I spend a lot of time working in software houses. One of the nastiest things that I see again and again and again, is developers attempting to roll their own security and authentication mechanisms.
Spend a moment and think about how many security incidents the big companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) have had over the years. Now think about how much effort they’ve put into doing it right, yet they still have issues at times.
2018-07-17
One of the software houses that I’ve done some work for over the years has had a number of unexpected issues with their clients and had to shed quite a lot of their staff. This is always a concerning time and I’m seeing a lot of worried and unhappy people. Either they don’t think their jobs will last, or they are upset at having been moved to roles that they don’t want.
2018-06-19
I have many friends who would have checked the calendar when they first heard that Microsoft was buying Github. They would have guessed it was April 1st.
I think it’s another pretty bold strategic move by Satya Nadella.
It’s been interesting to see all the naysayers coming out of the woodwork to beat up on the idea of Microsoft owning Github, as though it was going to be the death of Github. Almost every single time I hear a justification though, it is based on their opinion of Microsoft or something they did often decades ago.
2018-06-15
The industry is clearly trending quite quickly towards Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Rather than building monolithic chunks of code, new applications are often constructed by combining a variety of platform services, themselves usually delivered as Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.
Any application layers that you build above these services though, are only as good as the underlying services. And that’s where things can go very, very wrong quite quickly.
2018-05-29
For many years, I was blogging at sqlblog.com and I was a big fan of what Adam Machanic and Peter DeBetta had done there. Eventually though, community server was on its last legs, and WordPress seemed the obvious platform for a blog. Fellow MVP Adam Machanic made it really easy for me to migrate to a WordPress site with a tool that he had created.
I headed off to BlueHost with high hopes, but those hopes just haven’t been fulfilled. I’ve had a number of times that things just stop; it’s hard to get to the bottom of what’s causing it; the support is really glacial at times (ever had a chat with someone who is having a conversation with 10 other people at the same time?); and it turned out that what’s broken was something that apparently I was responsible for but didn’t even know existed.
2018-05-15
The other day, I joined a Skype for Business call from the Microsoft Regional Director program that I’m part of.
I was using my iPhone and I chose to use the web option to connect. I’d say it must have flipped me across to using Skype for Business anyway. (It is installed on my phone).
I thought there would be a large number of people in the meeting, and that we’d be muted the whole time, so when it asked if it was OK for the app to use the microphone, I said “no”. Clearly I should have just left myself muted instead of disabling microphone access.
2018-05-08
Today, we were having trouble saving a PowerPoint slide deck as a set of PNG files.
The error message said:
Sorry we couldn’t find slide1.PNG. Is it possible that it was moved, renamed, or deleted?
After trying to copy the slides into another deck to replace the original deck, the same problem existed. Saving in PPTX format was fine. Curiously, saving individual slides was also fine.
I found a few blog posts online that said it might be to do with an embedded period in the filename. That wasn’t the case but it gave me the clue that I needed.
2018-04-16
One of the changes that has happened with Windows in recent years is the concept of forced updates. Basically, you’re going to get updates from now on, like it or not. Generally that’s a good thing. You can delay them for a little while but not for that long. In the Advanced options update Updates, you can see this:
So you aren’t going to delay them for that long.
2018-03-20
I was interested to see our old buddy Pinal Dave recently post a link to one of another old buddy Brent Ozar’s posts from 2015:
What’s the difference between a contractor, and consultant, and FTE?
Brent defined consultants as giving advice on what the client should do; whereas contractors turn up and do what they’re told. This distinction is pretty clear and I agree with him.
I always thought that was a great post but I also always thought it misses one additional category: mentor.
2018-03-06
There is an old saying about not reinventing the wheel yet this is something that I see happening at client sites every day. I see two main reasons why this happens:
Discoverability
[caption id=“attachment_2809” align=“alignnone” width=“339”]
Image by Nathan Dumlao[/caption]
There are so many tools and frameworks in this industry, that you can’t be expected to know them all. I remember when I worked a lot with the .NET framework. I’d go into client sites and see them designing and building classes that were already in the framework. Worse, the framework classes were usually very well designed and tested.
2018-03-06
