This is the city, St Louis. I work here. My name is Rob. I write code. I carry a badge.
Early in my IT career, when I was a network engineer and beginning to venture into some simple programming, I wrote a lot of little utilities. I LOVED doing utility work. They were focused pieces of isolated functionality that performed a specific job. It was so satisfying back then to see that come together and … Read more
I was fortunate to be at Devup again this year as an attendee. Last year I took a shot at documenting my notes here on ye old blog. That “kinda” happened. That is to say, I started, then fizzled out. This year I’m doing it again. But now with more enthusiasm! Writing, I mean. Not … Read more
I was talking to someone on Slack today at work while … um … working, yeah … working really hard. The person I was chatting with was looking to get into IT and asked me how I got my start. I shared with them my very non-typical journey. Then later I figured, hey, why not … Read more
Continuing our series on Devup 2018 (gosh I wrote that like I have a huge readership) let me introduce another rockstar, Angela Dugan. If you get a chance to hear Angela speak, particularly on the subject of soft skills, make it a point to be there. I first heard Angela speak at Devup in 2017 … Read more
Lyndsey Padget. Learner. Public speaker. Writer. Badass. Lyndsey gave this incredible session at Devup this year called Badass 101. I’d never heard Lyndsey before but this won’t be the last time I attend a session led by her, I can tell you that much. This was different. Different in a very good way! It was … Read more
After this year’s dev up conference in St Louis, MO I wanted to write my notes and thoughts here on my blog instead of just keeping them to myself (like I usually do). Sharing with the rest of the developer community … that’s in keeping with many of the speaker’s messages from the conference too … Read more
Back at my second real IT job, we did not have what some would call today “true” agile practices. I say that because we did a great deal of up-front design work, requirements gathering, and signoffs. Those are all things that most “agile” shops I’ve worked with avoid like the plague. Somehow though, at that job, we seemed … Read more
Most days I leave all the programming stuff at work, where (for me), work belongs. I make it a point to not focus on work at home. Since I work for an employer, that effort I perform for them is to build someone else’s dreams. So I leave work at work, striving, never to let … Read more
Recently I needed to roll my own phone number formatting for a problem at work. The basic requirement was as follows: All the user to only enter numbers, no other characters were allowed The user could only enter 10 numbers After all the numbers were entered, the value would auto-format to (xxx)-xxx-xxxx The user could … Read more
I recently discovered this glorious option so I’m posting here both for my own memory and just to help anybody out that might need it. If you, like me, are tired of taking your Visual Studio dark settings and meticulously making SQL Management Studio match, then this is a much quicker way to get there. … Read more