Coding Blocks - Our Favorite Tools

Episode Date: December 28, 2014

We gather around the Festivus pole this holiday season and before we get into the Airing of Grievances, we discuss our favorite tools. No, not people. Actual tools. Srsly.

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 21. Subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes, Stitcher, and more using your favorite podcast app. And visit us at CodingBlocks.net where you can find show notes, examples, discussion, and more. And send your feedback, questions, and rants to comments at CodingBlocks.net via email. And follow us on Twitter at CodingBlocks or head to www.CodingBlocks.net and find our other social links. Using a web browser. At the top of the page. You know, we never get any comments to comments at CodingBlocks, or head to www.codingblocks.net and find our other social links at the top of the page.

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Comments at CodingBlocks.net. All right. And with that, welcome to CodingBlocks. I'm Alan Underwood. I'm Joe Zach. And I'm Michael Outlaw. All right, that's it for today's show.

Well, it was a short one. We do this every time. We need to put in initials by the first statement. I vote Alan. Alright, so first we want to send out a thank you to some new reviews that came in. We got a couple on Stitcher from Jono Chu

and Adam the Hun. That's fantastic. And we also got a couple over on iTunes from Spitz Gobi and Jay Demius. I have no idea. Easy for you to say. Yeah, fair enough. So thank you very much. We do appreciate those.

Always brings a smile, makes us happy. So thank you. Yep, and we also got some really nice feedback on the last episode, which was on testing, unit unit testing different kinds of testing and dodgy underscore coder mentions that uh mentioned random testing which is something we didn't mention so that includes like fuzz testing and different sorts of other things and he actually recommended a course on a free course on udacity so we'll have a link to that also Also, Russell Hammett mentions a.NET Rocks episode, which referred to testing in the zone

and how testing kind of helped you kind of get in the flow in your writing application. How also coming back to your test after a break can help you kind of pick back up where you were. And we'll have a link to that in the show notes. That was episode 1001. That's a lot of episodes. We're getting close.

I was going to say 80. Well, yeah, but this would be 21, so this would be 979. Long work day, brain no worky. We're catching up. Yeah, so let's get into that. Tonight's topic is going to be tools. Yep, and we actually had someone write in, Lewis wrote in,

asked us about what kind of tools we like to use. Oh, I thought we were calling out the people we thought were tools. Oh, God, I had to change my show notes. Oh, yeah, things are very different. We'll be right back. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock. All right. So, yeah, I mean,

so we're just, we had to narrow it down because we had a bunch, right? And Outlaw made us adhere to some rules, which was basically we each had to pick five. Well, yeah, okay. Hold on. Well, since I so rudely interrupted Joe, he can explain, you know, what Lewis's original statement was. Yeah. Yeah, he's just asking for, you know know we do tips of the week or tips of

the month every episode but we don't have anything kind of gathered up so we wanted to come up with a nice page that you can go to and kind of see a list of tools that we like and and uh pitch so uh this edit the episode is basically dedicated to that and uh we've got a little fun maybe uh with some resolutions which might be another episode. So here's the rules that Alan was hinting at. Number one, you only get to pick five favorites. So you're going to hear, we each picked five favorites, and then there's going to be five that the three of us agreed on that was one that was mutual between us.

But we only got to each pick five, right? Yep, so you don't hear ReSharper three times. Right. Number two, a favorite can be anything. It can be a website. It can be a browser add-in. It can be an IDE add-in. It can be an application.

It can be a mobile app. It can be a piece of hardware, whatever. If it helps you do your job, it counts as a favorite, right? Number three, I don't know if you understood number one, Alan, but you only get to pick five. Okay. Man who comes in with 11. Can we seriously make some more? That was after I shortened the list. All right. Number four was we had to order them. So we're going to call them out from five to one. So one is going to be the most favorite. Five is a normal favorite. And the last rule was that you can't repeat

something from someone else's list. So anything on my list has to be unique to me and Joe's is unique to him and Alan's is unique to him. All right. And that's why we have the final category with the ones that we all like. So let's, let's start into that with the fives. All right. So the Jackson fives. Here it is. So my number five that I picked was ScreenFlow for Mac. So I've done a couple of videos on YouTube and I plan on doing more in the new year and

maybe even before, don't't know but I use ScreenFlow to record my screen session so that when I'm doing SQL Server or any of that kind of stuff I am you know as I type I sit there and talk into the microphone do all that and that is made possible by ScreenFlow and I choose that because it's a Mac application but it's a Mac application, but it's $100 as opposed to some of those. Well, Camtasia on the PC is $300 from Adobe, and there's really not too many competing products out there that are of quality. And ScreenFlow is excellent, and I use it to record both my Windows, which I do in VM, and my Mac stuff.

