Various tips and tricks often focused on software engineering with specific code examples for you to use in your programming.
Recognition - Weekly Article Dump Not all of the articles this week touch on recognition, and to be honest, I didn't pick it as a theme for the articles either. Recognition is more a topic of discussion that's come up over the last week at Magnet Forensics, where I work. Being a team lead and part of the management team at Magnet, I'm often part of conversations about motivation. Providing recognition is an excellent way to motivate your staff and shows that you truly appreciate them. We've been trying to get better at recognizing staff for doing an awesome job--especially because we have so many awesome people working with us. It's pretty obvious with our Profit Hot 50 placement that we've got some kick-ass people. Recognition, whether it's one-on-one or in a public setting, has a huge impact. I don't…
In the past, I've dabbled a bit with hosting my own server on a spare outdated box that likely should have been thrown out.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…
Background When you're starting work on a new project or organizing a team to accomplish a goal, there's often a foundation that needs to be established: How is your team structured? What software should we use to help us? How do we set goals? How do we measure our progress ... the list goes on. It's a common challenge that's met by anyone organizing a team or setting off to work on something. So do you copy what worked for someone else by using a cookie cutter approach, or do you wing it and see what happens? My approach when faced with two extremes is usually to aim somewhere in the middle. Cookie Cutters Being a copy-cat and using cookie cutters has some benefits. If something worked for some all-star teams at big successful companies, then why re-invent the…
Background There are two classes available in the .NET framework that sometimes have some confusion around them: The Thread and the BackgroundWorker. They're both used to do some heavy lifting for you on a separate thread of execution (so you can keep on keepin' on), so why do we have two different things to accomplish the same end result Enter The Thread Class The Thread class is available in the System.Threading namespace. Surprising, right? It's the basic unit for spawning off work to be done. Threads let you provide them with a name, which could be one advantage to using them. A thread can either operate as "background" which means it will be killed when the application exists, or not as background, which will actually keep the application alive until the thread is killed off. An instance of the…
Background This probably sounds really nit-picky or OCD, but I think it's an issue worth addressing. Excessive nesting of logic within code can make things nightmarish to read. Even a few of years ago I never thought anything of this. I mean, how much could it really affect someone reading it? He/she must be a complete newb to not be able to read my logic. Fast forward to a co-op placement where this was more closely moderated by my managers, and I began to pay more attention to it... Why? Alright, so all that you know so far about my opinion on this is that excessive nesting bothers me. So far, my mission is accomplished. Everything else is just extra. The first issue with excessive nesting is that it actually makes logic hard to follow. If you're doing code reviews…
