David Zych

I make dumb things

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qwerty

A Brief History of QWERTY

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

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github

Science is always better if you work together

If you read my previous post, 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 library. It turns out

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github

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 and

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ubuntu

Setting up SSL with Lets Encrypt on Ubuntu and Nginx

Let's Encrypt entered public beta recently. What is Let's Encrypt? Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. Let’s Encrypt is a

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windows 10

Abusing Emoji in Windows

Inspired by this post by Zach Holman, 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)

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asp.net 5

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 <MvcBuildViews> attribute in the csproj file. But in ASP.NET 5 there is

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asp.net 5

Unit Testing Entity Framework 7 with the In Memory Data Store

Entity Framework 7 includes a new 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

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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

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SOLID

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

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powershell

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,

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wordpress

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

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asp.net 5

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

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asp.net 5

Explaining the ASP.NET 5 Configuration Framework

ASP.NET 5 (aka vNext) has a new configuration system which is designed to be lightweight and to work everywhere. This means no more web.config XML hell! Hooray! (However you can use

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asp.net

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 (aka vNext), you’ve surely seen the [AssemblyNeutral] attribute floating around. What in the hell is that? Some Background Right

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facebook

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

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apache

Compression on the web is surprisingly underused

Eric Lawrence posted an article the other day on web compression, focusing a bunch of different algorithms, what should get compressed and how to get the best performance on your site based on

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android

Google's Material Design Spec is a great idea

Google just released their first major update to their Material Design Spec. Originally released back in June, the spec is a document that outlines the best approach to application design based on their

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diskpart

Install Windows 10 from a USB Flash Drive

I’m writing this because I can, for some reason, never remember how to use Diskpart. And who uses DVD’s anymore? Download the Windows 10 preview ISO from here: http://windows.microsoft.

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amplify

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

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C#

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. That’s a massive difference, and something that, in theory,

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commit

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

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commonmark

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

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coffee shops

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,

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debug

The case against EntityDataSource

Why does Microsoft insist on developing the EntityDataSource? 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

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b

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, it lists b and

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