Category: Professional

Postings generally relate to employment related topics which may include, but are not limited to, coding, html, css, jquery, useful web sites and other things I find of use in my career.

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Academics Professional

Greatest thrill

I recently received an email from a former student. Part of the email read

Do you remember the website (linked) I made for my foster parents for our class last fall? I have some good news to share — they found their first customer, who found the website on their own! Isn’t it crazy that the website is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing!! I cannot believe that my product is actually turning out to be useful. 

To me, this is one of the biggest complements that can be paid as an instructor. To know that a project used for class is implemented, out in the wild and being used brings a definite level of satisfaction.

Receiving this email made my day.

Categories
Personal Professional

It does matter

Once again, the concept of writing is appealing, but it really does take a certain level of dedication and time.  The best way to approach it is to treat it as a job and set time aside to do the thing.

Previously, I wrote a four bullet points :

  1. Why bother? If you’ve thought of it, someone else has already written about it, and probably in more eloquent manner in a more popular format and with better information.
  2. Will anyone actually read this? I’m just a single voice in a crowd of thousands, nay MILLIONS!!!  It is the internet after all.
  3. Does it matter? In the grand scheme of things, does adding one more bit of trivia or nugget of information out there really benefit humanity.  As this guy (https://youtu.be/L4pE-pdhnJw) puts it, NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY!  And, quite frankly, PHOTOGRAPHY can be replaced with anything.
  4. Will it offend anyone? Now, this is a big one for me. I have lots of opinions about things, especially work related. However, I am concerned about the impression of “airing dirty laundry” especially when you realize that despite item number 2, people will search for you and find all those things you posted, especially those negative things when it comes down to decision making for a promotion, new employment and just curious about the new person they met.
Continue reading “It does matter”
Categories
Professional

Batch file 0, Me 1

As indicated in the previous post, a simple upgrade that required no Database work has taken up time across multiple days.  I should really point out that DAY 1, DAY 2, etc is really a matter of a couple of hours per day, if that.  And as promised…

DAY 4

So, after a little bit of research, it turns out that a batch file interprets a comma [,] as a delimiter when passing it in.  So, when we were passing the connection string to the batch file, we needed to include the port number.  In this case let’s say DBSERVER,12345.  The batch file was splitting that and sending 12345 as the second parameter.  Easy enough fix, let’s wrap that in quotes [“]!  Well, that worked, sort of, but not really.  When you use string comparisons in your batch file that looks like

@IF "%1" == "/?" GOTO PrintHelp
Continue reading “Batch file 0, Me 1”