The Archive

This is an excerpt for a talk I gave in 2016 at NDC London, featuring Elixir and the concurrency features it has, built in. It's easily the most annoying demo I've ever done...

Getting over imposter syndrome is no easy task, but it starts by recognizing a cold, hard truth: you're being toxic to yourself and those around you. I'll share with you some steps I took to get over it.

Think about the lines of code you would have to write in order to manage a scheduling system. Duration checks, start and end time requirements as well as checking for overlap! You could spend a few days writing all that code or you could let PostgreSQL do it better with 5 lines of SQL.

Digging through my archives once again and found this wonderful video with Jon Skeet doing what he loves to do: sleuthing date bugs and answering questions on StackOverflow!

I'm allergic to crappy, non-sensical, faked up demos that try to convey highly technical concepts. Yet I find myself falling into that lazy trap constantly. This requires intervention.

As programmers we tend to think of reports after the fact, often when it's too late. I learned this the hard way over the last few days.

Many people are interviewing these days and you really, really should know the basics if you expect to do well. You'll find that here with common data structures and algorithms.

Handling dates properly is delicate business and, thankfully, Postgres gives you many tools to help make sure you store date information correctly. But that only works if you know what's going on!

Digging through my archives of hundreds of videos, I found an oldy but goody - publishing it for you to enjoy!

I love nerding out over the holidays and today was no exception. I added a feature to my blog that I've wanted to add forever!

I like to change my publishing site regularly - it's fun and it keeps me sharp. This iteration is with Nuxt and Firebase, and I learned a ton.

Writers often talk about "finding their voice", but what does that even mean? There are ways to loosen the control your internal filters have on your ability to express yourself.

Nitro is an exciting web server created by the unjs team, who are also the people behind Nuxt. Nitro is a study in simplicity and a wonderful tool for your JS belt.

In this production, a SQL Server DBA (Rob Sullivan) and a developer (Rob Conery) take a deep dive into PostGreSQL (v9.1) and are surprised by just how capable, intelligent and *fast* PostGreSQL is.

In this feature-length production, Scott Hanselman and Rob Conery offer suggestions and advice on how you can get out there, and get involved. Blogging, Twitter, Github, StackOverflow, User Groups and Conferences: get out there!

There are too many crappy demos out there. It just takes a little extra time and some empathy to tie your tutorial to a real problem.

The hardest thing anyone can do is break down their own mental constructs, realizing they're toxic and destroy relationships. It's part of the journey.

I really think too much. I have a lot of fear in me that keeps me from doing things I love to do. It's unhealthy and also self-obsessive (there are 3 "I's" and 2 "me's" above). I really need to stop thinking and just... do...

Writing a full text index in PostgreSQL is an art form. You need to know what your users are looking so you can build the right index AND you need to understand how they write their search terms. Thankfully, Postgres is here to help.

It’s always fun to study the basics, and in this video we dive into the linked list and how to create one from scratch. Sounds ridiculous, but it can rescue an interview!

Importing data into PostgreSQL can be time consuming and painful – unless you toss the GUI tools and use scripts.

Understanding Big O has many real world benefits, aside from passing a technical interview. In this post I'll provide a cheat sheet and some real world examples.

This is a famous interview question: 'write a routine that adds two positive integers and do it without using mathematic operators'. Turns out you can do this using binary!

This is a famous interview question: 'write a routine that adds two positive integers and do it without using mathematic operators'. Turns out you can do this using binary!

You're George Boole, a self-taught mathematician and somewhat of a genius. You want to know what God's thinking so you decide to take Aristotle's ideas of logic and go 'above and beyond' to include mathematical proofs.

Let’s jump right in at the only place we can: the very begining, diving into the perfectly obvious and terribly argumentative 'rules of logic'.

It's a Unix world. You should have a functional knowledge of how to get around a Unix machine using the command line, as well as how to complete basic tasks using shell scripts and Make files.