NOTEBOOK HEAVY

If you’ve taken even a cursory glance at the flexbox CSS standard, you’ve probably seen that it’s confusing. There are two some many different standards implemented in browsers. What’s a confused developer to do? There are a couple options for dealing with this. For example, you could include the JavaScript library prefixfree.js to deal with it. The idea of -prefix-free is that you write your CSS rules the way they’re supposed to look after all browsers [...]

Earlier today, I presented my talk, “Real-Time Web Apps at the Assembly Hall” at the 2013 University of Illinois Web Conference. In this talk, I described the process used to create a “real-time” application using SignalR and demonstrated our application running on the web and on Windows 8. Here is a PDF of the slides and the original Prezi file. I had a great time presenting at the conference and am glad I got the [...]

Last week, my company published the public preview of MomCharts.com, our baby tracking software in the cloud. One of the design goals for the software was make sure it was cross-platform, cross-device, and as maintenance free as possible. My company (Heavy Code) is a member of the BizSpark program by Microsoft so we’ve got access to top tier tools and, most importantly, Windows Azure, at no cost to us. Pieces of Azure In Use There [...]

Six months ago, I hit File -> New Project on what has become MomCharts.com. My second daughter was due within weeks and I wanted to build a tool that would scratch an itch. Baby Data I’m a data junkie. I love looking at statistics, finding patterns in data, and tracking performance over time. Newborns, cute as ever, are themselves a significant source of data. They eat, sleep, and crap their pants. All day. Every day. [...]

Every programmer has a lot of tools that they use every day to get their work done. Here is my current list of apps, hardware, and software tools that I’ve put into service.

Azure Web Sites includes a way to easily install a number of web apps such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Orchard, and DotNetNuke. Azure also has a way to continuously deploy updates to your web site via Git. I’m running my blog on Azure Web Sites using WordPress and GitHub publishing and this is a walk-through of how I set that up. Follow along!