he was...
January 2012
1 post
4 tags
Go: Agile Release Management
At my current company we are moving towards a much more automated continuous delivery model. This reflects more of what some companies such as Facebook are doing to allow a very rapid deployment and integration cycle, such as rolling code on a daily basis to production.
But before you can do this, you need a few things in place from the infrastruture side of things. One of those in my opinion...
November 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Penetrating the psychological startup barrier
I’ve read a few great books lately about living your dream to launch your startup idea or just pushing yourself on executing your idea. One of the common key points each author makes is just get out there and do it. Stop making plans; stop thinking about it; stop trying to get everyone together to figure out the next big thing.
If you have something you’re passionate about and love,...
2 tags
Getting Things Done with Evernote
In the past few weeks at work since my role has changed I’ve been actively trying to maintain all of my notes digitally. This process will allow me to easily go back and search or filter on previous notes I had taken or to recall notes from a specific sprint planning session.
I originally went with Microsoft OneNote. It’s a decent piece of software with most of the features...
September 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Finally, Google Analystics Goes Realtime
Google is finally introducing real-time analytics with their Google Analytics product. This sounds like a serious competitor to other real-time analystical apps that track data from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. I’m curious to know if this will begin getting into the untapped market share those companies have deserved for quite some time.
If interested in trying out the new...
5 tags
Amazon Kindle Fire Sounds Intriguing
I have been reading into and thinking about the new Kindle Fire Amazon has announced. Comparing this “Android iPad Tablet Killer” device to every other one out there one thing really stands out: integration. It integrates very nicely just like the iPad with all of your other Amazon services right out of the box so it’s a very seamless experience.
So for $199 Amazon is...
As long as your going to be thinking anyway, think...
So this week I was asked to take on a lead role in another team at work. As I always look at every situation with a potential challenge, I still find my career and what I do extremely fun.
When you work with a team of intelligent and talented people it can make your job a very pleasant place to be. It allows innovation, increased productivity and creative output. This is what we’ve pushed...
August 2011
7 posts
2 tags
MongoDB: Intro
A while back I started reading into some of the NoSQL options for quick and dirty data storage. While there are plenty of them out there now days, I really liked MongoDB which serves as a document based NoSQL data store.
The beauty of this is that instead of thinking in a relational model, you store your data on a document level which is much more friendly to a programming if you ask me. For...
2 tags
Twitter Bootstrap →
I love discovering new css and development frameworks, and today Twitter has released their own called Bootstrap. It provides you with a nice grid framework, layouts, lists, tables, forms, buttons, navigation, you name it.
The probability of me using something like this is pretty high, as it really encompasses many elements other frameworks don’t provide.
It also uses Less which is a...
Now your grandma can code →
Check out this nifty little site that teaches you the basics of programming. I definitely think it’s a great little tool to show your nieces, nephews or heck event grandma the basics of programming.
4 tags
Patently Stupid
Being a software engineer, I tend to stay up to date on latest tech news especially in my industry. Over the past year it seems as if the amount of patent lawsuits in the tech industry have skyrocketed. This is a scary thing, since in my opinion most technology patents do more harm than good.
Some recent examples can be found here, here, here and here.
Among these are numerous other examples of...
3 tags
Enums from Hell →
When I read articles like this I just cringe, then laugh. Some people just don’t deserve to be in the business of software. I can’t say I haven’t seen worse in my own personal experiences of reading others’ code.
11 tags
Dreams of a Startup
While sitting idle tonight I started to think about if I was to launch my own startup from a fresh clean slate, what technologies and stacks would I use? Most people don’t get this opportunity so it’s actually a really interesting question to think about.
My first thought is being from a Microsoft background, would I want to go this route or learn something new. Using something like...
July 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Spotify
So Spotify finally launched in the United States after much anticipated wait. This is something a lot of us have been waiting for because the issues here in the US regarding streaming music is a mess. We have a few options, such as Pandora, Last.fm, Slacker and so forth for our free, streaming options. But it’s time to graduate from being cheap and get real with our streaming music options....
