WHAT WOULD THE CORGIS DO?

A few years ago, in a screenwriting class, our instructor asked us the following question: “How do you prepare yourself to write? What things do you do to create an environment that’s conducive to writing?” This was the third quarter with my fellow students – first class with this instructor – and I was comfortable speaking my mind. My answer went something like this: “I don’t have time for that. I only have one hour at lunch to write. So I turn on my laptop and I write.”

Software engineers usually don’t deal with binary data directly. Most data is stored in well-known, open-format files and manipulated through libraries that know how to handle them. So bits and bytes are almost never in a developer’s mind. Apparently, they even scare people: all that random, unreadable mess not meant for human consumption...

While doing his undergraduate at Virginia Tech, my son Tyler worked at 100-Cents (or some such store of similar name). He went on to graduate with honors and become a CPA at one of the Big-5 accounting firms. Then, he got an MBA at Darden (one of the top MBA colleges in the country). And now, he is an investment banker that manages the sales and acquisition of companies valued over a billion dollars. So he’s doing OK. But, instead of telling him I’m proud of his accomplishments, I chide him saying: “I had hopes of you becoming a manager at 100-Cents.” Which is not necessarily a career that you spend $250,000 on education to achieve.

“You should strike,” he said. We were laying in bed, catching up on the day's news when I saw an article for a general strike being organized to bring awareness to the contributions of women, both at work and at home. I mentioned it to my husband, Scott, who is also my business partner. Or as he likes to point out, I'm technically his boss as I'm the majority shareholder.

In my last blog post, I explained why metaphors are so important and how they can help raise our chops (and our hopes) when it comes to influencing the business side of things. The Seat Belt metaphor used in my previous example may have worked great for some, but not for others. Keeping a few different ones at the ready helps you adapt on-the-fly and better connect with whomever you’re speaking with. Another one of my favorite car metaphors to use is inspections.

I'm getting very comfortable with Hyper-V on my Windows 10 Pro machine, and I'm really happy I have this as a development environment. After updating Corgibytes' Chief Code Whisperer, Scott, about where I was at for a current client, we talked about remote machines and Azure. This lead to attempting to upload a VHD to Azure.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one... After spending years understanding the inefficiencies of a marketspace, a brilliant subject-matter expert strikes out on their own as an entrepreneur. Using their grit, knowledge and connections, they build their business. Soon after, investors and paying clients follow to benefit from the new product.

A commenter on dev.to recently posed the question, “What should someone without a computer science degree focus on learning?” As someone who was lucky enough to know I wanted to study computer science as an 18-year-old, I thought I’d weigh in on the topic. I had some ideas floating in my head about what I considered most important, but also decided I’d poll my colleagues to get their opinions.

One of the most mundane and frightening tasks for many developers is writing integration tests. It's a time-consuming, fragile, and often difficult and frustrating task to accomplish. What makes it even worse is that it quickly gets out of hand and breaks often, which leads to frustration and dropping the idea completely.

Does this sound familiar? A nervous, yet wildly confident singer prepares to wow competition judges. Meanwhile, a clip of them telling the camera some heart-wrenching story wraps up. The frame ends on some mention of this being their last chance at happiness, and this is their Hail Mary plan to finally follow their destiny. The music starts. The singer wails.