Free Stuff

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...

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!

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!

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!

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.

You've heard the terms before: YAGNI, SOLID, Tell Don't ASK, DRY... what are they and what do they mean?

You now know all about trees and graphs - but how do you use them? With search and traversal algorithms of course! This is the next part you'll need to know when you're asked a traversal question in an interview. And you will be.

You will likely *never* need to implement a sorting algorithm - but understanding how they work could come in handy at some point. Interviews and workarounds for framework problems come to mind.

How does a spreadsheet become a highly-tuned set of tables in a relational system? There are rules for this - the rules of normalization - which is an essential skill for any developer working with data

Functional programming builds on the concepts developed by Church when he created Lambda Calculus. We'll be using Elixir for this one, which is a wonderful language to use when discovering functional programming for the first time