So I find that thing extremely useful. So that's one of the things I do for being able to help and share and teach and do all that. So that's my number five. All right. All right. And mine, I keep changing mine as we're sitting here talking. But as Al mentioned, he had some kind of strict rules around this little game

we're playing here. But I've somewhat circumvented them by putting multiple items in each of mine surprise we're programmers we find holes so uh first i want to mention if you guys remember vlad we had him on in episode nine he sold me on solid state drives it's huge like five times performance boost. It's amazing. I love solid state drives. However, if you don't want to drop the money on solid state drives, then I recommend slash r slash programming on Reddit and Hacker News. Wait a

minute. This is for while you're waiting on those stupid compile times because you don't have SSD. Yeah, that's a cheater. Yeah, you cheated, dude. That's like a 5a and a 5b. That's right. I snuck it in there. Like, my fifth one is 5A, but if you can't have an SSD, then while you're waiting on your compile times. Hey, well, that's what you get for taking the one you're about to say.

Okay. So my number five is Chocolaty. So if you're not already using this, okay, for, let's say if you're a unix user this would be to windows what app get would be to ubuntu right this is this is a way to just from a command line find apps and install them and it's awesome yeah so like right now if i get a new computer i'm gonna go install pigeon i'm gonna install git i'm gonna install sublime editor whatever these are all things i would have to go to a website i have to download i have to install next next next uh so on it's a real big pain in the butt chocolatey allows you to do that all via

command line you can save off scripts and all sorts of cool cool stuff you don't even have to know if it's already there yet you can just do like a choco search notepad and find out all the different notepad type applications so you're gonna be out there you know and then if you say oh that's the one i want chaco install oh you know what though what you just said is beautiful if you actually saved off your own script that had a list of 10 utilities that you want installed bam right here's my script yep reinstall your your windows environment every month i'm down with that. Yeah. We know some people who do. All right.

The Fantastic Fours. All right. First off, I wanted to start with Markdown, which if you're not familiar with that, it's basically just kind of some conventions around plain text typing that you can then take and transform into formatting. So you can get rich text formatting

like bold, bullets, hyperlinks, stuff like that. But what I really like about Markdown is it lets me just type and focus on my sentences. And I'm not getting hung up trying to make sure that everything's on one page or two page, or the page breaks are right, or the indentations are lined up. And I don't have to worry about any of that stuff. I just focus on the content. And then when I'm ready to drop in an email or a document, then I take it and I transform it. And padau, done. It looks pretty nice.

I do a little bit of tweaking at the end. And I haven't spun my wheels for hours trying to make this crap look nice as I was writing it. Now, well, you say all this stuff about not making it look nice. But when you said Markdown originally, I was thinking about Markdown for readmes. Oh, yeah. And it's nice because it looks nice if you're reading text. But you are making it look nice because it looks nice if you're reading text so if you are making it look nice in that that's the point but you don't have to get hung up in like oh should

this uh h2 be blue or should it be black then you know who does that oh man a lot of people those people are called designers but then but here's my question though no there's so many different markdown specifications okay so which one are you using? Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me ask Joe, though. Which one are you using? Like, specifically, what type of markdown? So I feel a little bit bad. You know, this guy was at Gruber. John Gruber wrote markdown and came up with some rules,

and there were some ambiguities, ambiguities, but for the most part, I think it works well. However, I do know about the whole standard markdown kind of argument, and there's a lot of people that I admire behind it so I'm probably going to end up going the standard markdown route even though the name is somewhat of a diss

okay so this is actually utility you're talking about not just using I'm talking about a convention the convention okay but here now if you haven't already used this here's an awesome little utility for you markdown pad ooh But here, now, if you haven't already used this, here's an awesome little utility for you, Markdown Pad. Ooh.

Mind blown. I just cheated the system and added in a second one into yours. Like how I did that? But I want to say the way I do it, but we're going to mention it in a little bit here. Okay, cool. Okay. Well, I'm just saying, like, if you haven't already seen Markdown Pad, you can go check it out, markdownpad.com. It's an interesting little utility that Azure, it out markdownpad.com uh it's an interesting

little utility that as you're it's whizzy wigs it so as you're typing it you can see what it's going to look like um so if you want to have a nice looking readme in your uh your github repository then you can see it very nice all right so my number four, Fiddler. Because sometimes you just need to see the details. I mean, you need to see what's going on. I thought you were in a bluegrass band. No, that'd be just Fiddler. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, this is Fiddler.

