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Background I wrote a post a long while back about how I started to use Google Keep to get myself organized. Google Keep has been a go-to app for me on my phone for a long time now. I love using it to make lists of things, and I find it much more convenient than a paper notebook. Don't get me wrong--I think a paper notebook still has plenty of uses! I love my notebook for long running meetings with open-ended discussions or brain storming sessions. It's great to be able to take a pen/pencil and doodle down any idea that comes to mind. When I'm having a free-form conversation, I need a free-form way to take notes. However, my phone is something I almost always have with me--and my paper notebook isn't. My phone allows me to take my Google…
A few months ago I wrote up an article on using PyTools, Visual Studio, and Python all together. I received some much appreciated positive feedback for it, but really for me it was about exploring. I had dabbled with Python a few years back and hadn't really touched it much since. I spend the bulk of my programming time in Visual Studio, so it was a great opportunity to try and bridge that gap when looking at something like IronPython. I had an individual contact me via the Dev Leader Facebook group that had come across my original article. However, he wanted a little bit more out of it. Since I had my initial exploring out of the way, I figured it was probably worth trying to come up with a semi-useful example. I could get two birds with one…
Fragments: A Little Background Update: The actual application is available on the Google Play store. Once upon a time, Android developers used only two things called activities and views in order to create their user interfaces. If you're like me and you come from a desktop programming environment, an Activity is sort of like a form or a window. Except it's more like a controller for one of these classes. With that analogy in place, a view is then similar to a control. It's the visual part you're interacting with as a user. I remember the learning curve being pretty steep for me being so stuck in my desktop (C# and WPF) development, but once I came up with these analogies on my own, it seemed pretty obvious. So to make an Android application, one would simply put some views together…
Code smells are hints that code is taking a potentially nasty turn. What are some common code smells that we should all be looking out for as we're coding?
Code smells are hints that code is taking a potentially nasty turn. What are some common code smells that we should all be looking out for as we're coding?
Python & C# - Background Let's clear the air. Using Python and C# together isn't anything new. If you've used one of these languages and at least heard of the other, then you've probably heard of IronPython. IronPython lets you use both C# and Python together. Pretty legit. If you haven't tried it out yet, hopefully your brain is starting to whir and fizzle thinking about the possibilities. My development experiences is primarily in C# and before that it was VB .NET (So I'm pretty attached to the whole .NET framework... We're basically best friends at this point). However, pretty early in my career (my first co-op at Engenuity Corporation, really) I was introduced to Python. I had never really used a dynamic or implicitly typed language, so it was quite an adventure and learning experience. Unfortunately, aside from my…
In the past, I've dabbled a bit with hosting my own server on a spare outdated box that likely should have been thrown out. My least favourite thing to do is sit down and tinker with trying to get services and such configured so that they all work together... But once it's working, it's glorious. Enter the Raspberry Pi. Earlier this year I decided I wanted to get a Pi. Why? I wasn't too sure... But they're cheap and nothing bad could come of it :) Once I got the thing up and running I was reading about how people were using them. Hosting a Wordpress site was definitely one of the uses, so I figured I'd try my hand at that. There are other guides on The Internet about how to do this, but this is what got me up…
