Author: Charles Chen

Indoor Rock Climbing – Try It!

One of my recently discovered activities that I’m falling in love with is indoor rock climbing (though I suppose I may try outdoor rock climbing and bouldering one day, too). In a weird way, it’s the ultimate thinking person’s type...

An Alternate Meaning for FOCKED

Eric Brechner came up with one of my favorite acronyms of all time in software development: FOCKED. I want to add an alternate: Failure to Orchestrate Collective Knowledge Effectively for Delivery. Successful delivery of software requires that different members of...

Thoughts on Burnout

Thoughts on Burnout

I was reading an NPR piece on worker burnout and some different tactics taken by different companies to deal with it and came across a very nice, concise definition: Christina Maslach is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley,...

Invoking Custom WCF Services in SharePoint with Claims

Invoking Custom WCF Services in SharePoint with Claims

In SharePoint, if you host a custom WCF service in a claims-enabled application, the authentication via NTLM is actually quite tricky if you are attempting to invoke it from a console application, for example. There are various articles and Stackoverflow...

Defining a “Release Lead”

Defining a “Release Lead”

Came across a great definition while reading up on release 4.0 of WordPress: A release lead, if anyone is curious, determines all important parameters for a release, like schedule, deadlines, which feature plugins are merged, and more generally, scope and...

Adventures in Poorly Written APIs

Adventures in Poorly Written APIs

I’m working with a library that I have been fighting with for the better part of three days now to try to get it to work. The previous version of this library was actually very well written from an API...

Mind Your Matches

Mind Your Matches

I recently had to track down a performance issue with one of our Cypher queries that was taking an obscenely long amount of time to run (15 seconds!) given the simplistic nature of the query. Can you spot the problem?...

FluentNHibernate and SQL Date Generation

FluentNHibernate and SQL Date Generation

So you’d like your SQL entry to have a system generated date/time, eh? Here is a sample table:

To spare you hours dealing with this error:

What you need to do is to use the following mapping for...