You're not a Fiddler? No. Oh, okay. Well, in the sense that I use the app, though. Right, it's a Telerik app. It is awesome. You can actually save and replay the sessions. So that makes it nice if you're

working with a team and you need to be able to send some other developer like hey this is what happened you can send it to them and let them replay it or executing replay attacks you know whatever you might be working on yeah you know if you're from north korea and you can modify the uh the packets that are sent you do all kinds of stuff it's actually a pretty excellent tool yeah it is really fantastic if you're doing any kind of web development and you don't already know about it then you should so then why would you use this over say the built-in chrome tools or the um you know any of those um because this you can have act uh as the proxy for all the traffic on your on on your machine, not just that one specific browser.

So if you want to see, you know, that might be great to just see the interaction on your one machine, but you know, what if your local host web server was making another call out for some reason, you know, to a third party,

something like that, and you need to see what was happening as part of the overall transaction. You know, Chrome's tool built in dev tools are fantastic, party, something like that, and you need to see what was happening as part of the overall transaction. Chrome's built-in dev tools are fantastic, but they're not necessarily going to paint the complete picture. Plus, the ability to share and replay these results is huge. And you can also put add-ins, JSON formatters, JavaScript, syntax for yours. Well, I think the JSON's already in there uh they added it recently anything for that used to you had to but they have plugins that you can add in so there's a

lot of cool stuff that you can do with it yeah um uh so with that my number four choice is evernote and sketch wait now you're doing two as well well they're they're kind of they're the same they're the same company right so it's all kind of part of the same bundle so here's the thing like as developers there are a lot of times that you're working with business users or maybe even other developers and you need to point something out on a screen that you're working on or in some code that you've got and a fantastic way to be able to do it is to make some notes with, with Evernote, we'll say, take a screenshot and then use Skitch to mark it up with, you know, arrows, circling things, highlighting text, whatever. And it just makes it incredibly easy to do that kind of stuff. So, and the fact that it's portable between your phone, your PC, your Mac, whatever, like they've

got applications on every platform. It's probably one of the most useful tools for doing that kind of thing so evernote and sketch all right let's get into the terrible threes here we go my my number three post sharp because i like aop yeah you're down with AOP? I'm down with AOP. Very nice. It's not free, unfortunately. I mean, it has a free version, but I wish that the other version... I wish that the free version was able to do more, but, you know, they got to make a buck.

So what's the number one thing you do with PostSharp? The number one thing that I would do with it? Yeah. I mean, I've got like simple little aspects that I'll use for like debugging purposes or tracing purposes, things like that. Okay. That I just reuse over and over. So like as a debugging utility, that's kind of your first? Like if you're in a new project, what's the thing that you're like all right yeah i mean yeah i would say that it probably i don't know that it should be my first but i would probably

say that it is my first that i have used where i've like added trace capabilities into it if i want to be able to see like well how long was that really running for or you know what was the actual execution path that was happening here you know things like that just to help like understand what was happening at a time cool and why that over vlad's aop framework or or along with i was afraid this was gonna come up i mean so so um yeah they're they're you know as long as you're doing aspect-oriented programming it you know whichever one suits your your fancy they solve they saw the same problem but they come at it from different angles right so um post sharp is doing it at the um uh well well there's not that

just that but i was just speaking of it from the point of view of like in the post sharp world you're declaring what aspects you want to run on the methods so you don't care who the caller is whereas in an aspect or aspectacular you're actually doing it as the caller you're saying hey i don't care what that method is already supposed to do these are the aspects that i want it to run right so you're solving the same type of problem which is i want to apply aspects but you're doing it from different ways so is it safe to say that like a consideration where you would use post-sharp would be, you have this existing app and you don't want to go touch all the method signatures. You just want to be able to decorate some stuff and have some functionality.

That'd be a good use for it as opposed to. Well, that's actually an argument too for aspectacular is that, you know, as the caller, you don't have to care about, you're not modifying that source. But with PostSharp, you can apply aspects to entire namespaces. You don't even have to have the source to it. You can apply aspects to code that you don't have, but that's not going to be, you're going to pay. Right, that's not the community edition.

