Experimenting with python templating of jinja2 [https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.0.x/] and finding it quite a bit nicer than the razor [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/mvc/views/razor?view=aspnetcore-5.0] syntax in ASP.NET for one big reason to me that extracting the

Needed to deploy a pretty cool dynamic proxy called traefik [https://github.com/traefik/traefik], which is built on golang [https://golang.org/] and can be deployed as a single binary and along with some simply configs can take a lot of difficulties of say an nginx reverse proxy [https:

Capturing a screenshot in Linux/macOS is documented and can be done in a single command as detailed here [https://siliconheaven.info/capture-url-screenshot-chrome-ubuntu] Doing this in Windows is a lot less clear and more painful, but you can do it like so I am not running with administrator rights so

Capturing a screenshot documentation Setup 1. Add google chrome package location: wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb 2. Install: sudo apt install ./google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb Capture 1. Capture the url contents of siliconheaven.info [https://siliconheaven.info/] google-chrome --headless --hide-scrollbars --window-size=1920,2000 --screenshot=

Reading text from images using the Tesseract Code import cv2 import pytesseract if __name__ == '__main__': # setup the path for the tesseract tool pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = r"C:\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe" #load the image img = cv2.imread("code.png") #convert to grayscale gray = cv2.

Scaled Agile Framework [https://www.scaledagileframework.com/]

- Pretend I'm not a tech person. Can you explain REST in simple terms? Everyone can be a tech person and I hope that my explanation covers the concept and intentions behind REST (REpresentational State Transfer). Executive Summary: REST is an informal software specification/guideline/principle to creating

Asynchronous Python is a pleasant experience to work with.  Nothing unexpected or weird about using the await/async keywords and how they work. Basic example of an asynchronous function async def this_takes_awhile(wait_time_seconds=1): await asyncio.sleep(wait_time_seconds) That's all it takes

Individual lookups against a rules system stored in a database can add up to a lot of computations and depending on the size of your ruleset cause delays.  There are ways around this with caching [https://aws.amazon.com/caching/], in memory hashmaps [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table]

Wanted to create a chain of method call backs with some simple JavaScript [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript] as in startMethod -> calls function on success and another function on failure and it had been awhile since I did this refreshed my memory on Promises and

Working on a task to create a relational ordered set of prompts from rules with dynamic model binding.  This is one way to do it with JSON and SQL.  In this case the prompts may change, but it is a rare event.  The goal is to make the SQL server

Again I am fighting with a MySql [https://mysqlserverteam.com/new-defaults-in-mysql-8-0/#:~:text=The%20default%20value%20of%20the,vast%20majority%20of%20MySQL%20users.] collations and character sets.  Why would this be a problem when I have set the default collation and changed all the tables to character set utf8mb4 and collation

Putting this here to remember how to query out the metadata of a view, using the AdventureWorks2017 [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/samples/adventureworks-install-configure?view=sql-server-ver15&tabs=ssms] database view vAdditionalContactInfo for reference. use [AdventureWorks2017] SELECT [c].[column_id], [c].[name] AS [ColumnName] FROM [sys].[columns] [c] INNER

Needed to alter a particular stored procedure over a few thousand databases.  Here is an example script that uses a cursor and dynamic sql to do this.  Key point here is to have the USE statement switch the database prior to issuing the CREATE OR ALTER command so that each

Got some quirky unexpected behavior when loading data from text files and SQL [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL] statements when working with extended ASCII [https://theasciicode.com.ar/] characters and Unicode. These files in particular are UTF8 [https://www.utf8.com/] encoded as is standard when doing text editing

In the commit early and often strategy means checking in and commit code all the time like saving a file and sometimes when you do this you accidentally check in something that you shouldn't have and even push it up to the remote server(s) Do this to

User defined functions suffer from inability to be query plan optimized, but this is a nice function I wrote to find ASCII control characters CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[ContainsControlCharacters] ( @textToCheck NVARCHAR(MAX) ) RETURNS BIT AS BEGIN DECLARE @invalidCharCount INT; -- Sadness that it came to this -- Splits the input text

Sometimes due to circumstances beyond your control you get garbage in your database.  Optimally you would filter this data out from getting to and residing in your data storage, but decisions are made and things are built to allow for partial mistaken data rather than complete perfect data.  Today I

Was asked an interview whiteboarding question that was using a data graph and to solve two problems.  I don't like whiteboarding sessions [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/19/the-trouble-with-technical-interviews/] as I don't think they have a good application to what software in practice is

What is a Temporal Table [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_database]? * A system versioned user table that maintains the entire history of data changes * Introduced SQL:2011, proposed 1992 * Active data table is mirrored by historical mirror table controlled by database Temporal Table Details * Two timestamps columns are required

Most companies have too many rules. They're designed to keep people in line and drive them to produce more. The assumption is that without rules, people would be unmotivated, directionless, and unproductive.  This is insulting, patronizing, and an adversarial attitude to have. Trust, freedom, and autonomy are three

As I was trying to do some database schema cleanup, I needed to scan all databases on a particular server and see if there are any records in the table.  If there were no records this user table is unused and can not be dropped at this point. This approach