Benjy's IT Blog

So I finished my first book of the year called Soft Skills, The Software Developer's Life Manual !  I talked about this book in an earlier blog entry and the rest of the book did not disappoint! I would highly recommend Soft Skills as it gives great insight on how the author, John Sonmez, lived his life and how he became successful.  But he also points out that everyone's path might be a little different on how or when they become successful. Since reading John's book I've started my own blog, I've gotten several recommendations on other books to read, I've started using Kanban flow and the pomodoro technique (staying more focused on tasks at work), I've learned some insight on real estate, and also a few things about nutrition!  Yes, John covers all the aspects of life and it's a great read! The book has also convinced me that I've got a great skill because software development is not easy!  I'm starting to learn other code faster, as the ...

So I've come across some articles discussing Tally Tables in SQL Server, these are scripts that replace loops in your sql code to make it run faster.   Here's one of the articles I read  and I'm trying to decide if this is something I should try to implement here at work. I do have several stored procedures that use Cursors and While loops but does it go through enough data to justify using it?  If anyone has any thoughts or input on Tally tables please let me know. I do plan on investigating these more but wanted to get others opinions.

As a developer you hear and witness several different things from users.  One thing I've learned over the past 20 years is you must have patience, especially with certain users. It's amazing how many users are convinced that if something looks different or something "seems" to be missing on their screen that they assume something has changed in the code.  One of the comments I get a lot is, "you guys must have changed something in the code." Well, when you're the only developer at a company you know when something has changed or not changed.  I try to explain to these users that "no, nothing has been changed in that program, we haven't made any changes to that in almost 6 months".  Then I get responses like, "well I over heard you guys talking about a username being misspelled, and maybe that's what's causing this."  My response, "No, that had nothing to do with the program you're in and that was on our test s...

I came across an article yesterday by Nat Thompson called  Pioneering Your Way to Cloud Computing With AWS Developer Tools  - one of the stats I found shocking was 79% percent of organizations now have systems running in either public or private cloud infrastructure and 95% are going to pursue cloud adoption.   So, I thought it might be good to learn a little more about cloud infrastructures, and dabble with AWS ( Amazon Web Services ).  This article takes you through the process of how to sign up for an AWS Account (free for 1 year), how to setup an IAM user, and setting up your CodeBuild.   I spent most of last night setting up everything and now it's time to test and learn what I can do with the AWS tools!  Wish me luck! :)

Lets face it, everyone still uses Excel for one reason or the other.  I think it's a great tool, especially for organizing and tracking information, creating quick budgets, lists, etc.  Sometimes at work I get a request for the ability to store Excel data into our database.  For example, we have a QR Scanner that imports data into Excel.  We also have a Scan History table where we store all scans.  Note, we are able to scan traditional bar codes directly into the database, just not the QR Scans. So, the user wants to copy the scan data into our history database but also assign some other information to it, like a PO Number.  So one of programs I've created is actually pretty simple. You create a "textarea" input and give it whatever dimensions that seem reasonable.  I also added a Po Number text field for this example. The trick is to separate the data by tabs (but make sure the data itself has no tabs within the cells).  Below is an ex...

So being a sports fanatic, March Madness is one of the most exciting times of the year when it comes to sports!  This past winter Olympics has been fun to watch as well! Anyhow, as a developer I love to create new applications for things such as March Madness.  Several years ago I created a an application on our work intranet for users to make picks on their brackets.  The system also totals up points for making the correct selections (I just have to enter who won the games).  Again, I probably developed this over 10 years ago.  So, over the weekend I decided to write a new and improved version of the March Madness bracket buster!  And I'm much more happy with this version as it's more user friendly, more appealing to the eye, and the code is much more efficient!     Cool thing about this application is every time you select a team, the pick is saved automatically.  If you would like a copy of this application to use at your work just l...

I was reading up on some XML and AJAX stuff the other day and came across the  XMLHttpRequest Object  - when I come across snippets of code like the example in the link, I always try to figure a way to incorporate it into my work.  I always ask myself is this something I can use and make my software more efficient? This was something I most definitely could use as we have a system of part numbers in our database.  We have users that select part numbers to enter Selling Opportunities so I was able to use the code to look up the part numbers more quickly, showing the part numbers, qty on hand, and some other pertinent info. Below is an example of some code: Page1.asp <html> <head> <script> function showHint(str) {     if (str.length == 0) {         document.getElementById("txtHint").innerHTML = "";         return;     } else {         var x...