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The other day I was looking for a picture of a swimming pool for a mobile app I am writing (more on that later). Much to my excitement, I stumbled upon an online image catalog called Pixabay.

I wanted to become a software developer from the time I wrote my first “Hello World” app in 9th grade. After graduating high school in 1985, I entered the University of Maryland’s Computer Science program. It did not go well. I completed only four semesters of college over the next five years. My dream of becoming a professional developer faded. In 1995, nearly ten years after high school, I finally landed my first paid programming job. Here is how I did it.

Ten years into an otherwise successful software development career, I experienced significant burnout and walked away from a 6-figure salary. I quit my job, sold my house, moved to a remote part of New Hampshire, and did not work again in software development for almost three years.

This post describes how I built a docker container that runs an express server, which serves an AngularJS app, written in TypeScript, with live reloading, remote Chrome debugging, with Source Maps served from a different directory, and VS Code breakpoints.

My side gigs have brought in almost $7000 in passive income through the first half of this year, mostly by formatting and editing content I already had lying around. Here is why and how I did it.

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.

One hot summer day, my team received a somewhat frantic email. Due to some hardware support issues, a very large and visible part of our business was at risk of being shut down. They wanted to know what we could do about it. This post will provide some of our challenges, and the solution we ultimately provided, to keep the business running.

Last week I posted an article describing all of the cool things I love about working at Walt Disney World. Things that have nothing whatsoever to do with my actual job; they were simply the extra benefits available as a bonus. This post is all about the career benefits of working here.

I am currently in my tenth year as a Disney Technology Cast Member. As the tenth year is a milestone year at the company, I have spent some time reflecting on my time here, my career, and where I want to go over the next decade. My conclusion is that I cannot imagine working anywhere else. This post describes some of my reasons why.

In 2005, the .NET Framework had its 1.1 SP1 release and was relatively stable. Visual Studio .NET 2003 was a solid release. C# was being widely adopted throughout the industry. Selecting it for a project cost me my job, and nearly sunk my career as a software developer.

I recently celebrated nine years as a software developer at Walt Disney World in Florida. It is the longest I have ever stayed with a single company in my nearly 30-year software development career. Not coincidentally, it has also been one of my most rewarding. In this post I will describe a philosophy of Guest Service known as Walt Disney’s Four Keys Basics. In a follow-up, I will discuss how to apply these basics to software development.

If you want to have a more positive impact to those around you in your daily life, personal or professional, I have two words of advice: slow down. I will explain the details and benefits in this post.

I normally ignore unsolicited emails from recruiters. They are almost never a good match, and feel as though they are “shotgun” email blasts sent to hundreds or thousands of people. This one was different, though. It had the word “Disney” in the subject line.

If you think the key to avoiding perjury is simply to be honest, I have a story for you. Leaving one of my early programming jobs and being honest almost landed me in jail.

One of my blind spots when creating apps with the Ionic Framework is adding a side-menu after the fact. Even after using it for so many years, it seems I always need to look up how to do it. So I created this post to remind me (and you) how to create an effective Ionic Menu with and without an Ionic Split Pane View in an Ionic Angular application.

It took some experimenting and creating a video, but I finally figured out what the difference is between the three types for an ion-menu component in the Ionic Framework.

One of the key features of Progressive Web Applications is the ability for them to function without a network connection. Angular makes it really easy to turn any web app into a PWA. Believe it or not, though, having a PWA that works offline does come with some downside, primarily due to it caching much of your application. If your users are expecting current data, but your service worker is serving cached data, there could be some confusion. So in this post, I will show you how to provide​ a small visual indicator to your users whenever the app is offline​.

Deploying to app stores is painful. It is hard. There are many aspects of deploying apps that you must get right, and the process differs between the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. This post describes my experience with that process, and why I became so captivated with Progressive Web Applications (PWAs).

At the risk of offending some of my peers, I wish to make an observation. As a group, we tend to be horrible at written communication. Software developers are some of the worst writers I have ever read. We make sloppy mistakes, both in spelling and in grammar. Whether you write technical articles for a living, blog posts for a hobby, or pull request comments, this article is an attempt to provide some simple guidance to improve your language and your writing.

A while ago I made a post I titled “Confessions of a Reluctant Ionic-React Fan”. That post led to an experiment where I began to recreate using Ionic-React a subset of one of my existing Ionic v4 apps written in Angular. That in turn led to my latest online video course, Ionic and React, Zero to App Store. This is my most ambitious course idea yet, which I explain in more detail below.

Have you ever needed to create an application for customer engagements? Imagine building a call center application from scratch that needs to support phone calls, web chat, and SMS messages, interactive voice response, speech recognition, and more. If the thought of doing all of that makes you cringe, you might want to consider Flex from Twilio.

Ionic v5 has been released, right in the middle of the conversion of one of my Ionic apps to Ionic-React. So in this post, I will describe what I had to do to upgrade this work-in-progress to the latest version.

The other day I made a post I titled “Confessions of a Reluctant Ionic-React Fan”. That post contained some snippets that got added to the default Ionic SideMenu template, but it neglected to provide any real functionality. In this post, I will attempt to recreate using Ionic-React a subset of one of my existing Ionic v4 apps written in Angular.

What happens when a committed Angular developer crosses over and experiments with React, while working on an Ionic application? Would it work out well, or result in catastrophe? As it so happens, I did that exact thing over the 2019/20 New Year’s break. I was asked to come up with some sample questions to test someone’s knowledge of Ionic. “Angular or React?” I asked. “How about both?” was the reply. So I set out to create some Ionic questions, based on some real issues I had faced, creating both Angular and React examples. This meant learning at least some of Ionic-React. This post summarizes some of the things that I found pleasantly surprising.

