I took this post’s title from the subject line of an email I received from Microsoft this morning: This year Daylight Saving Time (DST) extends by approximately four weeks. In compliance with this provision in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, DST dates in the United States and Canada will start three weeks earlier (2:00 [...]
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Now that I’m a dad, I had to laugh at the comic below, but the truth is these fighting words aren’t going to come out of my kid’s mouth. “My blog gets more traffic than your blog” is more likely. This will, of course, be accompanied by a heated exchange of blog statistics served up by a [...]
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Last week’s post about The Anti-team by Jemery Miller reminded me of a book I picked up a while back: Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers by J. Hank Rainwater. In his book, Rainwater offers tips and management techniques on everything from code reviews to managing a distributed workforce. With good humor, he discusses dozens [...]
If I had to guess, I would say I conducted at least 100 phone or in-person interviews last year and all of the onsite interviews followed the same standard format: 1. Three or four lead developers, the interviewee and I sit in a large conference room. 2. Per our request, the candidate spends 3-5 minutes [...]
I have a folder full of SQL utility scripts which I’ve compiled over the years. One of which would search all stored procedures within a given database for instances of a specified string. This type of script is really helpful if you need to find all routines which reference a specific table column. This morning I [...]
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My mom took up painting a few years ago and I am absolutely amazed with what she is able to create. It is wonderful. It is inspiring. It shows what one can accomplish if they absolutely love what they do. What I truly admire about the way my mom paints is she is able to take [...]
If you like to drive your fellow developers mad, here’s something fun. The next time you need to manage a bunch of dates, add them to a Hashtable AFTER converting ToString(). For example, DateTime holiday = new DateTime(2007,1,1); Hashtable htHolidays = new Hashtable(); htHolidays.Add(holiday.ToString(), holiday.ToString()); … Next, create a function similar to the following: public static [...]
Disclaimer: If I were a betting man, I would bet there’s some code which does the following kicking around a forum, blog or two already. Simply, I wasn’t lucky enough to find it. Hence, the IF in “if I were a betting man.” I ran into a case today where I wanted to reduce unused [...]