Wise(ish) Words of a CodeFuMonkey: November 2020

Friday, November 27, 2020

Two Down.....

One (+1) to go.... And an MCSA!

Up next is 70-765.

Study materials:

Udemy Courses

MeasureUp tests

Microsoft Press Exam Ref books

Exam Skills

Microsoft.com Exam Reference

MCSA: SQL 2016 Database Administration

I studied hard for 70-765, and I procrastinated a bit again on going in to take this test. I wanted to knock all 3 of these out before Thanksgiving, but my Imposter Syndrome was really flaring up. I was slow. And then, because of COVID, I was delayed trying to get into my testing center. I could have done a remote proctored exam, but that would pretty much meant finding an alternate, quiet place to go for it. There's no way possible that I'd be able to clear my home office enough to satisfy the proctors. Plus, I've read some horror stories about proctors ending tests if someone just looked away from their screen. No thanks.

Fortunately, the Army base that I work on has an Authorized Testing Center right across the street from my office, so guess where I decided to take the test.

Unfortunately, the main proctor there was quarantined because of COVID, and the other proctors were either unavailable or had tech issues with Pearson. The clock was ticking, and I was running out of time.

Fortunately, I was able to schedule a slot THE DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING! Huge Thank You to the people over there who were able to schedule me in right before a holiday on short notice.

This test was harder than the first, but once again, I finished with plenty of time left. I think it took me just a little over an hour to finish. I thought I'd tanked this one, too. But the voucher I bought included a free retake, so I could study over Thanksgiving and retake it the next week. No biggie.

Final Score: 790 :-)

It wasn't spectacular, but it was PASSING. I got to breathe a huge sigh of relief and know that I'd get to at least enjoy my Thanksgiving break.

Best of all, I got to call my wife and tell her I had now earned one of these:

Now all that's left is just to cap it off with 70-762 and the MCSE. I got this.

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

RECAP: Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2020 - Day 2

This will continue my mostly stream-of-consciousness review of Day 2 ot ColdFusion Summit 2020 online conference.

DAY 2 (For me at least)

At 613 AM CST, there are 2412 Total Attendees with 311 now attending.

Times are still listed as IST, so I have no idea what time what is showing today. Guess I need to do some time zone calcs. :-/

1. Become an Application SUPER-HERO - Reduce the impact of technical debt and keep applications performing as they should - 05:00 PM - 05:50 PM (IST, GMT+5:30) - David Tattersal

I came in well after this one started. This schedule display is really disappointing. Sorry, David, but I'll have to watch the recording of this one.

Well, I guess this was the "actual" end of Day 1. There's a large break now until the next sessions, so I guess it's time to start my morning here. Coffee and shower. Be back in a bit...

NOTE: Just found https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/. It's showing me a running conversion from IST to CST, so maybe that'll help with scheduling. If nothing else, it easily shows that IST is 11 1/2 hours ahead of me here, so that definitely makes it easier to translate this schedule. A 9PM IST session is a 930AM CST session. Guess I'll be back in a few hours for the actual start of Day 2.

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ACTUAL DAY 2 START:

Going into the first "official" session of the day.

1. CSS Crash Course for CSS Haters or Novices - Jessica Keener @mistersender Twitter/Github

The lower the specificity, the better CSS will work.

Star Wars illustrations of CSS Specificity Rules is AWESOME!

Doesn't recommend inline style's or !important tag. NUCLEAR OPTION

CSS => #style vs .style vs style

Semantics - Naming stuff is hard.

Problems with CSS:

- Specificity

- Difficult to locate styles

- Poor context. Where is stuff?

- Difficult to maintain specificity

IT CSS == Inverted Triangle of CSS - @csswizardry (Harry Roberts)

*** BEM method - Block | Element | Modifier - Solves the problems of specificity, context and consistency.

ex card__title--modifier =>

Use Source maps.

GoogleFu: "Flexbox and Grid", "lobotomized owl selecter"

NOTE: Using https://www.mmhmm.app/ for preso. Only available for Mac. But Windows Beta coming soon according to their site.

