robhorton.net – Page 6 – This is the city, St Louis. I work here. My name is Rob. I write code. I carry a badge.

Coffee the Hard Way

March 15, 2017June 13, 2012 by Rob Horton

No development stuff here today. Just a random tale from the office. So today this guy, who I have no idea who he is … “made coffee” this morning here in our little coffee bar. I should say that I’ve never made coffee in anything but a regular old pot. Here at work, we have … Read more

Google Let Me Write That for You (glmwtfy)

March 15, 2017June 12, 2012 by Rob Horton

We’ve all heard of “let me google that for you” right? Fun little site where you can make your friends feel like the noobs they are. Ok maybe they aren’t noobs, don’t get cranky with me, k? For some time now, probably about a year and a half, I have have been using Google Voice … Read more

Eager Beaver

March 15, 2017June 6, 2012 by Rob Horton

I wanted to drop in today and tell you a quick story about (long ago) my being the eager, new guy in IT and how a manager handled my extreme over-zealousness. Perhaps someone out there can draw some inspiration from it, whether you’re the new guy or the manager/team-lead with a new guy. So as … Read more

Get a clue! or .. write a requirement

March 15, 2017March 21, 2012 by Rob Horton

Guys and gals, we’ve all done it. Written code without requirements. Me too. Guilty. However what is your preference? Are you the developer that needs a mountain of documentation that details your every line of code? Are you the developer that thrives on having some creativity by just having a loose outline of what is … Read more

The Simpleton Pattern

March 15, 2017December 5, 2011 by Rob Horton

No, you read that correctly. Simpleton, not Singleton is the subject of choice today. Recently a fellow developer was looking over some code that I had written.

He commented on it by saying, “Rob I just love looking at your code. It’s simple, easy to read, well-commented, and just makes sense”.

I replied, “Well that’s likely because I’m a simpleton”.

So jokes ensued with my friend asking, “Is that the design pattern you follow?”. I thought, well yeah actually I guess it is and thus was born the idea for this blog post.

The Pessimistic Programmer

March 15, 2017November 28, 2011 by Rob Horton

If you’re a programmer of any kind and have done it for any length of time at all; particularly as your profession, not just a hobby, you know this one rule:

Good programmers expect things to go bad.

One of our prime directives as lord or lady of the bits and bytes is to predict what can go wrong and prevent it. Or at the worst case, handle it gracefully.

Being a developer isn’t exactly all baby giggles and sunbeams so a healthy amount of pessimism is certainly warranted.

You never know what you know until you share it

March 15, 2017November 8, 2011 by Rob Horton

A lot of highly analytical folks I’ve met over the years have not been the best communicators. Heck I was first mentored by a Unix admin. He was not known for the leading you by the hand approach. Ok, that’s not fair. He’d lead you once but you’d better, by cracky, take copious notes and never have to ask about that thing again or suffer The Look.

Anybody with me on that one? Been there?

Cursors are evil, Cursors are good

March 15, 2017November 7, 2011 by Rob Horton

Sure, sure if you’re even slightly older than me “the cursor” was the unruly kid at school with a slightly skewed moral compass. However, if you’re like me, and reside on the Great Timeline of Technology, being privy to both the old world and the new information-age world you realize that the cursor can mean a few other things.

Today we’re talking about t-sql.

Ok let me out myself here. I hate cursors. A lot.

They are bloated, complex, and use entirely too much code. I get it though. Sometimes you just have to use them. And I get it that they have their place. Cool. However here is handy way to NOT have to use one though.

Software developer from good to great

March 15, 2017November 5, 2011 by Rob Horton

I’ve been in IT for 15 years now. For most of that time, I’ve been programming, at least on some level, even if it was “only” batch files. I’ve worked as an employee, a contractor and an independent consultant. For companies both large, medium and small, I’ve written code, built computers, networked them, trained users and written documentation for it all. I’ve done this on small and large teams as well as having been “the guy”. So I’ve been around … and there was five sentences about me.

Enough of that though, this is about you.

Check it and check it again

March 15, 2017November 4, 2011 by Rob Horton

The other day at work an interesting thing happened. I was working with someone else in order to troubleshoot an issue with pushing some software out to our live site. I had tested my changes on my local machine as well as the test site. So we rolled things out to an external test site so our client could preview the changes before we flipped the final switch. Drum roll please …