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Many years ago I was on a business trip, and found myself in a particularly crowded terminal at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Thunderstorms up and down the east coast had jammed air traffic all along the eastern seaboard. Most flights were delayed, and many were canceled. As you can imagine, people were not in the best of moods. For me, it turned into a lesson on kindness and humanity.

This is the second post in my series about learning and teaching. In the first post, I specifically discussed the four steps that everyone goes through when learning something new. In this post, I am going to discuss how to teach students at each step of the process. The techniques used vary, depending on where a given student is. Please note, you don’t have to be a professional teacher to understand and use these techniques. Whether you are a teacher, a parent, a manager, a mentor, or even a student yourself, understanding these techniques can make you better at what you do.

When my oldest son was 11 years old, I hired him to work on an ASP.NET project with me. It wasn’t anything I had planned to do, but I had some monotonous layout work and he was eager to help. As it turned out, he had quite the knack for it. At 15, he got his first “real” job maintaining an existing ASP.NET site for a friend of mine. Today, he is finishing a degree in Software Engineering while doing a paid internship building apps for a financial services company. In this article, I will try to document the experience, and hopefully identify some reusable patterns for teaching others.

Have you ever stopped to think about how we learn things? I was recently reflecting on when my 15-year old was learning to drive. I had the unenviable job of teaching him. At the time, it struck me that he had to think about every little detail of what he was doing. He needed to be reminded to check his mirrors, signal his lane changes, look behind him when backing up, etc.. Learning to drive requires absolute and complete attention. He didn’t even have the spare mental capacity to listen to music.

Did you know there is a very simple and straightforward command to archive a complete Git repository, while including no historical information? In this brief article I explain both how and why I do it.

Recently the social media tool Crowdfire had its Twitter API suspended without warning. Suddenly its users all over the world had their ability to post curated content to Twitter completely shut down, leavng them with no good way to automate their social media engagements. In this article I will explain how I am using IFTTT to overcome their suspension to let Crowdfire do its thing, and let me continue to post articles to Twitter.

Recently I needed to record a demo video for one of my apps running on an Android test device, an older Samsung Galaxy S4. I had no idea how to do that. Camtasia for the Mac supports capturing live video directly from iOS devices out of the box, but not Android. What to do? The instructions in this article describe one simple solution, which should work on both MacOS and Windows.

Everyone agrees that Test Driven Development (TDD) is a good thing, right? Right? If you agree that tests are important, you probably write a lot of tests. You might even have a code coverage tool that helps you know how much of your code is tested. Great so far. But here’s my question. Are you testing the right code? Are you testing your code, or mine?

The Ring Video doorbell Pro is an amazing little piece of technology that can provide safety and peace of mind. Almost two years after my original purchase, I’m glad I took the time to invest in one. Now that Amazon.com has purchased Ring, the entire product line continues to evolve and improve. Below are my experiences installing and using it for the first time, along with my two-year update.

When starting a new software project, your team has a lot of decisions to make. Not the least of which is how to track the features from initial design through completion. Trello can help make the entire process easy and painless. Let’s jump right in.

Whether your are creating or consuming an API, you must understand all of its implications. If you are the consumer, it’s up to you to understand what calling its various functions will do. If you are creating an API, you also have a responsibility to your consumers. I won’t go into all of the rules here, but will touch on two very severe problems that I have personally experienced in my professional life.