Recommended "CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems" by Lea Verou

NOTE: As of 10:29 am CST == Total Attendees : 2717 Now Attending : 636

2. Isolation is a Good Thing (For Your Local Development Environments) - Dan Skaggs

This is a talk about using Docker in ColdFusion.

By default, CF running in a Docker Container, is very isolated (pretty useless).

- To allow browsing, set up config to talk to webserver inside container. Open/Alias ports.

- This allows access to the Admin panel.

- NOTE: In production, you may not want to expose the Admin interface.

- To serve our code:

Need to map a folder. CF Docker image, by default, expects to see code inside the image in /app folder.

- Stop the Docker then map the "volumes" in the docker-compose.yml.

- For CF2021, must install needed packages.

- When things go wrong..... log files. Must be mapped to an on-disk folder.

--- I stopped writing notes as Dan talked. More info about setting up databases and data connections.

I need to learn more about Docker.

3. Securing ColdFusion Applications - Pete Freitag

I've watched Pete give similar presentations before. They're always full of good information. Pete is a very sharp guy, and any dev will definitely benefit from learning more about security.

Mature code bases - fun to secure.

Security often isn't addressed until after a breach.

First step to securing your old code is to just delete the old code.

Don't use homemade version control. index_2.cfm is a bad way to version. Version Control is not a fad.

Find obsolete code by looking for files that haven't been modified in the last year. Linux also has the ability to display Last Access of some files.

Patch your servers. Make sure you're running a supported version of your software.

Core Support for CF2016 ends Feb 2021!

Also look at OS and Java.

Follow the Lockdown Guide.

Equifax Breach is a great example of why you should check your software and components.

Continuous Security ->>>

You need version control.

Use source inspection security tools.

New functions in CF2021.

InitSAMLAuthRequest

InitSAMLLogoutRequest

ProcessSAMLResponse

NEVER TRUST A MIME!

Bank of Insecurity is AWESOME!

4. ColdFusion + ReactJS (Round 2): Taking front-end interactivity further - Minh Vo

http://draftstudios.com/demo/

5. Get your Front End Rolling with Vue and InertiaJS - Eric Peterson

These last two sessions dealt with a lot more front-end than I've used. Great info. Both Minh and Eric are very knowledgable educators. These sessions were engaging and

6. Panel Discussion - Future of ColdFusion -

Rakshith Naresh

Brian Sappey

Dan Wilson

Tim Cunningham

The future of ColdFusion definitely lies in The Cloud with more REST functionality.

After the end of the final Panel:

Total Attendees : 3019

Now Attending : 456

There isn't going to be a closing session, so it looks like it's just ending.

note from chat:

Charlie Arehart46 sec ago

In case Dan doesn't clarify it, we should note that in CF2021 there is now an alternative to the full gui installer, in the new Express/zip installer. But it doesn't take away from the point he's making about the value of Docker to not even have to "install it" at all, and to be "within Docker" and easily removed/rebuilt/updated via yaml, etc.

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https://teratech.com/state-of-the-CF-Union-2020-partial-Results

RECAP: Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2020 - Day 1

This will kick off my "mostly" stream-of-consciousness recap of Day 1 of Adobe's ColdFusion Summit 2020 online conference.

SCHEDULE

Adobe used vcofex.com for the conference. It looks nice. It looks well-organized. The PIP when leaving an Auditorium is pretty cool. It's nice to be able to watch your presentation while still being able to look at the schedule or around the exhibit hall, and especially while being able to access the Help Desk.

My initial opinion is that this platform is nice, but this event is very poorly put together. The Schedule is confusing: Times are displayed in IST, and since India is almost 12 hours ahead of me, it shows start times for me many hours off. There doesn't seem to be a way to fix this for whatever reason, and initially, the presentations weren't allowing me to join because my time was still way off. It appears that they did something to open up sessions when they go live, but it's still confusing. I did find out that, since it's only two "Auditoriums" running each track, I can just open both up in two different tabs, and then just see when the other starts or stops.