Whether your are creating or consuming an API, you must understand all of its implications. If you are the consumer, it is 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 will not go into all of the rules here, but will touch on two very severe problems that I have personally experienced in my professional life.

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 is my question. Are you testing the right code? Are you testing your code, or mine?

Someone commented on the discussion section of my Ionic/PWA course at Pluralsight that there are many examples of deploying to Firebase, but few other services. My immediate reply was that Firebase makes it dead-simple to deploy. But the question got me thinking. My course is almost a year old. Maybe there are other really good deployment hosts, and I might be doing my viewers and readers a disservice by not investigating them. I have always been a big fan of Microsoft Azure, so figured I would see what it takes to deploy my Ionic PWA there.

Angular Route Guards are great. Is the user authenticated? No? The guarded page won’t load. Is the user authenticated, but not a member of the appropriate authorization group? Also denied. Route Guards make this easy. They follow the Single Responsibility Principle, can be mocked for unit testing, and all is right with the world. What about Route Resolvers? Where do they fit in?

Today I needed to add some custom styles to a checkbox in an Angular 8 app. I found a simple example of what I wanted to do, implemented entirely with CSS and HTML, and containing no imperative code. Delighted with this discovery, I copied the CSS into my page and got it working with a few tweaks. Then I wondered what it would take to turn it into a custom component I could reuse. As it turns out, it was harder than I thought, but not overwhelming. The solution is described here.

I hate shaving. It is one of life’s cruel twists in that I have to shave daily, but cannot grow a beard to save my life. Thus, I am stuck with the worst of all possible options in this regard. For most of my adult life, I have used Gillette products for my daily routine of pain. And I do not mean simply physical pain. Gillette products are not inexpensive. Recently, I thought I might give the lower-cost upstarts a try: Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s. They each offer an inexpensive starter kit, so I decided to experiment with each of them for a month or so and see how it goes.

This is a follow-up to my post about creating iOS App Store icons for an Ionic/Capacitor application. I improved the script to make it a little easier for anyone to use.

Not long ago I posted an article about upgrading an app from Ionic v3 to v4. While adding some more features, I found that there are some gotchas that are not entirely intuitive, particularly when updating the UI after dismissing things like alerts. The issue is easy enough to work around, but it took me some time to figure it out. This post describes one solution I discovered.

Software developers are lazy, and I mean that in a good way. I’ve been writing software since 1981, and professionally since 1995. In those almost 40 years, I have learned a thing or two about this profession. One of the most important is this: Developers don’t like performing repetitive tasks. When we discover a task we have to do over and over again, we tend to invent a way to automate it. My latest repetitive task is generating screenshots for my mobile apps, prior to submitting them to the Apple App Store. The technique I outline in this post applies equally to Android, but the problem originated with the App Store. So that is my focus.

This is a follow-up to my post from yesterday, about making icons and splash screens for Ionic/Capacitor apps. Turns out, making a splash screen for iOS was simple. Just drop three 2732x2732 files into the project, and Xcode takes care of the rest. Likewise, Android Studio will take a large png file and make you a set of perfect icons. But making Android splash screens was harder, so I recreated my pattern from yesterday and made a script to do the hard stuff for me.

I recently upgraded one of my mobile games to Ionic 4 and Capacitor. One of the shortcomings I discovered was the lack of a simple tool to create the icons and splash screens. I imagine the Ionic team will eventually recitify this situation, but in the meantime I wanted to find an alternative. Given that I can be a cheap guy at times, I figured it would be best to build my own solution.

I have a modest mobile game called Bravo! It’s written in TypeScript using the Ionic Framework version 3 and Apache Cordova. It is currently only available for the iPhone. A few weeks ago I started receiving emails from Google warning me that I was out of compliance with their ad policy, and the ultimately decided to remove it from the Play Store. As it turns out, it was a simple configuration issue, but in order to get reinstated, I have to submit a new APK. I decided to take this opportunity to convert the app to Ionic 4 with Capacitor. This post describes my experience during the process

At my day job, I was asked by my leadership to provide an introduction to TypeScript, Angular, and Node to a group of experienced software developers. Many of these folks are “Senior” or higher, a few with more years of experience than I have. Despite their combined 200+ years of development, they have not used these technologies. This post is Part 1 of what I intend to show them: An Introduction to TypeScript for Experienced Developers.

After four long months, my latest Pluralsight course, Building Progressive Web Apps with Ionic, is now live and available on the site. This post provides an overview of the course, and also a link that will let you watch it free of charge.

As part of my recent Pluralsight Course, Building Progressive Web Apps with Ionic, I needed a public-facing API that its demo application could call. I implemented a simple Node/Express web service and deployed it to Firebase Functions using Google free “Spark” Plan. One major drawback to the Spark Plan is that it has a pretty low threshold limit for the number of requests per minute it will allow. In this post, I will describe how you can download the web service’s code and host it both locally and in your own Firebase account, and then how to modify the course’s demo app to call your version instead of mine.

What do all these symbols mean? I saw someone post on Twitter recently that if you place a single ampersand between two shell commands, they run in parallel. While that is somewhat true, the tweet didn’t capture the essence of what is really going on. So I decided I would go back to basics and remind myself (and others) just what these and other weird symbols do in a Linux, MacOS, or even Windows (Bash) terminal.

Recently one of my development teams had a merge problem. For version control, they use a modified form of GitFlow, and it was time to merge from the develop branch to the release branch. If things are done correctly, this should always be a clean, simple merge. It is especially true in this case, because it was their first release for a new project. The team opened a pull request from develop to release and then reported to me that there GitHub was reporting merge conflicts. Huh? How is that possible? The release branch should be empty. Except that it wasn’t.

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.

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.