Rob Conery
55 posts published
Copilot, The Good Parts: Efficiency
There are so many opinions about Copilot and AI in general - many of them negative - and it's easy to see why. There are some good parts, however, and I want to explore them.
I Would Love to Work With You
Like so many, I was laid off from Microsoft on May 13, 2025. Never good news, but life moves on and I'm still fired up to do fun things with the right group of people.
👹 The Wrath of the Junior Developer
There are a lot of opinions about AI, whether it helps or hinders our coding process and our team in general. Many are concerned that junior devs will be the ones impacted the most.
Following Your Imagination
I learned to play ice hockey when I was 11 and, as a kid from Southern California, it wasn't easy. I learned how to skate and how to play the game at the same time, all while going through a massive growth spurt. My sister once called me a "baby giraffe on a frozen lake". Nice.
It wasn't what you said, but how you said it
I make videos for a living and I swear: each one is an adventure. You would think I would have a system down by now but, as it turns out, each video is a unique thing that demands it's own type of story telling.
Embracing Mediocrity
AI returns mediocre results by definition - so what do you do to make things better? And why is this "by definition"?
Using Obsidian as a Programming Journal
A journal is critical for your career - but it's more than just throwing words on a page. How do you organize things, and what process do you use? Let's find out...
The Happiness and Terror of Shipping
Constraints and Logic in Your Database
Logic in your database... is that what constraints are? If you're a programmer, yeah, it's logic. If you're a data person, it's heaven.
✈️ What's Your Exit Plan?
Retirement is one thing, being where you want to be and doing what you want to do when your current job is finished in another thing entirely. What’s your exit strategy?
🥷🏽 Self Sabotage: The Good Parts
Personal growth books claim self-sabotage holds us back. Business hustle books frame it as a necessary thing. Which is it?
👼🏼 Divine Code Reviews
Reviewing someone else's code can be frustrating, but also a learning experience for everyone. Let's see how Stephen King might help us.
👻 Hacking Ghost for Fun and Profit
3 of the Best Things I Learned in the Last Year
I love learning new things - it keeps me going in this industry and, as my mom likes to remind me: learning keeps you alive. Here's what I learned last year.
Explain It Like I'm 5 - Why Are Hashes Irreversible?
How to explain hashing algorithms to 5-year olds? Well... I'll do my best in this post, which comes with a video too!
🤖 A Real World Approach to Playwright
Writing tests can be tricky, especially using a more complex tool like Playwright. I took some time and dug in over the last year and I'm happy I did.
What Is Your Yeet Threshold?
Solving problems is what we do, but sometimes the solution is to burn it all down and start again, learning from your mistakes. How do you make this choice?
😳 Allowing Yourself to Screw Up
I managed to screw a few things up this weekend and I want to believe it's OK. I like screwing up... it means I'm trying. Failure is the best teacher, after all. Then again...
What Should Be a Plugin vs a Composable vs a Store in Vue?
Vue is a very powerful framework that I love a lot, but understanding some of the builtin machinery can be extremely confusing. Here's how I deal with that.
Trying Something Different: A Real World Tutorial for Frontend Programming
I'm creating an episodic walkthrough where I build a real application I need to ship, and you get to do it with me. It's up for presale at 50% off.
Repositories and Unit of Work Don't Mix
There is a trend in the .NET space of trying to abstract EF behind a Repository. This is a fundamentally bad idea and hopefully I'll explain why.
Everyone Has a Plan, Until They Get Hit in the Face
I spent almost 3 hours last weekend trying to figure out one of the most vexing problems I've ever faced, and I recorded all of it.
How Elixir's Concurrency Changed Me as a Programmer
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...
Using Constraints to Protect Calendar Data in PostgreSQL
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.
Weird Brazil Date Bug with Jon Skeet
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!