Day 1

Total Attendees : 1459 Now Attending : 945

1. Keynote:

There were some tech issues. Because of the schedule, I wasn't able to open the Auditorium presentation, so I missed the beginning, and with continued "lagginess" after I was able to open the preso, I also missed large chunks of it. I'll watch the video later.

2. Managing deployments for your government clients - George Murphy

George talked about how to set up a CI/CD pipeline for an employer who is very locked down and without internet access. This is very applicable to me, since the Army if extremely locked down on what can be run and how we can run it. I'd love to set up some sort of Source Repo and CI/CD for our workgroup. I mostly do database stuff, but I also do some coding and some reporting development. I'd love to be able to get something set up to help keep history of what we have and what we do.

2b. I switched over to the end of Brian Klaas' talk Building Serverless ColdFusion Applications with cflambda. Brian is always incredibly energetic in his talks and is extremely knowledgeable. I got to have dinner with him last year in Las Vegas at CF Summit 2019, and he was just a great, fun and enjoyable person. And he's very smart. He makes me want to know much more about AWS.

3. CFCrimes: Top Ten Issues Migrating to a Modern CF Stack - Mark Takata

Unfortunately had to leave about 10 minutes into this preso. The first few minutes were pretty interesting, so I'll be watching this one on video.

4. Do It with ColdFusion: Building Your Own Tools with CommandBox - Matthew Clemente

Also missed the first few minutes of this one. His presos are always very informative, and I really want to learn more about CommandBox. So I'll be catching up on this one. So far, some of the CommandBox tools are pretty cool. Print Helper looks very impressive. (Can find what colors your terminal has available).

There were some tech issues, and Matt's preso ran long. Sucks because it had to be cut off early and I'll have to watch the replay for the end. Otherwise, it was a pretty interesting preso.

SLIDES HERE

5. This sessions has two presos that I'm very interested in. Charlie Arehart's "Hidden Gems" recaps are always pretty awesome, and I imagine with the recent release of CF 2021, he'll have some good info. But I know that he'll be posting about this and/or presenting this one again, so I may end up watching Dan Wilson talking about modernizing apps with APIs (especially since I can just rewatch these again later).

5a. How to modernize your application with APIs - Dan Wilson

-- Don't know if this is more tech issues, but it appears that the previous session ran long, and I joined this one several minutes into it.

One word. "Spaghetti". Dan is reminding me that it's lunch time.

- Low Encapsulation - Low code reuse.

CopyPasteMania (c) :-)

Taco Based Encapsulation - Medium - Just a little bit of code reuse.

Fried Chicken Encapsulation - High - Lots of code reuse.

He mentioned Adam Tuttle's REST Assured book. I bought this when Adam first wrote it, and he's apparently getting back into more Taffy again. Great stuff. DISCOUNT CODE: CFSUMMIT

5b. Hidden Gems in Adobe ColdFusion 2021 - Charlie Arehart

--- See my note on the other session. Scheduling got a little wonky here.

Caught the tail end. Lots of monitoring info available. More cool stuff.

NOTE: As of right now, there are 1812 Total Attendees with 830 currently online. It's great to see this many CF Devs interested in CF Summit.

6. Have a career, Expert status not required - Dave Ferguson

Dave is always a good speaker, which shouldn't really be surprising considering his background.

"What is an expert?" Good answers.

So...... apparently Dave and I have a very similar Geek Origin Story. BASIC, Commodore 64s and MUDs. Best way to start.

7. Panel Discussion - ColdFusion Application Modernization Challenges

Kishore Balakrishnan

Nolan Erck

Brian Klaas

Charlie Arehart

Gavin Pickin

David Byers

Last session of the day. Good panel discussion of the issues facing CF devs. Lots of good info, especially the recommendations about learning resources.

There are some very interesting sessions happening overnight, but I can't stick around to watch them. I'll catch the videos later.

......

DAY 2 Coming Next ....