DEV Community: fischgeek

Office Chair Recommendations?

fischgeek — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 15:56:40 +0000

I'm looking to purchase a new office chair. Curious if any of you other work-from-homers have any good recommendations you might want to share.

IDE Background Images

fischgeek — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 18:45:00 +0000

Gotta say, I'm digging the ability to add a background image to my VS2022 instance.

Got me thinking, do you folks have background images in your favorite IDE? And, if so let's see them!

What makes you so confident?

fischgeek — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 18:36:09 +0000

I've often thought about writing a "how-to" on here or a simple list of code instructions like some of our fellow dev'ers do. What stays my hand is the question "what make you so confident?" and then I usually click Save draft and move on.

I've always subscribed to the idea that you shouldn't post things you aren't an expert on. Which is why I don't post things often and when I do it's more of a "hey, look what I did" and not "here's how to do x".

Do folks (you, dear reader) have any thoughts on the matter? Do you look for only expert written articles?

I'm genuinely curious, what makes dev authors so confident and fearless to post these types of articles? Are you considered an expert in the things you write about?

My [Automated] Trello Movie Organizer

fischgeek — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 17:44:02 +0000

I use Trello for everything. It only made sense (back when I did this) to put and track my movie collection into Trello.

It all started as an Excel file that I used to keep track of what movies I owned, where they were, who had them and what-not. As my development skills grew, the more I played with the movie list.

I always felt like I was in between technologies and didn't possess the necessary skills to pull off what I wanted to achieve. I used AutoHotkey, C# with WinForms, WPF, I even went the painful route of vanilla HTML. Ultimately, these projects all failed.

I finally got an ASP.NET project working running on a Virtual Server on my home computer. You can see the issues with this setup, right? And, running a Windows server on Azure or AWS is only free for a limited time. This was not going to make me money so those options were out.

Recently, I learned about AWS Lambda. No, I haven't been living under a rock. I just simply didn't know about it, not to mention how to hold it.

At any rate, I finally figured it out and I gotta say I'm very happy with it!

In a nutshell, here's what I did...

Created an FSharp Lambda project in Visual Studio
Wrote the logic for handling the events I was interested in
Hooked up the Lambda with an AWS API Gateway
Registered a Webhook event in Trello's API

The result:

A new movie (Card) is added
Trello fires a Webhook event to my Lambda function's URL
The Lambda function
- grabs the name of the new Card
- asks The Internet Movie Database (not IMDB) for a match
- selects the best match
- updates the Card Title with the proper movie title
- updates the Card Description with the movie's synopsis
- updates the Card's Cover with the movie's poster

See it in action:

Trello Webhook Manager

fischgeek — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 13:59:38 +0000

tl;dr I made a UI for managing Trello Webhooks.

In the past I’ve worked on several iterations of a webhook manager for myself. Today, I thought I would share it to the dev community here in case anyone might find it useful.

I tried to make it in one single html file. This may not be best practice, but something about the simplicity and portability really appealed to me.

For example, you can take the html file and host it yourself somewhere, or use the link above or you can take the file and put it on your machine, run it locally and you’re still good to go. Lots of options.

I went as far as registering a domain for it and placed my single file out there for anyone to use. Here’s the github repo for those that are interested.

Anywho, have a good one folks!

DotNetDates

fischgeek — Fri, 28 May 2021 14:25:47 +0000

I made a little diddy I wanted to share with you all. It's nothing too grand or impressive. I just really like how it turned out and even more happy with the cleanliness of the code.

It's a simple form to play around with date formats in .NET. Here's the GitHub and a screenshot.

It was all written with F# (minus the C# Forms project bit). What is neat though is I only laid out the basic locations of where I wanted things to go using FlowLayoutPanels.

Then passed those to my F# to handle the rest.

using System.Windows.Forms;
using DotNetDates.FSharp;

namespace DotNetDates
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            var form = this;
            FormBuilder.Build(form, flpFormatMethods, flpFormatSpecifiers, flpCustomFormats, flpCreateYourOwn, flpCreateYourOwnResult);
        }
    }
}

I'm curious to read what you think and thanks for checking it out!

Configure SES on EC2

fischgeek — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 03:22:37 +0000

Anyone out there want to help a n00b with setting up SMTP on EC2? I've tried several different approaches and can't quite get it working.

Good Idea or Bad Idea

fischgeek — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 21:04:30 +0000

Had an idea I needed to get out of my head. This was the result. I can't tell if this is a good idea or not worth my time.

Is it useful to anyone? Is it useful to me? I can't tell at this point. Thought I would ask for some feedback and maybe more ideas.

Basically, it's just an executable I have running on a timer (Windows Task Scheduler).

The Greeting on the left changes throughout the day
The Date in the middle obviously changes only once a day
The weather data can be loaded from one of two sources at the moment (OpenWeather and WeatherBit)
The Priority items is pointed at a specific Trello list and pulls in the cards and description from that list
The primary background is just a simple background image
The background, colors and fonts can be configurable

I thought maybe...

There could be three columns in the lighter gray area but not sure what the other two columns would be (calendar might be nice)
I have plenty of room below the focus area to use up, but this is calculated based on the user's screen size
Might be cool if it could take multi-monitor setups into account

Your thoughts?

