Developer Notes from Google Plus #1
Aggregated from my Google+ posts under the hashtag #DailyDevNotes for your viewing convenience, dear reader. And for the sake of fleshing out my blog, it should also be noted. Notes from 31st March to 19 May, 2012.
Halfpenny bridge, Dublin, Ireland , by braulio.mora. See, I'm building a bridge between my Google Plus posts, and my Blogger posts. Ah, the Ha'penny Bridge: many's the use I've gotten out of it.
Hey! Sharing a #StackOverflow answer on +Google+ First time! #DailyDevNotes
Google Plus 2012-05-19T02:19:53.000Z
The same way many people think they have a novel inside them, maybe many developers have a game inside them. I have. I've been working on my GoogleMaps PacMan for over a year now, and that's one of the reasons I headed along to the #QMSDNUG meeting at 400 George tonight.
+Patrick Klug demo'd CreateJS via his own MindMap tool, NovaMind. More great stuff to learn, one less night to do it in. I am going to work that into PacMan: I just don't know how much I can use any of that stuff in my day-to-day working dev.
I'd already heard about Glimpse from +Andrew Newton who baked it into our code, but the talk by +Anthony van der Hoorn made me feel bad for not actually using it. I mean, I think it's still actually there in our codebase: I just didn't realise how powerful it is when you get right down and use it like a bastard. Anthony is a good speaker, obviously used to doing the Glimpse spiel, but mixed a curious metaphor at one stage: "Put your mind in the shoes of a mobile developer for a minute". I don't think I want to do that.
Met good ol' Martin Pitel at the talk, who's now off Google+, he informs me. Your loss, big guy. Also representing from Mater was Leena.
#DailyDevNotes
Google Plus 2012-05-15T12:22:45.000Z
Nice quick blog post about using that much-maligned thing, MVC3 ViewBag. And it's written in the context of a working team and their struggles to get the job done, which is nice. A lot of posts are banged out by robot coders in a vacuum. I like blog post working context: it breathes life into the writing, even if the subject happens to be dry and technical, which of course it always is because we're developers developers developers. #DailyDevNotes
Google Plus 2012-05-09T12:53:12.000Z
Got to use Code.Assassin.ConfigTransform today. Much better than maintaining separate config files per environment and copying them around the place. Nice and DRY alright. #DailyDevNotes
Google Plus 2012-05-08T11:36:01.000Z
Needed some help here after my last #dailydevnotes post - https://plus.google.com/114773679764230564490/posts/8E9MkTMXuuk - about changing over to 2-factor authentication. You don't need a Google account to use an Android device, but you may as well not have one without one.
Google Plus 2012-05-02T11:57:27.000Z
Honestly, I've worked on apps that were less elaborate than some of Jeff Atwood's posts. This one even has a test Google account user and a phone screenshot.
But the point of it is of course that you should take your email security more seriously than you are undoubtedly doing at the moment. I've just enabled 2-factor authentication (via SMS) on Gmail. I'll see how I get on with it.
As ever, developing this sort of security gives you an appreciation of the difficulty of implementing it. In our case at work, if we don't get the time delay between the user getting the "You have been sent an SMS code" message, and the actual arrival of that code down to under 10 seconds like Google manages to do it, I reckon it's a non-starter.
By the way, how can they afford to send out so many SMSes? All over the world. Like it was nothing.
#DailyDevNotes
Google Plus 2012-04-30T11:19:18.000Z
There's reading a book about #EntityFramework #CodeFirst, working with and trying to understand it, and then there's thinking in code first terms. The old ways of thinking won't do anymore.
The other day, I had to fix up a bug on the test environment. The bug arose in a situation which involved a user getting into a certain state: you know - filling in a few forms and getting to some screen after clicking here and browsing there. So I thought: I can debug this by just switching connection strings in web.config so I'm temporarily using the test database with my dev code. Log in as the user in question and zing! enjoy the fruits of my ingenuity by having the test environment state right there to work with. Done it before, no big deal.
