DYI SEO - A Few Basic Tips on Search Engine Optimization to Get the Eyeballs Rolling

You want more hits on the content you publish. You want higher click-through rates. You probably want to make sure your site is Optimized for Search Engines. You want SEO - Search Engine Optimization.

Beginner's C# resources and cheat sheet for the VB.NET developer

My experience as a Microsoft developer goes all the way back to Visual Basic 3. When .NET came out, I naturally transitioned to VB.NET. I received advice, years ago to also learn C# along-side VB, but I did not listen to that advise. In late 2013, I started the transition to C#. Although, the craft is not mastered yet, I am getting much better at it. If you are in the same situation, the following notes highlight tools and references that helped me grow in this area, my hope is that these can assist you in your practice. Feel free to comment and share other tips / tricks / tools that have helped you in your own journey to become a sharper C# developer.

Test the quality of your assumptions as you analyze, design, code, test and deploy/ship your next app.

As you prepare to tackle a new project, you probably make sure all the proverbial IT ducks are in a row.  From skills sets, tools in both hardware and software, environments, connections... the list seems endless at times.  You always make sure to acquire the highest quality of tools and skill sets that your budget can buy. Have you ever considered to inspect the value or the quality of your assumptions as you step into a new project? Failure to keep assumptions in check may lead us to have faith in pursuing a goal of oversimplification, or worse, believing in a myth!

Simple Cost Benefit Analysis for the Software Developer

I took some college courses about finance a few years back. Little did I know that the knowledge I acquired during those sessions was going to become handy during a discussion about the best course of action on a project we were reviewing. In this case, the conversation went something like this:

We need to add functionality "x". If / when we do this our application will perform much better and it would clean up our design. 

But the cost to analyze, design, code, and test would be very expensive. You know development hours are expensive! How about we "throw more hardware" at the problem?

It has got to be cheaper than coding it right. Besides, we do not want to over engineer something if we don't have to. Right?

How-To: Test-drive Software Developer's Skills BEFORE Hiring the Candidate

The Problem...

In a previous post, we listed out some thoughts and considerations about hiring the ideal candidate for a job opening at your IT shop.  In there I made my lame attempt to coin a phrase: Hypothetical Scenario Modeling or HSM for short.  While it is probably a very long shot for this to become a "coin-able" phrase, with this post, I'll attempt to describe how to use the HSM approach.