New Idea Blocked

fischgeek — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 21:06:45 +0000

What do you do when you have an idea in mind but no clue how to dev the front end?

I can do the server and backend but zero knowledge on how to begin the front end.

Mind you, I know front end dev pretty well and have made lots of projects on my own. What I’m referring to here is complex UI/UX implementation.

I don’t mind learning new things but I doubt I can make things look and function like I’m dreaming.

Any thoughts on where to start with this?

PWA vs Native App - What's your preference as a user? As a developer?

fischgeek — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 13:09:01 +0000

Myself, I feel like PWAs are great for quick and easy cross platform development but at the end of the day nothing beats a native app for me as a user.

However, having fell out of the app game some time ago it would take an immense amount of time for me to get back up to speed on things (especially on iOS). So, I tend to lean towards PWAs for development if I'm going to share with the world.

I would like to know the community's view on this...

Do you prefer to install PWAs or native apps on your device? And, do you prefer to develop PWAs or native apps for distribution?

Why I Moved My Notes to Trello

fischgeek — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 16:42:02 +0000

But, Trello is a project management application? True, while it’s mostly used for that, I have found that its flexibility really starts to make sense [for me] as a note repository. I will try to make a very long back story as short as possible, but I have long struggled with this topic.

I have tried all the major (and minor) players in this game. For the majority of my career I have been using OneNote. While this is probably the only other application for notes I used on a consistent basis it fell short in places.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but something about using OneNote just wasn’t satisfying. It felt clunky. A co-worker of mine hit the nail on the head the other day and described it like this:

“I feel like when Microsoft makes a product like this, it resembles a school final project. It gets the job done, but just not quite all there.”

Another trip up was the lack of integration into other third parties. And I’m just not smart enough to use their API. I have tried and failed numerous times to do so.

I used Google Keep for quite a while as well (in tandem w/ OneNote) and I really enjoyed the experience. It had a lot of the features I was looking for: it was fun to use, it was available on the phone, PC (chrome app), and browser. It had the ability to have checklists, formatted my links really cool, I could share/collaborate notes, but it lacked an API for integration. My notes were stuck in there and only in there. Offline wasn’t as big of a deal for me, but the deciding factor was the lack of text formatting within the note itself.

I tried Evernote a few different times. It had much better integration capabilities, but those came with a cost and I wasn’t/am not willing to add yet another monthly bill to my already stretched thin budget for something that I wasn’t passionate about. I may have a skewed opinion from listening to CGP Grey gripe about it for years on Hello Internet and Cortex. At the end of the day though, it was a lot like OneNote. Too much of an open canvas maybe, I don’t know? Didn’t like it. Moving on.

I started to try and use native apps that came with my devices. Notes on my iPhone (I’m a Windows user btw with an iPhone). While Notes was available on the phone and on iCloud.com, it too lacked integration and was slow to sync. I even went with good ol’ Notepad on Windows. I setup a system that captured all my open Notepads and saved them into a directory in Dropbox. I could load them on my phone, but that too was slow and obviously had no formatting.

I have tried countless other free note apps that ultimately were cast out for some reason or another.

Finally, it dawned on me one day when I was in Trello doing some PM and realized we had a column labeled “Inbox” (loosely modeling off of GTD). I looked at what was going on in this column alone: Each card was a note, each note could further have a description, comments, checklists!, due dates!, collaborators!, and labels! I started then importing all my notes into my personal Trello boards. Coming from OneNote, it went like this

Each Book was now a Board
Each Section was now a List
Each Page was now a Card

I was really digging this. My mind was going non-stop at all the possibilities. I can have the same fun experience as Google Keep with a similar structure from OneNote and all the in-between features other applications lacked for me. The API is super easy to use! I can have a custom background on my boards. But, lastly the best part is, is the fact that Trello decided that the full version of the Butler Power-up was now included for free. That was fantastic news! Think of Butler like IFTTT rules for Trello.

One simple example I use Butler for is I have a label named “Pinned” and when the label “Pinned” is applied to any card, it moves that card to the top of the list it resides in. When the label is removed, it bumps the card down below any other existing “Pinned” cards.

They have improved their reminders system so there are more options to get reminded about a card due date.

I also want to give a mention to the Custom Fields power-up which allows me to structure note meta-data anyway I want.

I could go on and on, but I think it’s time for an obligatory TL;DR. Using Trello for my notes works great! You should try it!

AWS Advice

fischgeek — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 16:59:26 +0000

I've been struggling with getting started with AWS EC2. It took me a long time to even wrap my head around what that meant. There are so many articles and video tutorials out there on this stuff. That in itself is overwhelming. Often outdated immediately after publishing.

Some tutorials say choose this option, and that option ends up not existing or is named something different. It's really frustrating. And while AWS does have extensive documentation I find I face the same issues there as well.

I'm not a n00b necessarily with linux, but definitely a novice. I learn best by watching others, and or driving under supervision. So, if anyone knows of any decent, yet current, resources or is (shot-in-the-dark) willing to assist me, I would greatly appreciate it!