From Throughput to Truth: What Kafka Taught Me About System Health Scaling exposed something deeper than bugs—it exposed misunderstanding. From resource requests to Kafka lag, the real challenge wasn’t fixing the system, it was learning how to read it.
The Value of Asking “Why?” A system review showed major performance improvements — but one operation took two minutes. A simple question, “Why?”, led to uncovering a hidden bug. Curiosity like this is one of the most powerful tools developers and testers have. Sometimes small anomalies reveal the biggest insights.
From Ownership to Access: The Quiet Transformation of Gaming Cloud gaming made me realize something unsettling: the games I play, and even the save data representing my time in them, may never exist on my own system. Gaming may be the clearest example of a broader shift—where ownership is slowly being replaced by access.
Adapting to the Corporate Security Maze as a Developer As corporate security tightened—removing admin rights and restricting cloud access—I had to rethink how I work. This is the story of the small development machine, an RDP connection, and the workflow that kept me productive.
Uncategorized A day of road-blocks for a software developer Recently I had one of those "nightmare" days for a software developer where I was simply trying to complete one small task, and it ended up taking half a day due to a rabbit hole of problems. I had assigned myself a single issue/ticket in JIRA that I thought would be pretty easy to complete.
Uncategorized Updating a 301 permanent redirect If you change the URL for a 301 redirect (at least a redirect powered by NGINX), the browser does not respect the new URL. This appears to be because the browser caches the URLs for 301 redirects, because they are supposed to be permanent. If you google online, everyone tells
Java Setting up a Java development VM with VirtualBox I decided to setup a Linux development environment so I could separate my .NET development work from Java development work. Here are the steps I took (with some trial and error along the way) to get this setup properly. 1. Install VirtualBox This is easy. Easier than Docker, easier than
FHIR Pleasant surprise with open-source module development I regularly work with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). I also do a lot with JavaScript/Node.JS/NPM. About a year ago, I found that there weren't any openly available modules for serializing and deserializing FHIR resources in JavaScript. Needing this functionality in several use-cases, I decided
CSharp Allowing external access to Visual Studio ASP.NET Web API project While developing a Slack Slash Command for one of the products I work on, I discovered it is rather difficult to allow external access to a Web API in my Visual Studio debugging environment. Using numerous online resources, this is the steps it took to make it all work: 1.
CSharp How one line of code improved performance over 900x Over time, some of my export logic started taking longer and longer to perform. At its worst, on large sets of data, it was taking 15 minutes to perform the entire export. Obviously, this isn't ideal, so I began investigating. The project is developed in C#/.NET and
Uncategorized Extended vacation Lantana provides a unique benefit to its employees: after seven years of employment, an employee can take a two-month paid vacation, called “The Sabbatical.” I’ve now been working for the company for over seven years (over eight if you include my contracting time), and I recently finished my sabbatical,
IT Slow computer due to proxy auto-detect While on vacation, my laptop (which is a Windows 10 machine) stayed off, almost entirely; save for some miscellaneous banking, news, etc. A week prior to returning to work, I performed all the updates necessary to get my computer back "up to speed". Unfortunately, one of these updates
Node.JS nvm-windows node 8.9.4 installation error When attempting to install node version 8.9.4 with NVM for windows, I received an error when it attempted to install npm, indicating that a file name was too long. There are a number of GitHub issues related to this, with many suggestions; some involving moving files around, some
CSharp EntityFramework 6 DbContext with an interface I recently migrated one of our projects to EntityFramework 6's Code-First framework. There weren't a great deal of differences in the underlying models, but the context class changed a fair amount. My project is loaded with over 300 unit tests that interact with the EntityFramework models.
Uncategorized Docker for IT Administrators I worked on a project recently where the client used Docker to create isolated containers for their applications. They highly recommended that I look at it, and based on their brief explanation of Docker I decided to make a go at it. As it turns out, it seems like one
Node.JS Node.JS on FHIR If your using FHIR resources to represent your healthcare models, you may run into some issues when building a Node.JS application to work with your FHIR models. FHIR does a pretty good job at providing examples (reference implementations) of how to use FHIR in different technology stacks. However, I
Node.JS When to use Node.JS Node.JS is really cool. I like how easy it is to setup an application and get a website running. Its multi-platform support is great, and I hear that it scales pretty good, too. There seems to be a huge trend where everyone wants to use Node.JS, which is
IT Updating Dell Latitude E55XX BIOS I tried updating a Latitude E55XX bios today with the latest firmware. It would unpack the firmware and then shutdown, but not actually do the update. Michael and I could not figure out why it was not updating, and spent over an hour searching for a solution; finding none. Finally
Node.JS Node.JS and Soap Services Recently I worked on a project that was developed entirely using Node.JS. There was a need to integrate the application with an XDS registry/repository, which exposed its functionality via SOAP services. I investigated soap client interfaces for Node.JS, and found three; node-soap, easysoap, and douche. After testing
Node.JS NodeJS Limitations I've been working with Javascript a great deal in the last year. I've recently worked on two web applications that were both written purely in Javascript (which were exposed using NodeJS) and two other web applications whose UI were purely javascript, with alternative back-ends (such as
IT Carbonite backups with encrypted files I've recently begun using Carbonite for backing up my files. Carbonite is a very easy-to-use and works quite well... But, that's another subject for another post. I did, however, run into some problems when contemplating how the backups are affected by encrypted files. When using TrueCrypt
Web Design Wordpress Mobile Pack Broken Images I have a WordPress site that uses the Mobile Pack plugin to display a friendly interface for mobile users. Installation went rather smooth, however I found that images weren’t displaying correctly. I could NOT figure out why for quite a while. At first I thought it was an issue
CSharp Developing Mono-Android for C# I started playing around with the Mono-Android SDK. Pretty cool stuff! Not having developed anything for Android yet, it was admittedly confusing at first trying to figure out the structure of things. For example, the link between the XML UI definition and the actually class objects. Why you have to
CSharp Multiple providers with ASP.NET Forms Authentication Microsoft claims that it is easy to setup multiple member and role providers in .NET. While that appears to be relatively true for configuration, getting Forms Authentication (most particularly, the ASP.NET Login control) to respect the multiple providers is much more difficult. I spent probably 3 hours this weekend
IT JIRA 5 Sharing & Mentions with Exchange 2010 I recently updated our company's JIRA installation to the latest version, JIRA 5. I was very excited to see the new sharing/mentioning features in JIRA. Unfortunately, I found that I had some initial problems getting the new features to work with our Exchange environment. Here are the
