Stories
Time flies... even if you waste it
Gamification, superficial recognition, mindless ease-of-use. There are so many reasons we're attracted to social media. It's disgusting how easy it is to lose hours, days, of time with nothing to show for it afterwards. But what can I do? What can we do?
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My first aquarium - Month 7
When I wrote about setting up our aquarium last year, I intended to post regular updates. Then everything but one fish and the snail died. Not cool. Fast-forward 6 months later, and I've decided to make one important change to the tank, and introduce a new gang to the sole survivor!...
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Showing Results is Hard
Writing software is a weird cerebral exercise, where you can burn tons of energy working on a problem, and exhaust yourself to the point of needing a good night's sleep, yet have very little (if anything!) to show for it. What do you tell people you do all day? What do you do to prove your value?...
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How to use an application config file with a .NET Standard app and NUnit 3
Porting .NET Framework code to .NET Standard has been a learning experience, with some challenges too. This time I had a .NET Standard library that expected an application config file, but loading one from an NUnit test suite proved to be more difficult than it sounded at first....
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8 Tools Every Developer Should Know and Use
You learn a lot doing a decade of anything... techniques, approaches, tools. If someone asked you what the top 10 tools were in your field, what would you tell them? Here's my top 10 list for software development....
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How to include a DateTime format as a constant inside string interpolation
I was upgrading some code to use string interpolation, a feature introduced in C# 6, when I ran into a small snag with DateTimes and a format string stored as a constant....
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5 Practical Examples of C# Attributes (and why you'll want to use them)
Ever thought it'd be convenient to attach metadata to your code at design time, then read it at runtime? Attributes let you do just that - to methods, classes, tests, enumerations, and more. Use reflection to read them at runtime and take some action. Here's a few examples for the uninitiated......
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How do I view the dev console in my browser?
Most people will never even know their browser hides a great set of tools, mostly used by web developers, but which can be useful for anyone trying to figure out why their browser is misbehaving....
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