Jon Fazzaro

Today, we're never finished, and that's okay.

Fri, 25 May 2012 08:24:48 -0400

Today, we're never finished, and that's okay.:

And that’s the dance. Facing a sea of infinity, it’s easy to despair, sure that you will never reach dry land, never have the sense of accomplishment of saying, “I’m done.” At the same time, to be finished, done, complete—this is a bit like being dead. The silence and the feeling that maybe that’s all.

Dancing on the edge of finished [ Seth’s Blog ]

Are you the worst?

Fri, 18 May 2012 06:42:00 -0400

Are you the resident genius on your team? Do you wrap wrappers in wrappers and frame frameworks in frameworks? Have you ignored/obscured whole swaths of .NET because your application is a special, special unicorn? Well, I’ve got some bad news. You’re the worst.
As for the rest of you, come with me. We’re going to painlessly add some business logic to an Entity Framework model.

Meddle’s IAddable, IUpdatable, and IDeletable interfaces respectively provide OnAdding, OnUpdating, and OnDeleting methods for your entity’s partial class to implement. As the naming would suggest, this is where you do your custom unicorn-type things to make your model sing and dance:
public partial class Product : IDeletable , IAddable
{
    public void OnDeleting(IWork work)
    {
        if (this.PurchaseOrderDetails.Any())
            throw new ApplicationException(
                "This product is a special unicorn and it cannot be deleted." );
    }

    public void OnAdding(IWork work)
    {
        if (UserPreferences.NoDuplicateProductNames)
        {
            // the context is available via the work parameter
            // for testing more intense rules involving other
            // data in the system
            var context = work as SpecialUnicornEntities;

            if (context.Products.Count(p => p.Name.Equals(this.Name)) > 1)
            {
                var message = "A product with the same name already exists.";

                if (UserPreferences.ErrorMessageIntensity == ErrorMessageIntensity.Abusive)
                    message += " Be more creative next time. Loser.";

                throw new ApplicationException(message);
            }
        }
    }
}

[ Meddle on GitHub ]

[ Meddle on NuGet ]

Here's what I did after I was finished shaking my fists at the sky during a torrential downpour.

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:51:17 -0400

I began to question the most basic of my nerdly assumptions. Do I have the right connection string? Should I even be using SQL anymore? Is the fabric of the universe collapsing?

After a therapeutic session of pacing and taking in some Carl Sagan to re-staple my faith in the sturdiness of the cosmos, it dawned on me that this particular service call was in fact an HTTP request made from a browser. And yes, the damned thing was caching.

To remedy any further zombie data tomfoolery, I have here a NoCacheAttribute class that inherits from ActionFilterAttribute:
public class NoCacheAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnResultExecuting(ResultExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        var cache = filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Cache;

        cache.SetExpires(DateTime.UtcNow.AddDays(-1));
        cache.SetValidUntilExpires(false);
        cache.SetRevalidation(HttpCacheRevalidation.AllCaches);
        cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);
        cache.SetNoStore();

        base.OnResultExecuting(filterContext);
    }
}
This meek mod merely intercepts the result, grabs ahold of the HttpResponse’s cache settings and beats them soundly about the head and shoulders until they are certain that they’re not going to cache anything that comes from this response. Like, ever.

Here’s How To Make Sure You’re Not Returning Zombies From An MVC Action [ Aptera Software ]

So, this was amazing.

Fri, 11 May 2012 08:43:00 -0400

And I might have posted about it in a more live, less after-the-fact sort of capacity had I not been straight up engrossed in using this app to play along with OK GO and a few thousand friends.

Not to mention the rest of the show.

Ani: 1, Fear: 0.

Sun, 06 May 2012 12:09:48 -0400

Ani: 1, Fear: 0.

Responsive Design Just Doesn’t Work

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:28:40 -0400

“You can’t take a mobile app and just scale it up to tablet or desktop,” [Kiran Prasad, LinkedIn mobile development team] said. “A lot of responsive design is building one site that works everywhere, and that works for websites. But it’s bad for apps… You have to come up with a completely different design because of the use case.”

So, building one monolithic thing that will mean everything to everybody everywhere all at once is a bad idea?

The hell, you say.

You’ll never believe how LinkedIn built its new iPad app [ Venture Beat ]

Hoist The Colors, Me Hearties.

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:15:16 -0400

Here’s the consuming code that shows the ImageResult in action:

public ActionResult UserImage(int id)
{
    using (var db = new ApplicationEntities())
    {
        var user = db.Users.Single(p => p.ID == id);

        // read bytes from database into a stream
        var imageStream = new MemoryStream(user.Image);

        // create an image result using the stream
        return new ImageResult(imageStream, "jpeg");
    }
}

See what I did there? In action.

