I’m always disheartened by these arguments.

In the end we flick bits off and on.

Those bits flicker into the most beautiful things the mind has only begun to imagine.

Lets make beautiful things.

Reasons why I love this picture:

1. It was there
2. I get to share what I saw
3. S
4. Symmetry
5. Red / Blue
6. Engineering (built for semi-trucks at high speeds)
7. My shadow
8. Snow capped peaks

LeBron James

I was happy Dirk Nowitzki, Jason Kidd and Mark Cuban won a championship.  I thought LeBron’s post game interviews and tweets were funny – but I agree that he needs a strong mentor – a Chris Carter type – to help him get to his next level.  He’s not there yet.  He will be.

Mark Cuban

Blog Maverick was one of the first blogs I subscribed to when I started at NewsGator 6 years ago.  Mark is a polarizing figure.  I fall on the “love him” side.  His handling of the playoff interviews this year was incredible, but him deferring the acceptance of the trophy to the original owner of the Mavs was one of the classiest things I’ve ever seen in sports.  The biggest FUCK YOU to all his haters.  Well done sir.

Vancouver

The city is overreacting.  We get it that it was just a few idiots.  We’re Americans.  We deal with those kind of people everyday.  I think it got so much coverage here cause we assumed you didn’t have those idiots too.

Boston

One of the most important cities in America’s history is also currently the best sports city in the world.  7 championships in all major American sports leagues in the past decade.  Kudos Boston!

Packers Ring Ceremony

The maturity of my favorite players on the team continues.  Arron Rodgers, Clay Matthews, Greg Jennings – all class acts.  It was fun to watch them post all their pictures on Twitter last night as they got their rings.

Tim Tebow

I won’t buy his jersey but I’m proud to have him in Denver.  I’m no Broncos fan, but players who reach out and make a positive impact on the community get my admiration.  Tebow’s partnership with Denver Mattress for his foundation to help orphans is just the latest example.  John Lynch was one of the greatest persons I think Denver had the pleasure of have play for a team.  Class act all the way.  Tebow I think has that same draw.. even if he’s never a starter here.

Roy McIlroy

I’m cheering for him.  His post-Masters-collapse interview was one of the most refreshing takes on ones personal faults I’ve heard from an athlete in a long time.

Ohio State Football

Looks more and more like Pryor is going to be portrayed as the poison pill.  Is it fair?  No.  It’s obvious for anyone who follows college football.  But the effort to help Tressels image by doing so doesn’t bother me much.  I think Tressel is one of the finest coaches in college football.  I wasn’t happy to see him go, though I was one who thought he should be fired to save the reputation of OSU.  His reputation was fairly safe no matter what.

My Latest Experience

We use SendGrid to send emails from our platform.  Could we have done it ourselves?  Of course.  But reliably delivering emails is a lot more complicated then you would think, so we decided to go with a trusted company.  We’ve been using them for months and honestly they’ve been terrific!

This week I was tasked with estimating a solution for our users to be able to reply to emails we send.  My first thought was our own SMTP server since we have the code in the NewsGator platform.  But moving an SMTP service in your own datacenter to Azure turned out to be more difficult than I wanted.

My former CTO (who actually wrote the SMTP code I was working with) pointed out to me that SendGrid had its own solution for email replies.  I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it looked – and its SendGrid… they’ve been great!  They even had step-by-step instructions on how to get everything configured.  This included writing and deploying our own REST endpoint as well as DNS/MX configuration stuff.  Not a trivial task but it looked so easy I went for it.

About 6 hours later I had talked to the right people in our company to get the DNS/MX setup correctly, rolled my own endpoint, unit tested it and deployed it to our production environment. Now for the big test… send an email to our MX domain and watch it get parsed by SendGrid and passed to my endpoint.  I sent the first email.  Then the second.  Then the third, fourth, fifth and sixth.  Nothing.

OK – what’s going wrong?  My emails aren’t bouncing (I tested. GMail bounces invalid DNS lookups almost instantly).  My unit tests work so my endpoint is correct.  So I logged into the SendGrid dashboard to see if it would tell me what’s wrong.  Nothing.

Ugh!!!

Finally it hit me – what account type do we have and what’s supported with it?  I didn’t setup our account so I honestly didn’t know the differences.

On the dashboard our account is listed as a “Recurring Account”.  Cool.  So I went to the pricing matrix - no “Recurring Account” type there.

Well shit.  Back to our account page.  Clicked the “Upgrade Account” button.  Ah!  ”Current Package: BasicPlan: $9.95″.

Back to the pricing matrix.  No “Basic Plan”.

Oh for fucks’ sake.

Well the “Bronze” plan is $9.95… and there it is… the red X in the column for Parse API.

