Author: ontechies
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A snowy day in Seattle.
Last month, my family and I moved to Seattle, Washington after living in Austin, Texas for thirteen years. Moving to Seattle was something my wife and I have been talking about for years, and last year we finally decided to sell our home in Austin and move to Seattle. One of the main reasons for…
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A note about Analytical skills
I’m focusing on helping my kids learn analytical skills, everything else they need to learn will be more accessible to them than this, now and in the future. STEM, leadership, and other career-specific skills are often (but not always) learned while working, most adults would agree with that. A big difference between poor kids and…
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Ideal Workspace for Developers
Before becoming a software developer, I had no clue what this job required or what did a developer did through the day. Many years later, I have a pretty good idea about the workload and can share some advice on what the ideal workspace for someone that writes code is. First of all, let’s get…
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How to successfully work from a coffee shop, or from anywhere!
I have been a software developer for many years now, and for the last 5 years, I’ve been working remotely 100% of the time. What does this mean? It means I’ve been working primarily from home, but it doesn’t mean I’m always home; instead I try to balance my time between multiple places inside my…
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Parallelism. Using Parallel.For and ConcurrentBag.
Parallelism refers to the technique of running multiple calculations at the same time to speed up a computer program. Historically, this has been a complicated thing to write requiring a developer to do complicated coding including low-level manipulation of threads and locks. A program will generally run faster if you allow it to execute multiple…
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How to serve your static content from Azure blob with Azure’s CDN
You are using Azure and have managed to move some of your images to blob storage, that’s great, but you know what’s better? Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve the load speed and availability of your images. Azure’s CDN is there to help you with that. Main disadvantage of using a content delivery…
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How to use Azure Storage to host a static website
Have you ever tried to use one of the many cloud providers out there to host and serve a simple static website? I have, and while there are places that make it somewhat simple to accomplish this, as a developer using Azure, I’m delighted to learn that this feature (preview) is now available to all…
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How to explain technical information to someone with no technical knowledge
Last week as I was asked to describe what a JavaScript callback is to someone without any technical background. I thought about it for a few seconds and couldn’t think of a non-technical way to explain that a callback is a function that gets executed after another function has finished its execution, so then I…
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Favorite New Visual Studio Code Features of 2018
Visual Studio is my favorite code editor, and the things I like the best about it is how light and extensible it is. Last week I posted some of my favorite extensions for this code editor, and today I want to show you some of the new features I like the most. Visual Studio Code is…
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Favorite Visual Studio Code Extensions of 2018
Visual Code is a fantastic code editor, but what really makes it powerful are the extensions available for it. In this post, I share some of my favorite VS Code extensions while using VS Code to develop web applications. WakaTime – Metrics, insights, and time tracking automatically generated from your programming activity. GitLens – GitLens supercharges the Git…