Clint Of All Trades

Today, I was standing at the recycle container with a box that I wanted to break down. Unfortunately, it was taped to withstand the next nuclear war, and I didn't have scissors or a box-knife on me. I almost forgot that I was carrying my poor-man's swiss army knife (aka: house keys). I whipped out my house key, swiped down each side of the taped seams, and voila! The box broke down faster than a 1990 Chrysler. I realized that in almost forgetting about the usefulness of my keys, there are others who have probably never known that usefulness. Time to fix that. While I'll probably forget some here (like I almost did that day with the box), feel free to chime in on the comments and I'll add any here that I feel are pertinent. Without further ado, here are some ways that your house keys can come in useful (plus I've added helpful "key RISK gauge" in [brackets] to help you gauge the low/moderate/high risk to your key for each of the uses): Disclaimer:...

When it comes to tools, I'm a pragmatist. That may be because of the small spaces we've lived in (no McMansions for us). It may be because I don't like clutter. It may be because I'm frugal to a fault. But in any case, I carefully consider each tool before I commit.  In a garage, that's one thing. There's plenty of room for some flex. But in a condo, there's not. If the condo toolkit is too big, it often becomes a mess and presents its own hassle to find the right tool. A bloated toolkit is also cumbersome to move around - whether size, weight, or both. When this happens, the toolkit is a hassle to move, so tools get taken individually and often misplaced. On the other hand, if a toolkit is too small, it may lack usefulness. Every tradesperson has their core set of tools. It's important to know what that core set should be, and that takes time, experience, and careful thought. So I took the time to write my experience & careful t...

&nbsp tl;dr Click the broken link, and manually change the broken page address protocol from "https" to "http". Boom. Works. The Goal: Better Stats When trying to determine what my stats were on Blogger, I noticed Blogger was counting every time I  looked at my own page. Viewing my own page really shouldn't count a "page view", so I figured there must be a place to turn off tracking myself. Turns out there IS a setting to do just this. If you go to Blogger > Stats > Overview, on the right-hand side of the page you'll see a link that says: " Manage tracking your own pageviews ". Yay! But when I click the link, I get this: Boo. :-( The Problem: Bad Link Address I did a quick google search for a solution, but didn't find anything useful. After investigating the page on my own, I found out what's wrong. Blogger has an "oops" in their system where they didn't update thei...

There is a lot of great advice out there on how to switch careers into software engineering, but sometimes you just want to know exactly what someone learned to switch their career. This article is about that - the resources I used in switching careers including: online readings, books, tutorials, courses, bootcamps, etc. Keep in mind that when learning from, say, a book, I can't readily capture the google searches I inevitably made for personal learnings along the way. I highly recommend you conduct plenty of supplemental searches to clarity "fuzzy" points in your learnings. The following learning resources are in  chronological order of the order I learned them . I have also provided a rating from 1-5 based on how valuable each learning was to me  at the time I learned it (ie: in context of the learnings I had already done prior). Think Python - How To Think Like A Computer Scientist  ★★★★★ This is the start-from-scratch CS training book I needed, but di...

Are free coding tutorials worth your time? I regularly get this question from people who complete a few of the free online coding training courses. People don’t feel there is anything they can really “do” with their learnings from these tutorials. The tutorials are "too focused. Too abstract. So, what are online tutorials good for? Should you do them? If so, what value will you get? Free training courses are available through sites like  CodeAcademy ,  CodeSchool , etc. These courses often focus on language-level syntax. Languages & topics like:  Ruby ,  Java ,  Python ,  JavaScript ,  HTML ,  CSS , RegularExpressions, etc. At the end, you may even get a CERTIFICATE!  (note the overemphasis)  In this post, I’ll be sharing some insights on when and how to use these courses. One Thing At A Time "Will these free courses help me build real programs?" Yes and No. Let me explain.  Courses like CodeAcademy, CodeSchool, ev...