Grant Winney

Grant

I write when I've got something to share - a personal project, a solution to a difficult problem, or just an idea. We learn by doing and sharing. We've all got something to contribute.

Convert code from C# to VB.NET and back

Convert code from C# to VB.NET and back

If you work with the .NET Framework long enough, you may eventually find yourself tasked with converting one language to another, either by request or necessity. But conversion isn't always necessary - it's possible (and easy!) to have one solution with multiple languages.

Calculate Easter and other holidays in Erlang

Calculate Easter and other holidays in Erlang

I wrote a small library for calculating Easter and other holidays in Erlang. Here's how I did it and what I learned.

Access yesterday's Internet with the Wayback Machine API

Access yesterday's Internet with the Wayback Machine API

The Wayback Machine, a product of the Internet Archive, is an ambitious tool that's been documenting websites for many years. It's useful when a page you need is removed by the original author. Let's take a look at their API and how we might make use of it.

A look at the many ways APIs can authorize access

A look at the many ways APIs can authorize access

After writing about so many APIs and having to figure out the auth process for each, I wanted to compare and contrast how some of these services approach authentication and authorization, and why they might've decided to do it the way they did.

A random selection algorithm that factors in age (weighted selection)

A random selection algorithm that factors in age (weighted selection)

Have you ever had a collection of items and needed to select a random one from the lot? What if you have a class with some property (i.e. 'age' or 'weight') that you want to take into account when doing the random selection? Let's see how we might approach that...

Getting rid of unused function errors when using timers in Erlang

Getting rid of unused function errors when using timers in Erlang

Have you ever tried to execute a function at some future time in Erlang? You can, with a timer, but the compiler may complain that the function you're calling via the timer is unused. Why is that and what can you do?

Tweet random blog posts from an RSS feed using AWS Lambda

Tweet random blog posts from an RSS feed using AWS Lambda

If you've got a Twitter account, and a blog with a lot of content, sharing your posts can be a nice way to help someone out, and drive a little extra traffic to your site. If your site generates an RSS feed, here's how you can automate the process - for free!