Category: #general

Go get me my coffee!

That is right, you, intern, are here to make my life easier and do all of the grunt work that I don’t want to do.

But you can start by bringing me my coffee.

Two sugars and 1 cream.

This sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

Whatever perceptions and expectations that exist in society, whether from badly scripted movie and tv shows or from horror stories from really bad places to work, an Engineering Co-op or Intern experience should not be lumped in with all of that.

A good intern experience should give you just that: experience.

Minecraft is awesome. I also hate part of it with every fiber of my being. Wait… backup, rewind. Let’s start at the beginning. This is not a story about how amazing Minecraft is. It is also not an explanation for someone that doesn’t know what Minecraft is. Honestly, if you aren’t aware of Minecraft at this point then skip this article altogether. However, if you are looking to get up and running with a dedicated home server and don’t know where to start or have started and find yourself stuck then you are at the right place. So… Minecraft. What an amazing game. I have spent countless hours placing simple blocks on a screen. It is amazing how such a simple concept can engross so many people and be so popular. However, there is one aspect to Minecraft that I hate with a burning passion. I. Hate. Minecraft. Mods. If…

Windows 11 was officially announced on June 24, 2021. This may also be the day where we have witness the beginning of the end of custom PCs. Hidden in amongst the fanfare and the shiny new features are two seemingly minor footnotes that will have a major impact for anyone not buying a prebuilt, from the factory PC. These two statements are scary for those of us working, writing and playing games on homebuilt computers. They may have a huge impact on how computers will operate in the future. But how did we get here? We can blame the rise of mobile for most of this. If you were an executive at Microsoft, having watch your mobile and tablet efforts fail year after year then seeing two upstarts, one a fruity computer company who made decent hardware but didn’t focus on the operating system too much and the other an…

I can’t stand cats. This is because I am allergic and the second reason is that cats are a-holes. Yes, I will freely admit that I am a dog person. Having a pet that will love you unconditionally and will get just as excited upon your return no matter if you are out of the room for 5 minutes or 5 days. Cats, on the other hand, are pretty much 1/2 second away from clawing your face off at any given moment. It is a good thing that cats are lazy. Their sun-sleep-recharge cycles mean that they have less time for creating claw-shredding mayhem as they appear to sleep 20+ hours per day. However, cats can provide one huge benefit to developers: That is right. This person’s cat found a UI-breaking bug simply by sitting down on the keyboard. So is this telling us that in order to be a…

The command line is awesome. Seriously – if you have only ever used a mouse to navigate a computer then you are missing out. Way back in middle school I had a teacher for an anthropology class. One of the lessons from that class that has stuck with me all these years is how amazing and useful the human thumb is. To illustrate this concept, one day he would have all of the students tape or wrap their thumbs so that they couldn’t use them and then try to complete the school day like that. Let me tell you – it wasn’t easy. That is a little bit like using a computer with only a mouse. Sure – it is useful and handy and all, but you aren’t using all of the tools at your disposal. So let’s un-tape that thumb and set up something amazing on Windows – bash.…

Data is awesome. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that having an ability to sift through mounds of data and come up with a specific answer or conclusion is an awesome ability to have. In my experience as a developer, building queries and logic into databases has always been one of my favorite types of development. Linking together disparate pieces of data into something functional and usable is really cool. However, one aspect of data that was drilled into my head as a young Engineer was the ability to audit data. Who did What and When did they do it? Now, years later I find myself building an integrated custom data solution for Product and Project Management, Time Entry, and Product Release Management. So where did I start? With the data of course. The following is a quick crash course in setting up tables and functionality in a…