I had to sign into our SendGrid account to configure it correctly to use the Parse API.  Presumably it knew at that point what account type we had.  It should have never let me go ahead with configuring this feature.  At the very least it should have told me when I was done that it wouldn’t be enabled until we upgraded our account.  Instead I got nothing but an hour of detective work to figure out it wasn’t a problem with my code.

**Have we upgraded?  No.  $9.95 vs. $79.95 isn’t a small upgrade.

The Point

My point here is that if you offer a tiered service plan, make it EXPLICITLY CLEAR EVERYWHERE what options are available and which aren’t.  Hide them or disable them (which is better is a whole different UX discussion… but choose one!).  Not giving feedback anywhere along the way is a horrible experience!

My guess is that I’m the first to stumble upon this with SendGrid and based on our experience with them they will rectify this as soon as they can.  They have been a great service to us.  I hope they’ll do the right thing and I’ll still recommend SendGrid for anyone who needs to send email via Azure or for any other situation where you need your email delivered reliably.  But hopefully if you’re creating one of these services you’ll remember my story

** I don’t have the authorization to upgrade our account.  I’ll revisit if we do.

I ran into an issue yesterday though with my latest release where I didn’t have the right version labeled in Mercurial… so I wasn’t sure how to get a copy of the old sqlite database.  After an admittedly lazy tweet, @ideal1st put me on the right track – “Download a datastore from your device, pop in simulator and run mapping model on it“.  But I wasn’t quite sure how to get at the Application directory.  A quick Google search later I found iPhone Backup Extractor.  From there it was easy…

1. Download the existing app from the app store and run it
2. Take a backup in iTunes
3. Use iPhone Backup Extractor to grab the Documents and Library directories of my app which has my sqlite database file
4. Run the new code in the iPhone Simulator
5. Navigate to the Documents directory of the app in the simulator and replace its contents from what was in the backup
6. Run the new code again and verify the migration

Glad I did too.  I had an issue where an attribute was getting an invalid type, but a quick look with SQLite Database Browser helped clear that up.

Hopefully that helps someone else.  I’d love to hear better suggestions as well!

Brent Simmons
Joe Pezzillo
Dan Burcaw
Daniel Pasco
Walker Fenton
Jenny Blumberg
Merete Mueller
Dave Wiskus

Why the fuck do I know you guys?

C# developers get this wrong… a lot….

My favorite example that I ran into once while debugging another developers code…

try
{
// ...
}
catch(System.Exception)
{
Console.WriteLine("huh...");
}

This was in a commercially released product.  Pardon the pun but that’s unexceptable.

But everything has its place.  And since going back to helping architect and develop a C# webservice platform, we’ve molded a pattern which uses custom exceptions to handle bad things that we know might happen but allowing other exceptions to bubble all the way up to the “this shit is broken – fix it” level.

The platform uses the basic three tier approach – data level/logic level/webservice.  The idea is that if any client developer using the webservice sees a 500 error from the webservice tier, then something we never expected happened in the logic or data tier and it’s a serious bug. Top priority fix.  Pretty basic idea right?

In our code design we concentrated objects that will be used across multiple applications – be they service applications, web applications or even unit test projects – into their own library.  We then added our our subclass of System.Exception.  Now anywhere in the solution we know if the exception was something we created and should handle accordingly, or if its a bigger problem.

On top of that we added our own error code to our exceptions and documented what each of them means. They’re segmented into ranges just like Http Status codes and returned to anyone using the webservice in the headers of the response along with a detailed error message.  You can run Firebug and see exactly why your request failed.

This approach also gave us the ability to correctly set the http status code to something a client application can understand.  I’ve run into so many webservices that return HTTP STATUS 200 OK with an html body that says “400″.  If you’re doing this, you suck.

With our approach we have a central place on each endpoint that returns the appropriate http status code with an error code the client developers program can recognize and provide the appropriate user feedback, along with a useful trace message the savvy developer can use to figure out what’s wrong.

It’s an “everybody wins” goal platform architects should strive for.  It also saves on the technical questions as well.

We already have numerous developers building on our platform with minimal technical questions to our platform developers since its all relatively self explanatory.  And as someone who would rather write code than answer questions… that’s pretty awesome.

Jazz flows

Like life

Chaos

Sounds come in the same tones
But never the same beat
or rhythm

Rock is structured
ridged
four four

Life thrives on structure
Life diversifies in chaos

I’m a hopeless romantic…

These are my girls Anna and Shoshanna – sparkling eyes and all…

I hand my phone to the guy and tell him that the pictures it takes now are really blurry.  I know its because the back is scratched to hell but I played dumb.  He looks at the back and says “the back of your phone is scratched to hell, that’s why. I’ll replace that for you.”  After gathering my info he disappears in the back for 5 minutes then comes back out and hands me my phone with a brand new glass back and my receipt for $0.00.

Lets see if you notice the difference…

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