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Hating old code is a sign of growth. Note: Brandon Savage is a PHP developer whose newsletter “Modernization Tips in under 100 words” holds a wealth of ideas for developers of all stripes. From time to time, I repeat some of these here, attributed to Brandon, of course.  In late 2021 I took a hard look at some code I wrote back in 2013. I hated it. The design was all wrong, it didn’t follow best practices or good standards, and it was a mess. A product of its time, sure: there were no type hints, no return value definitions, and no …

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What’s coming up? Virtual FoxFest is coming up soon (sessions start October 14th). Like last year, the conference is entirely virtual yet includes great breakdown rooms and sessions to add that nice one-on-one feel that you get in person. It’s also staggered so you can choose which days you want to attend – October 14th, 20th and 26th. This is great if you can’t break away for a consecutive three days. But really, I’ve gone through the sessions and I see five great sessions that I’m eager to check out. 1. A Decade of Thor (Rick Schummer) Thor has been …

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https://anildash.com/2021/09/11/twenty-is-myth/ Anil Dash has written a post of remembrance every year since September 11th, 2001 (yes, on the day). His blog has lots of other great things on it – but the ONE post I always look for is his post. We were away at DevCon in San Diego that day. I was up early and was able to absorb the news firsthand. I have an affinity to New York for a number of reasons: my sister lived there, we honeymooned there and it is New York. But the days that immediately followed in 2001, I saw the heartbreak of …

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https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/the-new-javascript-typescript-experience-in-vs-2022-preview-3/ The promise noted in this announcement sounds very exciting. Sure, you can do most of this already with VS Code – but encouraging this type of development directly in Visual Studio is awesome. The one thing I would like to see is built-in support for Cypress – my e2e testing tool of choice. (Https://www.cypress.it) – which is a great tool for Vue and React apps.

Error handling is an integral part of application development. Unless you are like myself and never release code with bugs 🙂 , the need for clients to tell you what's wrong is important. I've seen a number of error handlers in the past, dating all the way back to Pat Adam's famous FP2ERROR routine (back from 1991). Most systems log their errors and then pick them up as part of a diagnostic push. Unfortunately, reporting these errors back to the developer require some effort by the client. Doug Hennig has introduced a new VFPX project for adding easy error handling …

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https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/load-only-the-projects-you-need-with-solution-filters/ While I don't have a hundreds of projects in a solution, our larger application definitely has a few that don't need to be loaded each time (test apps, etc). It's a great feature but not very discoverable – I can see why they needed a blog post for it. Maybe the VS Team can come up with a better way.

I’ve started listening to Tim Crawford’s Cautionary Tales podcast recently and aside from listening to enjoyable tales of design mess-ups and warfare losses, the most recent episode Bowie, Jazz and the Unplayable Piano has given me two of the things I love about great podcasts:  -they make me think– they introduce me to something I’ve never heard/seen before I had never heard of Keith Jarrett before (jazz afficiandos, please don’t hate me) – but the story of this jazz improvisist and how he recorded the Koln concerts was super enjoyable. The version there is slightly different than the one noted on …

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It’s funding (whether private or public) that decides the reality of ideas like GPS, interstellar travel, the Internet and more – what would you pay for? f you listen to podcasts and haven’t listened to Levar Burton reads, you may want to consider it. It does offer some very interesting stories and Levar’s readings are incredible. One recent listen was “The Best We Can” (by Carrie Vaughn) about first contact with aliens – you. can READ the story here but Burton’s read really does make it come to life. What was neat about the timing, however, was this story that …

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