I’ve spent my last two weeks at Microsoft wondering how I was going to write this blog post.
Microsoft recruited me off of Hacker News two years ago. In the Summer of 2010 I was still brushing off the ashes of my first failed startup when I wrote...
Why Front-End Web Development Makes Me Sad, Issue #1092145
I have an internal reporting interface for one of my Windows Phone 7 applications that shows me more or less how much of the app is getting used every day, and I developed the reports using the eternally awesome jqPlot charting plugin for jQuery.
I generate three line plots...
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Taking Risks Requires Practice
And patience. This is intended for people who recognize that a need to change themselves, their environment, or whatever and are having trouble getting started.
Until last month, all of the books in my Kindle collection were exclusively technical.
Whenever I travel for work and spend two hours uncomfortably seated...
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College: Four Years Later
This is intended for recent graduates who are finding themselves lost in the shuffle as they adjust to the real world, but has advice that is applicable to everyone. Your mileage may vary.
I graduated from Vanderbilt University with a B.S. in Computer Science in May of 2008. I was...
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Code Camp Talk: RavenDB vs MongoDB
This past weekend at SoCal Code Camp I presented a session along with my friend Nuri Halperin entitled “Battle of the NoSQL Databases: RavenDB vs. MongoDB.”
I represented the RavenDB team, having used it in production now for a couple of months (and ditched Mongo to do it.) I’ll blog more about the specifics of RavenDB and what it’s awesome at some point in the future, but nevertheless I wanted to post my slides here so you could see the bullet-by-bullet comparison between the databases.
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Managing Your Windows Azure Services from OS X, Linux, or Windows Using the Command Line Interface (CLI)
A lot of exciting things were announced at today’s Meet Windows Azure event, and one of the things I wanted to share with you is how you can now use our cross-platform Windows Azure Command Line Interface (CLI), part of our Node SDK, to administer your hosted services,...
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How to Build a Real-Time Chat Service with Socket.IO, Express, and the Azure SDK–Part 2: Setting Up Express and Session-Handling
So if you read part 1 of this series, then you’ve had a chance to grok the requirements for our little chat service and see all of the NPM packages and front-end tools we’re going to use for building it. In this portion I’m going to explain how to...
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How to Build a Real-Time Chat Service with Socket.IO, Express, and the Azure SDK–Part 1: Setting Up
This past weekend I ran a Node Bootcamp on behalf of Microsoft and in partnership with the fine folks at Cloud9 IDE – the goal of these camps is to help teach newbies Node.JS and to get some Node.JS-on-Azure business from attendees who have a good experience.
So...
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Building a Node + MongoDB Powered Blog on Windows Azure
This is a simple blog engine that I wrote in about three days time. I wanted to show off the power of Node.JS on Windows Azure, and also take advantage of our recent support for MongoDB in Replica Sets on Windows Azure.
Here are some of the tools I...
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How to Do Business with Extremely Busy People
Big Picture
The bottom line when working with busy people is to preempt as much of the mental overhead of working with you as possible; all it really takes is some brevity and thoughtfulness on your part. If you form the eight behaviors I list below (and others I may...