I Am Speaking At PASS Data Community Summit 2022!

 I have been accepted to speak at PASS Data Community Summit on November 15-18, 2022. They are going for a hybrid conference this year, with the main conference being held live in Seattle with an online component! 

I'll be presenting You've Been Hit By A Bus about preparing for that horrible, but inevitable,  moment when you won't be able to handle your geek belongings. 

I'll be one of the On-Demand recordings, but I'm going to try to make it to the live conference, too. I've never been, and I've been looking forward to going.

You should come out, too. There are heaps of great sessions going on. Mostly on much less depressing  topics than mine. But come join the #SQLFamily!

From my abstract:

If you’re like me, you’re probably IT Support for your home. Your business probably has a Continuity Plan. Shouldn’t your home have one, too? 

What happens to our digital selves when our physical selves are gone? Most of us probably haven’t given much thought about our digital footprints and how they will far outlive us. Or, more importantly, about how our passing can leave our loved ones in a tight spot. Our modern lives have changed to include a significant amount of digital stuff that could easily disappear if that bus comes around. Will the people you leave behind be able to continue to function without you? We need to have a plan.

Come out to The Summit! 

 

Tron is 40 Years Old!!!

Wow. Am I really THAT old??? 

It was originally released July 9, 1982.

I still love the original Tron. The modern "sequel" was pretty good, but doesn't come close to the original.

That was one of my favorite movies ever! In a very tight race with Star Wars: A New Hope, Flash Gordon and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Plus, we're talking about a rogue AI chess program. This movie was made WAY too early. 

But I have heard that Flynn Lives!

Ortus Has Invited Me Back Again!

I'm speaking live at Into The Box again! 

This year, I'll be talking about Impostor Syndrome: "I'm Just Here For The T-Shirt".

As the even gets closer, I'll try to share more info with you. 

Big thanks to Ortus for continuing to have faith in me. 

Support TryCF

 If you use ColdFusion, chances are, at some point, you've used TryCF. This is an invaluable resource that allows a developer to try out their CF code in several different flavors of CFML, both current and not-so-current. I believe the current iteration of the site goes all the way back to Adobe CF 10, Lucee 4.5 and Railo 4.2.

Hello, World Example from TryCF.com

Abram has put a ton of his own blood, sweat and tears into this project, and for years the community has asked him how they could help. Now he has finally opened up a Patreon for TryCF. 

If you are so inclined, help him out by becoming a Patron. 

May the Fourth Be With You!

 It's Star Wars Day again! 

And this year, I learned that the day had its origins in the election of Margaret Thatcher!

From The London Evening News, May 4, 1979

Gotta love an interesting history lesson.

Happy Pi Day!

It's time to be irrational again! 

Happy Pi Day 2022, everyone!

Back in August 2021, researchers in Switzerland calculated Pi out to 62.8 TRILLION digits, smashing the previous record of 50 trillion.

https://newatlas.com/science/pi-world-record-62-8-trillion-digits/

Advent of Code Is Done For The Year

We've come to the end of another year of Advent of Code. Apparently this year AoC saw the 10 millionth star issued since it began in 2015! Pretty impressive. Not sure of any final numbers yet, but I've heard there was again more participation this year than the previous year. The stats show that on Day 1, 190,118 people completed both parts and 22,274 additional people completed Part 1. And on Day 25, 7227 completed both parts with 4701 completing Part 1. Last year, more people stuck around to the end (quarantine-related?), but this year had far more participants. 

Pretty cool. 

I started the season with the framework I had begun building to quickly parse the inputs into a usable format, but I quickly realized that the inputs this year were a bit more complex than I was previously working on. I bailed on my framework and just resorted to simple day-by-day processing. I'll go back and refactor my earlier framework to include this year's processing needs. 

I'm not one of the Competitive Programmers who always top the AoC Leaderboard, but I did participate this year with a few other programmers from the Working Code Podcast's Discord server. Some used Python, and a couple of us used CFML. I created a Private Leaderboard for us so that we could at least see how we were doing against some of our peers. Considering that most of the Top 100 Public Leaderboard spots were filled within just a few minutes of puzzle release, I'm glad I did it. 

I didn't finish as many days as I wished I had. I only made it through Part 1 of Day 9 before time ran out. I ran into a huge stumbling block on Day 4 that really hung me up and killed my motivation. I gave it a few tries a couple of times, but kept getting wrong answers. I watched myself getting further and further behind, and just kinda set the whole thing aside for a few days. I finally went back to it and solved it, much easier than I thought I would, and realized I had been way over-thinking it. I tried to blast through as many as I could before time ran out, but stumbled again on Day 8. I managed to get the solution and knocked out Part 1 of Day 9, but struggled with Part 2 until I ran out of time. The biggest lesson I learned was to not try to do these late in the evening. And also, Off-By-One errors suck. 

Oh, and Python (which has been on my Things I Want To Learn list for way too long) is much more capable of handling these types of problems. ColdFusion can do it, but some of the processing seemed to be much more straightforward in some of the other language answers. 

I took notes on the days I did, and I need to finish writing them all up. 

A big thank you to Eric Wastl for creating this, and another big thank you to all who participated. I look forward to doing this again next year. 👍

Working Code Podcast Group 2021 Private Leader Board