This past week I learned a new party trick. I can turn a holographic researcher beet red by simply referencing Tupac’s Hologram. It’s not because they identify strongly with East Coast hip-hop. Rather, it has to do with calling it a hologram in the first place.

Show of hands if this ever happens to you. After a long day of fighting fires at work, you settle into your favorite chair to unwind and write code. Your fingers fly over the keyboard punctuating your code with semi-colons or parentheses or whatever is appropriate.

The beads of sweat gathered on my forehead were oddly juxtaposed against the cool temperature of the air conditioned room. But there they were, caused by the heat of the CTO’s anger. I made a sloppy mistake and now sat in his office wondering if I was about to lose my job. My first full-time job. I recently found some archival footage of this moment.

This past week I had the great pleasure to speak in Puerto Rico at their TechSummit conference.

I heard you liked GitHub, so today my team put GitHub inside of your Visual Studio. This has been a unique collaboration with the Visual Studio team. In this post, I’ll walk you through installation and the features. I’ll then talk a bit about the background for how this came to be.

The other day I was discussing the open source dependencies we had in a project with a lawyer. Forgetting my IANAL (I am not a lawyer) status, I made some bold statement regarding our legal obligations, or lack thereof, with respect to the licenses.

A lot of the advice you see about management is bullshit. For example, I recently read some post, probably on some pretentious site like medium.com, about how you shouldn’t send emails late at night if you’re a manager because it sends the wrong message to your people. It creates the impression that your people should be working all the time and destroys the idea of work-life balance.

Unless you live in a cave, you are probably aware of the large leaps forward Microsoft and .NET has made in the open source community.

I’m often amazed at the Sisyphean lengths people will go to try and prevent failure, yet prepare so little for its inevitability. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, noted the following in his book Creativity Inc.

There are times when the Managed Extensibility Framework (aka MEF, the close relative of “Meh”) cannot compose a part. In those cases it’ll shrug (¯\(ツ)/¯) and then take a dump on your runtime execution by throwing a CompositionException.

Learning Git and GitHub can be daunting if you’re new to it. I recently gave a small presentation where I pretty much firehosed a group of people about Git and GitHub for one hour. I felt bad that I could only really scratch the surface.

If you’ve ever written a unit test that instantiates a WPF control, you might have run into one of the following errors:

Repeat after me, “Avoid async void!” (Now say that ten times fast!) Ha ha ha. You sound funny.

For most of my life, I was a man without a drink.

I love to communicate through the written word because it offers me a chance to really consider what I say, and then rewrite it, and then rewrite it again. And in the end, I still don’t communicate as clearly and eloquently as I would like.

If you run a company, stop increasing pay based on performance reviews. No, I’m not taking advantage of all that newly legal weed in my state (Washington). I know this challenges a belief as old as business itself. It challenges something that seems so totally obvious that you’re still not convinced I’m not smoking something. But hear me out.

GitHub for Windows (often abbreviated to GHfW) is a client WPF application written in C#. I think it’s beautiful.

Recently I wrote what many consider to be the most important Visual Studio Extension ever shipped - Encourage for Visual Studio. It was my humble attempt to make a small corner of the world brighter with little encouragements as folks work in Visual Studio. You can get it via the Visual Studio Extension Manager.

BONUS! I’ve added a useful 14th Git Alias: git migrate and now a 15th useful alias to open the repository in the browser

GitHub is a great tool for developers to work together on software. Though its primary focus is software, a lot of people find it useful for non-software projects. For example, a co-worker of mine has a repository where he tracks a pet project: