DEV Community: Richard Lewis

What To Do With Dev Community When In Offline Mode

Richard Lewis — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 02:19:39 +0000

Took a flight Chicago to Seattle this week. Instinctively I went to browse Dev community from the mobile application hoping it would cache the application but discovered a cool little scratch pad coloring feature. Check out my artwork.

My Favorite VSCode Plugins In 2019

Richard Lewis — Sat, 28 Dec 2019 13:10:06 +0000

2019 was a big year for me using VS Code before the beginning of the year I was still using Notepad++ along with Visual Studio as my daily IDE's. But in January I tried to use VS Code every day for 30 days and I haven't stopped and along the way, I also convinced a few of my Co-workers to convert over as well. I remember reading the 2018 Stack Overflow release their annual Developer survey results last December, one of the interesting things that I noticed was that VS Code had risen to the top as the Most Popular Development Environment among Developers and Admins with 35% of 75,398 respondents claiming to use it which is pretty cool for a tool-less than 5 years old. What makes VS Code so popular is first it's platform agnostic, then the design is clean simple and how easy it is to create and add an extension to the marketplace. That means depending on the type of task programming or administration you want to do at that time VS Code can help you accomplish it. Ok so here are some of my favorite plugins I use.

First, let's talk about themes this is one of those things that makes VS Code different most of the other tools out there.

SynthWave '84 Is a Synthwave-inspired theme. It makes me feel like I'm writing code in Grand Theft Auto Vice City and I find the colors of test and background easy to look at anytime today.
Winter is Coming Theme I've never seen Game of Thrones but I love this theme as well. It's my second favorite plus John Papa who makes awesome Pluralsight videos.
DEV Community This plugin was created by one of the users of the Dev community. It allows you to write your post, publish, and edit existing ones within VSCode. Actually, This post was written with it.
HTML Snippets I remember taking an HTML class back when I was a freshman in high school. A tool like this would have been super cool back then. This extension makes it super easy to create and format HTML5 code on the fly.
JavaScript (ES6) code snippets for the same reason as the HTML Snippets plugin I love this Code snippet tool for JavaScript in ES6 syntax as well. It just makes life easier.
Path Intellisense This plugin is pretty simple, it autocompletes my file name paths.
SQL Server (mssql) With this plugin you can connect to Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouses from within VS Code. It's perfect for when you need to do a quick lookup of a dataset.
Docker, I run about 10 containers on my laptop for demo and testing purposes. So this plugin might be my most used. It allows you to manage Docker Containers, Docker Images, Dockerfile, and docker-compose files all from within VS Code.

Access To Free Developer Knowledge Sites

Richard Lewis — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 14:24:39 +0000

Happy Monday Friends,

I wanted to share with you all one of my favorite knowledge websites that I get for free through my local library it is lynda.com. If you've got a library card you might want to check if you get it for free as well. For my local library it was listed under Resources if its listed bingo you're good to go. Once you confirm your library is a partner you can head over to lynda.com and sign in under organization portal option with your library card number and pin.

What knowledge websites do you use for free?

How Do You Use Your Talent For Good

Richard Lewis — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 14:02:18 +0000

It's Giving Tuesday and I was wondering how do you use your Development talents for good? As for me over the last few weeks, I've been helping a local group migrate from on-prem to the Cloud. I finished up everything last night and it's running well today. It's actually cheaper than what they had been doing before. Also today I spent the morning updating a church website. I see a migration to another CMS in their future as well 🤦🏿‍♂️

Awesome Things I Read Or Saw Online The Week ending Dec 1st

Richard Lewis — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 06:23:17 +0000

This week I took some time to unplug and get away from screen time up in Wisconsin and stayed at The Abbey Resort if you're in the Chicagoland area and you're looking for a place for a quick getaway this place is awesome.

I'm a really big fan of Grafana. I love how it looks on wall displays I read this awesome Azure blog post about what their data explorer plugin. I plan of playing around with more next week.
I saw this funny post by @abregman on some funny open source projects
One more thing I saw this week on Dev.to was about my favorite store and thoughts on an outage they experienced last year. Food for thought as my company heads towards its busy season.

Awesome Things I Read Or Saw Online The Week ending Nov 24th

Richard Lewis — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 05:57:08 +0000

Another week of reading some awesome things online. Here are some of the best things I read about this week. I learned a lot from them I hope you enjoy and learn from them as well.

Until next week have a great week and Happy Thanksgiving!

Awesome Things I Read Or Saw Online The Week ending Nov 17th

Richard Lewis — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 13:05:14 +0000

It's been a crazy week, but here are some of the odd yet my still my favorite articles this week. I learned a lot from them I hope you enjoy and learn from them as well.

Looking back at what you were blogging about 15 years ago with Jeff Barr Chief Cloud Evangelist for Amazon.
Part of my role I'm one of my company's Azure DevOps Admin when teams want new projects created, or we need to onboard new developers or a plugin added we step in and help out. A lot of this work can be done through the APIs this Azure Project is interesting.
I love my Developers, I came across this interesting blog post this week about How to make Developer awesome.
I'm starting to learn the value of Firebase and how to collect data from it. I saw this quick dive and thought it was awesome.
I recently just moved to all my console applications to running off of a raspberry pi instead of an Intel-based server. I'm running Pi-Hole, Unifi Controller, and Tautulli as services on Raspbian OS. My weekend project for this past weekend was inspired by this How To Setup A UniFi Controller On Raspberry Pi With Docker blog post.

Awesome Things I Read Or Saw Online This Week!

Richard Lewis — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 01:33:51 +0000

I'm a life long student and love learn thousands of random things. Here are some of the odd yet my favorite articles this week.

An artificial-intelligence first: Voice-mimicking software reportedly used in a major theft from the Washington Post.
These superpowers of MongoDB will convince you to make the move I'm trying to up my MongoDB knowledge.
I'm in the Logistics business so this Vice News story I watched on Self Driving trucks was interesting.
Creating load balanced systems is interesting. I studied networking in college so I'm fascinated by it and you can learn a lot from potty humor.
At Coyote our tech stack is evolving always I really enjoyed reading about tech companies in LA are doing.
One of my expertise is in Robotic Process Automation this week at the Microsoft Ignite conference they announced the rebranding of Microsoft Flow to Power Automation along with the features to make it a full-on RPA Suite.

Hello World

Richard Lewis — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 02:24:26 +0000

My first post so this is the HelloWorld moment!

I've been a Developer for over 20 years... it's hard to say and even harder for me to believe. Not only am I getting old but when you launch your first website when your 15 that 20-year mark creeps up mighty quickly.

I think I'm going to like it here. But in the meantime, you can find me at gogorichie.com been there since 2002