How To Serve An Image From An Action And Otherwise Be An MVC Swashbuckler [ Aptera Software ]

Little Girls Do Not Have SixSigma Black Belts or PMI Certifications

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 07:00:40 -0400

The real beauty here is that even though this product was fundamentally broken – fundamentally it did not achieve its initial goal – Jim and the people at Children’s Television Workshop thought this lesson was worth sharing. They saw that through variation in their youngest of knowledge workers, there was innovation and inspiration.

There was value in variation.

Variation Can Help: Lean Muppet Post 1 [ Personal Kanban ]

Photo

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:04:39 -0400

People stop their busy lives to sit still for a week, sit...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 08:28:00 -0400

People stop their busy lives to sit still for a week, sit still for half an hour, be mindful, be present, to meditate, do nothing except be.

And it’s BORING.

Why would anyone want to do this?

There’s resistance. And the lawyers in the mind come up to explain why this is the most ridiculous thing in the world to do. Because there’s important things to be done. Important things to think. Important things to avoid and run away from.

Something About Nothing [ Audio Dharma ]

Here's The Thing About Duct Tape.

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:46:00 -0400

What I mean to get at with all the jabber about our ubiquitous silvery adhesive friend is this: jQuery is arguably the duct tape of WebForms development, and its quick-fix powers over rendered markup are seemingly without limit. Use enough of it at once, though, and it will find ways of getting stuck to itself, or indeed to the hirsute wrist of your DOM. As your page’s once-blinding responsiveness disappears over the usability horizon, you shed a single caffeinated tear, and it dawns on you that getting this untangled could be a slow and painful affair. Perhaps involving plenty of unintentional hair loss.

Now, let me brush away that tear—in a totally non-creepy, platonic sort of way—as I submit for you today some tricks to get your jQuery just about as unstuck and performant as an abstraction over an interpreted language could ever hope to be.

Slow jQuery And The Thing About Duct Tape [ Aptera Software ]

"You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires..."

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:27:00 -0400

“You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are naturals at computer programming.”

- Dr. Grace Hopper, from “The Computer Girls” (Cosmopolitan, April 1967) [ The Computer Boys Take Over ]

See also: What Are Brogrammers Afraid Of? [ Haacked ]

What If Someone Does Something Bad?

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 07:00:15 -0400

Policies and processes we adopt over time are corporate inventory. We have to maintain them, administer them, and be annoyed by them. All these actions are waste.

The tricky thing here is that all policies can be defended by “what if” arguments. “We can’t get rid of that policy … what if someone does something bad?”

Well, what if someone does something bad? How likely is that to occur?

We know for certain that the waste is making the group less effective when subjected to the policy. What is the likelihood of your What If?

One Day’s Idea is Another Day’s Waste [ Personal Kanban ]

Photo

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:04:35 -0400

I'll forgive almost any kind of ineptitude as long as I've never heard it before.

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:47:00 -0400

Every time I hear something I don’t know, it’s grist for the mill, for my own work. When I hear it I think, ‘Wow. That’s some new stuff. Maybe there’s something there I can steal.’ If I know what it is, then it’s just “Oh, there’s those guys doing that stuff. I know that stuff.”

The Bad Plus: On Jazz, Humility, and Finding Your Voice [ The 99 Percent ]

Let's start with "are we eating tonight?" and work from there.

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:01:51 -0400

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs of Software Development [ Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen ]

"If you’re hyper-aware of what others are thinking, if you’re looking for criticism, the..."

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:57:13 -0400

“If you’re hyper-aware of what others are thinking, if you’re looking for criticism, the unhappy audience member and the guy who didn’t get the joke, you will always find what you’re seeking.”

- The mathematical impossibility of universal delight [ Seth Godin ]

This guy.

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 19:04:55 -0400

This guy.

You see how absurd this sounds, but musicians do this all the time.

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:00:05 -0400

What if I told the wine bar owner that I have a great band and we are going to play at my house. I need someone to provide and pour wine while we play. I can’t pay much, just $75 and you must bring at least 25 people who are willing to pay a $10 cover charge at the door. Now wouldn’t they look at you like you are crazy?

Why Music Venues Are Totally Lost: An Open Letter from a Professional Musician [ The DIY Musician ]

Or, you can have some newbies hack something together real quick. Up to you.

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:31:58 -0400

It’s tempting to question the value of an organized architecture and clear code commenting, but again, it’s almost impossible for an organization to overdo this. We don’t have time to do it over so we have to spend the time to do it right.

The Extraordinary Software Development Manager [ Seth’s Blog ]