I’ve had several mentors over my career. Most of them informal mentors that were able to see something in me and help guide me in a more productive direction. Sometimes they were managers, or often friends that provided a different point of view. In most cases I still don’t know what they noticed in me, or why they helped, but damn I am glad they did.
continue...April 22, was my last day at Microsoft. I have thought a good bit about how I would talk about this publicly. Would I write a blog post? Would I just leave it to a short messages on social various networks?
I finally decide that it was necessary to write this post as a record of my thoughts for my future self.
continue...I added two productivity tools to my arsenal in 2012, Writemonkey and Trello.
I can't live without a simple text editor that understands markdown. I have shifted over this last year from proprietary note taking application such as OneNote and Evernote, to simple text documents saved in the cloud. I used markdown for taking notes, specifications and blog posts. If I have an idea I usually start with a new markdown document followed quickly with a card in Trello (more on that in a moment). continue...
I like extremes. There is something pure about seeing something taken to extreme. There are negatives at the extremes. But there is also elements that come out that can provide inspiration.
Take Jiro Ono, a 85-year old sushi chef from Tokyo. Jiro has taken the act of preparing sushi to an extreme level. His goal is to approach perfection. Jiro runs a 10 seat sushi restaurant in the basement of a Tokyo office building. Not the type of place you would expect to be a 3 star Michelin rated restaurant. continue...
Since I switched my blog over to a static site generated via Pretzel I have been looking for even easier ways to publish posts. @vikingcode has a great post on how to configure a empty shim project to kick off Pretzel on push to Azure.
Jekyll is nice but if you're not a Rubyist or if you don't like Liquid (the templating engine that Jekyll uses) it may not be as nice to you. One of the early projects of Code52 was Pretzel which started off as a .NET app with Jekyll compatibility. Since then, Razor has been added as well as other enhancements. The "problem" with Pretzel was that you'd have to prebake the site and commit the site to Git, rather than just the "source" files.
Azure "relaunched" a few months back, including a new product "Windows Azure Web Sites" (WAWS). WAWS is essentially Microsoft's version of AppHarbor or Heroku - Git (or TFS, or FTP) deployed sites "to the cloud". WAWS lets you use a whole stack of web tech - .net, node.js, java, php, python and potentially more.
Now thanks to this post I was able to switch up my workflow. Instead of pushing from my desktop to Azure the _site folder. I now have a service hook configured on CodePlex that pushed the source to Azure and then on the Azure side Pretzel is run to generate my site. It is always great to remove a step in any workflow.
If you try this out and have problems with incorrect paths, I submitted a pull request to fix a bug when using the -d switch