So you are going to take a performance hit uh you know so post sharp is going to do it at compilation time and aspectacular is going to do it at runtime so you're going to take a hit um yeah so yeah okay cool they they both solve the same problem just different ways of getting to it all right so then my number three is win merge and anybody who's had to deal with large codes large code bases and you make changes to files and you don't necessarily know what the changes were um you need a tool to be able to help you diff files and win merge is windows only but it is actually a pretty outstanding tool on Windows that's free. I see a fight happening.

Yeah, yeah. Yep. So this one is free, and you can compare directories. You can compare files. It has all kinds of options. It's even got plug-ins that are pretty outstanding. So you don't just use diff at the command line? What's wrong with you, man?

Yeah, uh-huh um so one of the things that i do like about win merge is if you use seven zip it has a plugin for it so that you can actually have it export the files that were different to a zip file and then that way if you need to do like a diff set somewhere else you could just take a zip file so there's a lot of neat little features built into it. And the fact that it's free and is actually a very stable, well-done tool, that's one of mine. Yeah. It's all right, I guess. So you mentioned 7-Zip. My next favorite is WinRAR.

It's awesome. You can zip stuff up. It's really efficient. And people love when you send them RAR files, don't they? Yeah. It's awesome. You can zip stuff up. It's really efficient. People love when you send them RAR files, don't they? Yeah, it's awesome. I'm totally kidding. Don't send me a RAR file ever. Please, stop. If you guys have ever sent me a RAR file, I kind of hate you a little bit.

I don't want RenRAR. Don't you just imagine he should have a little dinosaur as the logo? Yeah, absolutely. No one uses RenRAR anymore. If they used it, then Windows would have built it in. It's just like WinZip. You know 7-Zip will actually unzip a RAR file. I'm not installing 7-Zip either.

Dude, 7-Zip is so much faster than Windows Compress. Knock, knock. Who's there? 1997. Right-click, compress. Right click, extract. So slow. Okay.

Anyway, my real tip is PowerShell. It's right there if you're using Windows. It's a really nice utility to get familiar with. It's something you end up like. See, if you go dog on him for this, really your favorite is going to be like, I like the built-in utility. It's really nice. There's so much you can do with PowerShell.

I mean, just restarting. Are you guys kidding me? You don't love PowerShell? Well, then my favorite should be Windows because you can do so much with it. Actually, mine's Explorer. All right. I'm going to start doing some PowerShell tips then because you guys obviously don't understand the power and the beauty. Go on.

We've hijacked this thread here. It's so nice. I use it for all sorts of things. It's got code completion so much better than Bash. I'm sorry. I hate to bash on Bash. Oh, my God. The code completion alone, the consistency,

it returns objects rather than strings. None of that said awk crap when I'm just trying to do something basic. It's great for generating input, massaging output, and it's really good for code generation, too. Bash has ran the internet for how many years now? You want to dog on it? Oh, wait, because it was built in 1980. We should stay with it? That's right. Hey, it's fantastic.

That's why. Yeah. They just found, like, the first bug in it. How long? So Bash and WinRAR deserve a special place at the top of the trash heap. Granted, it should be garbage collected immediately. And PowerShell belongs in the other collection with all the other built-in utilities. Hey, one of these days, Microsoft is going to make it the command line.

By default, CMD. My favorite is Fileman.exe. So apparently nobody came into this knowing they were going to be highly scrutinized for their picks. I'm judging both of you. The rest of the show will not go smoothly. All right, we're on a downhill path.

Yeah, so we're going to take a break real quick. Please, again, if you guys get a chance, if you remember when you get out of your car or when you head home from work, whatever, do please get on, leave us a review, drop us a line, or come join us on Twitter at CodingBlocks. So definitely, again, we always appreciate it. So please do take the time to do that.

Yeah, like we said before, we really love and appreciate the reviews that you guys give us, both in iTunes and Stitcher. Or if you have another favorite place that you're uh you know leaving feedback to you let us know that too we'd like to know that and like we said before you know spread the word man you know tell tell a couple friends you know about the show and for anyone that you don't like tell three friends three people you don't like about the show and uh yeah help spread the word yep so back to our regularly scheduled program all right all right number two i think i was i think i've mentioned this one before but there is a tool

that i use on windows called con emu and it stands for a console emulator another console app man is this one built into the operating system no you actually have to go down this one why would you do that so i'll tell you a couple of reasons why this one makes my list and it's the first and probably most important for me is you can full screen it like in windows you cannot full screen the command line i don't know if you can power shell no see and dude that alone is enough to just send me over the edge are we talking about you know if you you can't hit that go into your power shell properties and you change your layout to maximize the width in the rows and the columns well that's what you got to do in in the command prompt right you have

