Where I work we use a really old fashioned way of recording where in the country employees are: Excel! For years I have been trying to persuade staff to use calendars in Exchange. Outlook is great for looking at one or two people’s calendars at once but quickly gets unmanageable for looking at ten or more peoples...
Last year I blogged about Team City , well I have been looking at it again recently. In that time they have even changed their logo! Lets start with thinking about what I want my Continuous Integration server to do. Check out my code from source control (usually master but all feature branches would be even better)...
Model View Controller or MVC is a software architectural pattern for implementing user interfaces on computers. It divides a given software application into three interconnected parts, so as to separate internal representations of information from the ways that information is presented to or accepted from the user. I...
I spend an awful lot of my working life adding new features and improvements to a legacy database system. A legacy system is an old method, technology, computer system, or application program, “of, relating to, or being a previous or outdated computer system.” Often a pejorative term, referencing a system as “legacy”...
Today I did a clone of one of my git repositories and it took ages to download. Looking into what got downloaded it was easy to see why. The .git folder was over 500Mb in size. I know how this has happened. This repository was created in 2013 and has been used by me as a dumping ground for lots of things related to the...
Like many DBAs I spend a lot of time maintaining my SQL Server backups. From SQL Server I maintain both full backups and transaction log backups. I have often restored my full backups but until recently I have never restored a transaction log backup. All backup strategy’s are only as good as the last time you tested...
I spend a lot of my time creating new features that simplify my companies business processes. A good example of this is an invoicing system I created. Instead of users working off different spreadsheets and copying and pasting data between various different programs the user can click a couple of buttons and...
Wow! What an amazing year 2015 has been and with 2015 about to end I thought it would be good to look back at what happened in this amazing year. January I started the year with a declaration that 2015 would be my year of code. Well I have had a few breaks from programming but I have learnt loads this year. I have...
Four months ago James David Martin Foster was born. And he is even more awesome now than when he was born. As I write this James only has a few sleeps (as James sleeps multiple times in a day I can’t put an exact number) until his first Christmas. James is pretty much unaware of what is going on as he is still too...
In December we count down the days to Christmas. People often have advent calendars filled with chocolates or even Lego. But what about if you are a programmer, how can you count down the days till Christmas? What about if you had a daily Christmas themed coding challenge? Well www.adventofcode.com is the answer. Each...