2 tags
Google+
I’ve been away from blogging for a few days because I’ve been playing with the new Google+ social stream.
I have to admit I really dig it and loving the set of features Google has introduced. The fact I immediately define a circle that a user belongs to upon adding them is a nice touch, which is opposite of how Facebook interacts with Lists.
In my opinion Facebook has really lost a...
June 2011
9 posts
1 tag
MoviePass Netflix for Theaters →
I wonder if this will catch on. Basically pay $50/month to watch any movie whenever you want. I’m not sure that I even want to see enough movies a month to warrant $50 but lower price options are definitely something I’m interested in.
1 tag
Television Networks Are So Fail →
These TV networks don’t get it. Imagine if to hear a song on the web you have to provide proof that you originally bought the CD. This is what TV networks want. INstead of providing alternative means of getting access to content even in a paid way they would rather people still cattle through traditional methods such as a cable box or satellite dish and pay for 90% of the content they do not...
2 tags
PizzaHacker
This is one of the reasons I love living in San Francisco. There is a guy here who calls himself the PizzaHacker, who considers himself an official pie slinger. Using only the freshest and organic ingredients he shows up at specific designated spots throughout the city during a time frame and creates pizza masterpieces for you to buy.
Apparently these pizzas are the real deal. According to fellow...
2 tags
Turntables in Your Browser →
The guy who wrote the original audio library that other sites such as Soundcloud and so forth use for web based audio came up with a really awesome concept of turntables in the browser. Uses HTML5 as well, nifty!
3 tags
Making a Continuous Deployment Model Succeed
So I’m not going to go into the specifics of what a continuous delivery model is or what it’s supposed to do. I wanted to talk about what I felt could make a continuous delivery model succeed.
Short Iterations
Short and quick iterations are proven to provide more value and allow engineers focus more on getting code written and out the door. Facebook is a great but extreme example of...
1 tag
We Need Front End Developers!
Are you a front end developer? We need kickass rockstar front end guys (or girls) to come help us out at Ancestry.com. We are a big company, with great revenue that really is engineer focused.
Lots of great perks that you would get at a startup and we’re located in the tech hub of South Park area in San Francisco (think TechCrunch, Github, Yammer, Splunk, etc)
Check out the opening here...
2 tags
GitHub for Mac →
Very cool.
2 tags
Amazon Web Services Summit 2011
I attended the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit 2011 yesterday in San Francisco and had a good time. I thought it might be a bit introductory but I actually gained some insight on new services that are being used by companies in a very successful way.
The theme of the talks was definitely cloud and scalability. I had the change to talk with CEO and founder of Optimizely which is an AB test tool...
March 2011
1 post
3 tags
WCF WebSockets
Update: I have moved the code snippets to a Github gist because of design constraints of my blog. It’s better that way ;) So one of my new hobbies is using Node.js, which is an uber awesome event driven server side JavaScript engine (whew). Anyway, I hit a point where I wanted to use Node.js with WCF and was thinking how I would be able to interact with my service layer (WCF) to send...
January 2011
2 posts
Breakdown for 2011
Since 2010 was not the greatest of years, I’m really looking forward to 2011. I think I’ve had better luck with odd years so I want to do my annual post of resolutions. Since I haven’t imported my original wordpress blog here yet I don’t have the original list to mark off what I’ve done. Once I do I’ll re-update this post.
Fully embed myself in unit testing...
December 2010
2 posts
Officially Moved
Today we officially moved all of our goods from Fresno and handed in the key. Here’s to the future and a great 2011.
2 tags
What I've Been Up To in San Francisco
So I’ve transplanted here to San Francisco for the past two weeks so far, and I have to say it’s been a pretty exciting two weeks.
I started my new job at Ancestry.com and everyone there is friendly and talented. We just had our christmas party and I got to know some more coworkers I had yet to officially meet. I also got moved into my new loft which is much smaller than the...