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Dave Zych

A Brief History of QWERTY

A Brief History of QWERTY

Qwerty is the default layout for most keyboards. But where did qwerty come from?

Science is always better if you work together

Science is always better if you work together

If you read my previous post, Introducing Shience: What it is and how to use it [https://davidzych.com/introducing-shience-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it/], you'll know that I was working on a C# port of Github's Scientist [https://github.com/github/scientist] library. It turns out Phil Haack [http://haacked.com/] of Github/Microsoft/

Introducing Shience: What it is and how to use it

Introducing Shience: What it is and how to use it

Shience is a .NET library for carefully refactoring critical paths. It is built on .NET Core, currently targets .NET 4.5.1 and DNX Core 5.0, and is available on Github [https://github.com/davezych/shience] and Nuget [https://www.nuget.org/packages/shience/]. Keep in mind that it's

Setting up SSL with Lets Encrypt on Ubuntu and Nginx

Setting up SSL with Lets Encrypt on Ubuntu and Nginx

Let's Encrypt entered public beta recently. What is Let's Encrypt [https://letsencrypt.org/]? > Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. Let’s Encrypt is a service provided by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). So, basically, free https. Yay!

Abusing Emoji in Windows

windows 10 Featured

Abusing Emoji in Windows

Inspired by this post by Zach Holman [http://zachholman.com/posts/abusing-emoji/], let's see what Windows 10 will allow us to use emoji for. First... some history Unicode Most computer systems today (e.g. Windows, OSX, Android, iOS) use a thing called Unicode to represent text. Since computers work in

View compilation in ASP.NET 5 with the RazorPreCompileModule

View compilation in ASP.NET 5 with the RazorPreCompileModule

In MVC versions up to and include version 5, you could compile your Razor views by adding the attribute in the csproj file. But in ASP.NET 5 there is no more csproj file, so how we compile views for MVC 6? Why? If you've never compiled views and

Unit Testing Entity Framework 7 with the In Memory Data Store

Unit Testing Entity Framework 7 with the In Memory Data Store

Entity Framework 7 [https://github.com/aspnet/EntityFramework] includes a new InMemory [https://github.com/aspnet/EntityFramework/tree/dev/src/EntityFramework.InMemory] store which is fantastic for unit testing. No more mocking DbContext or doing other dumb things! Here's how Start by creating a new class library project using the

Programmers and sleep

Programmers and sleep

For most programmers, sleep is an afterthought. It gets in the way of coding. Of inspiration. Of progress. But sleep is an important part of your mental and physical health and is essential in keeping your body running smoothly. Most programmers I know have some trouble sleeping, a disorder or

The SOLID design principles applied to an actual Swiss Army Knife

The SOLID design principles applied to an actual Swiss Army Knife

The term swiss army knife is thrown around a lot when discussing the SOLID principles. Dave, that class looks like a swiss army knife. We need to refactor that shit. Yeah. Whatever. You know what, how about we see how a real swiss army knife stands up against the SOLID

The Internet, text encodings and making an ass out of you and me

The Internet, text encodings and making an ass out of you and me

HTML, by it's design, is incredibly liberal in what it accepts. Which is kind of cool, but sometimes it's definitely not and it bites you. And it can bite you in many ways, including the character encoding used on a page. (I.e. ascii vs unicode vs whatever. Read this

Migrating from Wordpress to Ghost: 301'ing some urls

Migrating from Wordpress to Ghost: 301'ing some urls

I just migrated from Wordpress to Ghost, for probably the same reason as most people - I got tired of the mass of crazy that Wordpress has become. I just want to write shit, and Wordpress was almost getting in the way of that. The migration process was ridiculously easy

Creating an ASP.NET 5 Class Library with Vim

One of the great things about ASP.NET 5 (aka vNext) is that there is no longer a reliance on Visual Studio. I definitely think VS is a great IDE, but it does have it’s quirks and people love options; the option of not having to use VS is

Explaining the ASP.NET 5 Configuration Framework

ASP.NET 5 (aka vNext) has a new configuration system [https://github.com/aspnet/Configuration] which is designed to be lightweight and to work everywhere. This means no more web.config XML hell! Hooray! (However you can use XML files if you want…) Loading Settings The Configuration class is defined

What is an Assembly Neutral Interface and why do we need it?

If you’ve spent any time browsing the source of ASP.NET 5 [https://github.com/aspnet] (aka vNext), you’ve surely seen the [AssemblyNeutral] [https://github.com/aspnet/HttpAbstractions/blob/7be9cefc4c7671caba7d8fe538ba6a0ad308fdad/src/Microsoft.AspNet.HttpFeature/AssemblyNeutralAttribute.cs] attribute floating around. What in the hell is that? Some Background Right

I understand why Facebook split Messenger into it's own application

A large part of programming (probably the largest part) is refactoring. It’s the process of taking existing code and improving it. And part of that is determining when a class, feature, or even an application gets too big and splitting it up. It could mean applying the Single Responsibility

Compression on the web is surprisingly underused

Eric Lawrence posted an article the other day on web compression [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2014/10/21/http-compression-optimize-file-formats-with-deflate.aspx] , focusing a bunch of different algorithms, what should get compressed and how to get the best performance on your site based on mixing minification and compression. It’

Google's Material Design Spec is a great idea

Google just released their first major update to their Material Design Spec. [http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html] Originally released back in June, the spec is a document that outlines the best approach to application design based on their material design philosophy. It’s goal is to:

Install Windows 10 from a USB Flash Drive

How to install Windows 10 from a bootable usb flash drive using diskpart and the command line. Or any version of Windows, really.

Tools Amplify Talent

My sister in law’s dad picked up golf a few years ago. We’ll call him George, because that’s a pretty generic name and he was curious about golf. Anyway. On the morning of my then-girlfriend’s-brother’s-wedding-to-his-then-girlfriend (complicated, I know) we played a round of golf. George

If you're using enum.ToString() that often, you're doing it wrong

Daniel Wertheim measured the performance of enum.ToString and found it to be 400x slower than using a comparable class with const’s. [http://danielwertheim.se/2014/09/30/c-someenum-tostring-measured-to-be-400x-slower/] That’s a massive difference, and something that, in theory, might make you think otherwise about using an enum. But

Recovering changes with git reflog

I ran into a situation recently where I accidentally merged an unfinished feature branch directly into master. I had been working on the feature and got an urgent hotfix request. Without thinking, I branched from the feature branch to perform the hotfix changes, then merged that directly into master once

CommonMark only wants to help

I’m sure many of you have heard of Markdown, which is a plain text format for writing structured documents. Developed in 2004, it is in wide use throughout the internet and has simple syntax: Heading ======= Sub-heading ----------- h3. Traditional html title Paragraphs are separated by a blank line. Let

Coffee shops and programming... now with science!

Remember that scene in Family Guy, where there are two guys in a coffee shop and one asks if the other will watch him work? You don’t? Okay, fine: > Guy #2: Hey, getting some writing done there buddy? Guy #1: Yeah, setting up in public so everybody can watch

The case against EntityDataSource

Why does Microsoft insist on developing the EntityDataSource [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/cc488502(v=vs.100).aspx]? I really don’t see the benefit. It’s just adding bloat to Entity Framework, especially since most people are moving away from Web Forms in favor of MVC. It

Why use strong and em over b and i?

One question I see around the interwebs a lot is why strong and em should be used over b and i. If we look at the HTML 4 spec [http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/cover.html#minitoc], it lists b and i under the Font style [http://www.w3.