Writing
Articles
Essays on thinking clearly, working for yourself, and doing real work while AI rewrites the rules. Two decades of them.
Insane Flight Prices
A quick rant about flight prices -- a short hop from Minneapolis to Des Moines quoted at over $700, cheaper to just make the 3.5-hour drive.
2008.08.22Read →The Twin Cities Give Camp
Launching Twin Cities Give Camp: a weekend where developers, designers, and DBAs build free custom software for local non-profits.
2008.08.13Read →DiscountASP vs. Me
A rant about DiscountASP.NET recycling its app pool every few minutes because of Community Server 2007's memory footprint, logging everyone out mid-post.
2008.08.08Read →Is Premature Optimization Really Evil?
A real story about an order system that broke under a sales spike, used to argue premature optimization is only evil when you optimize the wrong thing.
2008.07.24Read →Mobilizing Your/My Blog – mobile.blog.donnfelker.com
How I used Mofuse to mobile-enable my blog and pointed a custom subdomain at it with a simple CNAME record, no code required at all.
2008.07.17Read →Passed the ASP.NET 3.5 Exam
I passed the ASP.NET 3.5 beta exam at Tech-Ed 2008, which makes me a certified MCTS in both ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 now. Woohoo!
2008.07.17Read →Calgary ALT.NET Open Space – August 15-17
Details on the Calgary ALT.NET Open Space, an unconference covering TDD, BDD, DDD, Agile, and Lean, with sessions set by whoever shows up.
2008.07.14Read →Tree Surgeon 2.0 Released
Tree Surgeon 2.0 is out: support for VS 2003/2005/2008, a choice of NUnit or MbUnit, and updated NAnt scripts for .NET 1.1 through 3.5.
2008.07.14Read →Virtual Earth – End of Life
Microsoft is retiring Virtual Earth versions 3, 4, and 5 in the coming months. Here's what it means, and why my MapPoint geocoding class is unaffected.
2008.07.02Read →Recommended Reading
A running list of the software and IT books I actually recommend, from Fowler's enterprise patterns to Hunt's Pragmatic Programmer.
2008.06.21Read →GMail = Dog Slow
Gmail crawling because of all its AJAX and JavaScript? Switch to the Older Version or Standard HTML view for a noticeably faster inbox.
2008.06.13Read →I Took The ASP.NET 3.5 Beta Exam, and then the red pill
I took the ASP.NET 3.5 beta exam with almost no prep -- 70 tough questions covering WCF, AJAX, and mobile, plus tips on surviving Microsoft's exam tricks.
2008.06.10Read →