Except for the question of code first initialization strategies. Ours was DropCreateDatabaseAlways (or a custom variety), not DropCreateDatabaseWhenModelChanges as I'd thought. So when I ran the app locally, it dropped and recreated the test database. Except it couldn't even do that successfully, since it removed the requisite logins/permissions attached to that database, and now the test environment was down. And I hadn't been able to replicate the bug, because the state disappeared with the dropping of the db. Not my finest hour.
In the event it wasn't a big deal - we deploy to test a couple of times a day, at which stage the database (or at least its tables) gets dropped and recreated, so there's not much in that database. But there could have been. I felt distinctly old-fashioned, old school, and less than stellar.
I wasn't thinking CodeFirst.
#DailyDevNotes
Google Plus 2012-04-28T02:17:10.000Z
Well that's plain weird. My last #DailyDevNotes post contained a link to www.sogou.com which caused +Google+ to include/attach a paragraph or so of Chinese (I guess?) characters underneath, as it normal does for a link. Subsequently, this post disappeared from my #DailyDevNotes REST search endpoint that I consume (or intend to) for my weekly aggregation that I blogged about. The one that looks like this: https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/activities?query=%23DailyDevNotes&pp=1&key={YOUR_API_KEY}
Playing around with the API search composer, it turns out that I have to include "&language=zh-cn". Just because I linked to a Chinese website. This really looks like some sort of mistake because the API documentation says of this field: 'Specify the preferred language to search with", yet including that querystring parameter finds the other posts that are not in friggin' Chinese. That, or they need to change the wording of the documentation. In my humble opinion.
Google Plus 2012-04-03T12:45:44.000Z
My site is getting a lot of visits from the Sogou spider. I know this because of my logs. Sogou means "search dog" - the logotype is more than a little reminiscent of Google's. When a search spider visits your site, it helpfully leaves a little business card, or at least the server asks for one, whereby you can find out more: http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07.
I want to find out how to stop my site being constantly crawled by the Sougou web spider, looking for links that no longer exist. I've added the offending folder, the one responsible for almost all the spurious link crawling, to my 'robots.txt' file recently, but I'm not sure Sugou does robots.txt. Not that its costing me anything extra in bandwidth, but because it's reducing the signal to noise ratio of my error logs.
I think this is the question I need on the Sogou bot FAQ: Q. "Is sogou spider visit my site too fast how to do?" Ah, cool, it does: they cite http://www.robotstxt.org and mention that "but the newly updated robots.txt may be too few weeks to reflect the effect to. Important to note that, you block the the sogou spider included in the page will not be on the Sogou search engine retrieved." That's exactly what I want. I think. Ok, so I just have to be patient. And good work Google Translate. No, I mean it.
#DailyDevNotes
Google Plus 2012-04-01T12:47:57.000Z
As the project I'm working on gets closer to go-live, the +Readify developers we have here have already started to leave. One of them, +Mehdi Khalili, took the unusual step of asking us to fill a SurveyMonkey questionnaire about his performance, as his own departure looms.
Well, when I say it's unusual - it might be common in certain quarters, but it's certainly the first time I've ever seen it. It's par for the course for Mehdi though who is very analytical about his approach to programming.
It's also quite gutsy - I mean here's a chance on a silver platter to "anonymously" (I'll come back to that) wreck someone's buzz without having to account for your accusations, unfounded denigrations, and mean-spirited put-downs. I spoke to him about it, and of course he was aware of the limited utility of both anonymous questionnaires and face-to-face discussions, but to his credit he was prepared to allow people take the anonymous option if they wanted.
In terms of being meaningfully anonymous, well it can only be pseudo-anonymous with a small team like ours. So it's kind of like a game because a) you don't have to play it, and b) there are strategies you can adopt: the more banal and noncommittal your observations and language are the more anonymous you are, although in that case it's hardly worth playing in the first place.
It takes confidence to formally ask others what they think of us, and I have to admire when someone is willing to put himself out there like that. #DailyDevNotes
Google Plus 2012-03-31T08:11:44.000Z
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