27 Dec 2014

The Next Fork in the Road

I had several friends and advisors review this post prior to publishing it; most encouraged me to go forward with publishing it but others cautioned that future investors / business partners may choose to pass on a deal with me due to the content below. I took time to consider...

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24 Jul 2014

Real-time Marketing Automation with Distributed Actor Systems and Akka.NET

I published a lengthy post on MarkedUp’s blog yesterday about the new product we recently released, MarkedUp In-app Marketing Automation for Windows Desktop (with support for Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS, and Android planned) and how it uses Akka.NET’s distributed actor system to execute real-time marketing automation...

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15 Jul 2014

Tradeoffs in High Performance Software

I’ve spent down the past week tracking down an absolutely brutal bug inside Akka.NET. Sometimes the CPU utilization of the system will randomly jump from 10% to 100% and stay pegged like that until the process is recycled. No exceptions were thrown and memory / network / disk usage...

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03 Jul 2014

The Profound Weakness of the .NET OSS Ecosystem

I’m in the process of writing up a lengthy set of blog posts for MarkedUp about the work that went into developing MarkedUp In-app Marketing, our real-time marketing automation and messaging solution for Windows desktop applications (and eventually WP8, WinRT, iOS, Android, Web, etc…)

During the course of bringing...

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01 Mar 2014

Bitcoin Paved the Way, but it’s Not the Future of Cryptocurrency

bitcoinUntil recently, I was extremely skeptical of cryptocurrency in general. In the midst of the investment speculation and mania in late 2013,...

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19 Dec 2013

The Taxonomy of Terrible Programmers

The MarkedUp Analytics team had some fun over the past couple of weeks sharing horror stories about software atrocities and the real-life inspirations for the things you read on The Daily WTF. In particular, we talked about bad apples who joined our development teams over the years and...

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13 Nov 2013

Win32 Errors: How to Format GetLastError() Output into Readable Strings

I’ve been doing a moderate amount of native Win32 C++ programming over the past few weeks, and occasionally I’ve needed to set up some debug points to print errors that occur during file and memory I/O.

When something goes wrong inside the Win32 API, some methods will return a...

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21 Sep 2013

You Succeed Once You Stop Giving a Shit

This post is about how to find success in any situation and draws entirely from my own experiences. Your mileage may vary.

July was a rough month for me this year – I endured simultaneous failure on all fronts. I had put on a shitload of weight, ended...

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27 Aug 2013

Being Right is Always the Wrong Choice

It was about four or five years ago that I had an intrinsic need to be “right” all the time.

I couldn’t let it go when someone made a mistake, or slighted me, or disputed the quality / direction of my work. Everyone else was wrong. I wasn’t alone in...

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