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Showing posts from 2018

My new Dell XPS 15

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I’m really enjoying my new laptop. About a month ago I splurged and upgraded to the Dell XPS 15 9570 .  It has the 8th Gen 6 core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD and Nvidia GTX 1050 TI. So far I’ve only been running Windows but I might make it dual boot later. I’m running on the latest preview builds of Windows and its been pretty fun.  This Dell has everything I would need to code almost just about everything. With the GTX, I decided to add some games and the Unity developer tools on it.  It’s doing quite well.  It a really good gamer compared to other laptops that I’ve owned. One thing that I downgraded was the monitor.  I didn’t appreciate the glossy high res touch display on my XPS 13.  I actually prefer to code on this matte finish, non-touch, HD display.  1080 is fine and I don’t need the 4k.  It has been said that I’ll get better battery life with this set up also. When I’m presenting, 4k doesn’t help all that much either.  Most conferences barely have HD projectors.  So at a lower reso

Web Development Rockstar Unicorn with Ninja coding skills who moonlights as a Wizard of Data

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Are you a developer?  Maybe you are a recruiter? Hiring manager?  If you are then you probably know what I'm about to write. IT and development job descriptions can have pretty demanding skill requirements.  In order to take short cuts or make things sound 'cooler', hiring managers create job descriptions looking for Ninjas, Rock Stars, Wizards, Unicorns and other things other than programmer. Ninja - a developer who codes quietly in the dark and kills any task required by his master. Rock Star - a developer who stands out in a crowd and loudly codes better than everyone around them Wizard - a developer who magically creates software that everyone loves without any guidance and utilizing less hardware or maybe no hardware at all Unicorn - a developer who is an expert at all forms of programming.  A Unicorn (Full-stack Developer) can code the UI, API, database, virtual reality, business intelligence and everything else and do so all by themselves as equally well as a

Grudge Match: XML vs JSON

SQL Saturday Indy - August 11, 2018 Starting in SQL 2016, two rivals entered the ring in a professional fight for format supremacy. XML seems too fat to compete with the newcomer JSON but a fight has begun. JSON doesn't seem experienced enough to have real punching power but does it have the speed to win? Who is the pound for pound format champion? Come watch this action-packed bout between two titans of SQL. Alan Dykes and Aaron King will be presenting together. You can find the session schedule at  https://www.sqlsaturday.com/745/Sessions/Details.aspx?sid=83647 You can download the code at   https://github.com/SQLSaturday745/XMLvsJSON