WOW! I have reached the milestone of 50 blog posts. I have tried to blog at least every week and I have learnt a lot. I have talked about my work, technology, things I have learnt, things I want to do and many more things. It is too soon to tell if my blog is going to be a success, but I think I am starting to find my...
Why is it so hard to find out exactly what is needed when designing changes to a system? When adding functionality to databases I always like to dive in and start adding extra columns and new tables. But at some point you need to find out what is needed. The process of gathering requirements that I have followed goes...
Today is my day off, but I wake up and have a quick look at nagios to see if there is anything I need to worry about. Yes there is, SQL Server has run out of disk space on its data disk. I race downstairs and VPN onto the server to find out what has happened. One of my monitoring databases has had runaway log growth...
Last night I started reading The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas . One practical tip that immediately jumped out at me as useful in my quest to be a better programmer: Don’t live with broken windows. The theory goes like this: an abandoned building with a single broken window attracts additional...
For a while now I have been at the door of describing myself as a developer, but I think I have finally gone through that door. It is all a state of mind, its not about having x amount of knowledge, its just about saying “Yeah, I’m a developer now.” One thing that pushed me through that door, was an application form...
For a while I have been threatening to try a user group. Well this week I went to my first meeting. The user group I went to is called Leeds Sharp who are celebrating their third birthday, happy birthday guys and thanks for the cake. The talk was all about F#. I know nothing about F# other than it is in visual studio....
I recently replaced my installation of Visual Studio 2013 with Visual Studio 2015 RC. I like the new version, I am not a Visual Studio expert so it will probably take me a while to find all the good stuff but here are some initial thoughts. Being as my MSDN subscription is still valid I have installed the professional...
Today I encountered a new error. Run-time error ‘6’: Overflow doesn’t really tell me much. The error was occurring in the Access ADP front-end of our main database. It was only occurring for one particular Id number which was really confusing me. First thing I tried was to remove the most recent changes I had made,...
My laptop has been getting a bit cluttered up with stuff so this weekend I gave it a reset. As I am using windows 8 this was much easier than doing a format reinstall which I have done many times with previous OSes. Open settings and select recovery and after about 4 hours everything was back to factory settings. I...
In Cloud Computing there are a lot of terms that end aas or As a Service. Most of these I hadn’t heard of until I started writing this list. Any service that is delivered over the internet instead of hosted locally on your network or PC could in theory be described as an As a Service. PaaS Platform As a Service This is...