As an IT Professional, you most likely did not get where you are now completely on your own. You executed due diligence by going to school, researching on the internet, reading books, going to training, and following the instructions of others. This is all reasonable and acceptable. Now that you have built your skills on top of the efforts of […]

Before I did into today’s topic, let me take a moment to remind you to get your automated monitoring tested and solid before the upcoming holiday season. If you have time off you’ll be able to relax more. If you don’t you’ll feel less stress when your teammates are away. For today have chosen to continue the series on Software […]

This is probably the most difficult practice of an IT Professional. Software and Hardware changes faster and faster every day. The amount of information that may be known in any field related to IT, DevOps, SysAdmins, Architects, Project Managers, Agile Coaches, grows exponentially. Still, we must find time to learn and be educated about tools, platforms, operating systems, devices, services, […]

Software developer professionalism, as defined by Uncle Bob Martin, requires openness when it comes to code. Openness, when it comes to software code, or systems implementations, provides many benefits to any company. Here are a few of which I am aware. It helps identify bugs MUCH earlier in the software development, or systems implementation lifecycles. Finding bugs earlier in the […]

While the active of being assertive was not a topic of Uncle Bob’s presentation, it was demonstrated in his behavior and interaction with other professionals. Uncle Bob describes the meeting that resulted in the Agile Manifesto. There were nearly 20 signatories on the document. After spending a whole day working together, they were only able to come up with these […]

Another practice of professionalism Uncle Bob Martin spoke of was Being Honest. He spoke of honesty on two levels, at least that was the way I heard it said. First, be honest to yourself. Never commit code to the application before it is completed. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you are speed things up by checking in un-tested code. Be […]

Continuing with our topic of software professionalism, ala Uncle Bob Martin, we are going to consider the practice of Fearless Coding. While I am writing from personal experience in this matter, I am drawing from Uncle Bob’s packaging of many different principles. Some of them can be found at this presentation on YouTube, should you wish to dig further. This […]

I had the opportunity to hear Uncle Bob Martin as the keynote speaker, talking about the history of software programming over the years, comparing it to other professional practices. The entire presentation was thought provoking. I thought I would pass on a few points from his presentation that made an impact on me. First, Uncle Bob compared the computer programming […]

Today I had an experienced come to me with a problem working with dates in an SQL Server database. They were saving image files, and storing the date based in the date of the file in the file system. If a new image was saved in the file system with the same name, the system would know it was updated […]

Tuples are one of my favorite Dot Net constructs. I don’t use them much; but when I need a simple complex data type, and don’t want to go through the trouble of creating a new Class or Struct, a Tuple can be quite handy. A tuple is a generic class and can be defined by declaring each of the attributes […]