Twitter has lately been awash in ads. I don't mean the normal annoying ads, the ones promoting the latest Disney movie or some upcoming tech conference. I mean a more insidious kind of ad. The kind of ad that strives to steal your time. Ads like this: On the surface, this little advertisement seems like no big deal: a woman who loves her job was still doing it at nine months pregnant. That kind of tenacity, that dedication to their... Read more >
You may be familiar with the term rubber duck debugging. This is the idea that in order to help a programmer solve a problem, s/he should explain it to some kind of inanimate object (most commonly a rubber duck), because in the process of explaining the problem they will often solve the problem. I'm finding that the best way to help people with their problems is to become that rubber duck. Though, perhaps, a slightly smaller one. Image is... Read more >
My group has been doing a lot of REST API consumption lately, and our favorite tool to use for that is the terrific RestSharp library. Our latest project is very large, and uses lots of different APIs, and so we needed a way to create many different client classes that could consume many different APIs but still use common features like caching and error logging. And so, I present to you, the Ultimate RestSharp Client! In this post, we'll build... Read more >
A few weeks back I wrote about a very unusual bug that returned 500 errors for routes that should have been valid. Recently my team and I, to our great relief, discovered the cause of this bug. Of course, that wasn't before we ended up yelling "WTF?!" a great many times. A great many times. A New Failing Route Most of the our collective WTFs occurred when we discovered the original problem. As I wrote about in the earlier post,... Read more >
The Oracle Client (ODP.NET) that we are using to build a major web project put us in a really stupid bind last week, ultimately causing me to waste two days in search of something that wasn't really going to work in the first place. I'm on something of an async/await binge with this project, since in C# and ASP.NET it's really easy to implement and possibly gives you great scalability benefits. So, one of the first things... Read more >
We're working on a large project which consumes a custom-build API, and one of the requirements of this project is that if the API goes down, certain sections of the website still need to be able to function. The reason for this is that our app consumes a lot of APIs and services, and occasionally a non-critical one will go down (for maintenance, bugs, whatever) and we don't want our site to crash as well, since this was a problem... Read more >
