How I Clear My Mind

As a software developer, it is important to take a rest now and again to avoid burn out. What I do to get away and clear my mind, is hiking and photography. It allows me to get away from most technology to clear my and return refreshed.

The things I love about hiking is exploring new places and enjoying the scenic view. I live in central Illinois, we don’t have much nearby. If I drive a couple of hours south I have a national forest that gives me hundreds of miles of trails with interesting views. Seeing these relaxes me and allows me to clear my mind.

I encourage others to share what they do unwind from developing.

Just Got Home From DevUp 2019

I have just arrived home from the DevUp Conference in St. Louis, my conference experience was a mixed bag this year. There were things that could be improved, but I want to focus on some of my favorite sessions from this year’s conference.

Also came away with come personal action items from the conference. I have started working on building out a better portfolio of what I am working on. Other items include promoting myself more, and possibly live streaming some coding sessions, so keep an eye out for that.

Entity Framework Core Debugging using SQL Server: A Detective Story by Chris Woodruff

This session talked about tools you can use to debug performance issues. The first thing discussed was tagging your queries, so it comes across and adds comments to the SQL Server Profiler. Also discussed was checking query plans, and other tools included in the newer version of SQL Server.

Document Databases vs Relational Databases: An Honest Comparison and Things To Consider by Keven Grossnicklaus

I only caught part of this session, but still learned some interesting points. Essentially if your data doesn’t change much you may consider using a document database. It was also discussed, to use a document database in a hybrid scenario where you mainly use a relational database for main data store, but pages that need to load a lot of data quickly you may load a cached version to the document database.

Going From No Code to App Store in 30 days by Lauren Hilton & Eric Bloomquist

This session discussed taking an existing Angular Application and using parts of it to build an mobile application using Ionic. When building an Ionic app you can use most of your logic and create new views. Overall an interesting session that sparked on some ideas I may do in the future.