to go in there you have to know how wide and how tall it is dude that's ridiculous i think i fixed it in win 10 you can hit the maximize button on the window thing and have a full screen console all right so that's good all in itself but let's say that like you two guys who who like powershell or git bash or any of these other things you can also instantiate a new tab and tell it which console you want to load. So it could be SigWin, it could be GitBash, it could be PowerShell, it could be Command. So it actually takes those in, brings it into its own little world,

and you can have one window with multiple tabs open and use different consoles. And honestly, I mean, it's so nice if you've got get open in one thing but you're doing some copies or whatever in another tab to just be able to do those in groups and not and not have to have multiple windows spread all over your all over your interface so that is that's one of my favorites all right i'll only like if it if it's blue like power show you could probably do that. It looks like, hey, Win 10 is going to fix it all, man.

What about Win 9? Don't get me started. All right. So my next tool is Agent Ransack. So this is a great tool for searching. There's a paid and a free version. I think the paid version is actually called File Locator Pro or something. But anyway, it's really nice.

It does some really cool caching. So if you're searching large sets of files a lot, then it's really fast. It also lets you do RegEx, which is really nice. So if you're looking for things in ProjFiles or doing all sorts of fun stuff, it's got a really nice user interface if you're not using something like Git Bash and Grep. Or Find. Find's really slow. I feel like you guys need some Linux commands here. All right.

So my number two is iStat Menus. Wait, when did you purchase this? Every time they come out with a new version. It is awesome. When was the original purchase? I've been using it for years. Okay. Every time they come out with a new version, I'm upgrading.

Oh, really? Yeah, it's awesome. You can find it from Bajango. It's a... So I like to... Okay, so we've talked about before in the past that you know uh that i use a mac and i think we've hinted around that we all are sitting around here with macs at the desk but i've had this question happen a lot of times when people will see my mini bar on my mac and they'll see like all these cool little things that are happening across the top

where i can see all the stats of like stats of what the temperature of various parts of the machine are and the I.O. on the SSD or the memory utilization or CPU utilization, network utilization, all these crazy things that are happening. And they're like, man, that's really cool. What is doing that? And it's this nifty little app made by Bajango called iStatMenus. And I'm telling you it is fantastic do you like it better than spin right i definitely use it more than anything like that yeah absolutely i mean because because it's on my machine every day you know you boot up and there it is right so you know i mean and you can also like see like fan speeds and you can change

the fan speeds if you if you really wanted to. That's what actually got me into it the first time was back in like 2006. You know, some of the Mac Pro laptops back then, you really wanted to tinker with the fan speeds in order to get it to play nice. And so I was looking for like different apps that would allow me to control the fan speeds and set different profiles. So that's how long I've been a fan of this guy, has been since way back then. But yeah, you can see all kinds of cool little details about it. And now the latest version for Yosemite,

it can tell you apps that are consuming too much power. So that was one of the Yosemite features. You can do stats on if you are on a laptop. It can tell you how many cycles your battery has already been through. It can tell you the current health of the battery, what the amperage of the battery is versus what the supposed amperage is supposed to be on the battery. Yeah, it's just wicked cool how much is this thing

i want to say for like a five uh a five computer license it's like 25 bucks and then the renewal every year is like or not every year uh whenever they come out with a new version the renewal is like 15 bucks okay something like. But it is absolutely fantastic. Cool. And now, we're moving to the number ones. On the top 40. So, Beyond Compare is like

WinDip, but way better. It's like $40 better. WinMerge? Is that what we're talking about here? Whatever this name. I don't have room in my brain for number twos. Wait, does it use 7-Up? The first losers, 7-Up. Does it have a plug-in for 7-Up? That's all I need to know.

No one knows what 7-Up is. This is a Sprite house. We're in Atlanta, yo. Coke products. All right, so tell us why Beyond Compare is so great so it's well first it made number one well first of all it's cross-platform so boom really yep absolutely it works fantastic in mac and linux oh i thought you meant windows 8 and 7 it supported sftp way back in the day which is how I initially got started with it. I just kept going with it. It's got a lot of really nice tools and rules that you can set.

So if you can say do this big diff between two projects, do rules-based or binary-based or include these, exclude those. It's just got a really nice interface for that and also for saving sessions so you can keep coming back to these diffs for repeated type task things. It's definitely my FTP program as well. And I think it's like $39, so it's just really nice. And it's so much prettier than WinWhatever. Okay, I'll give you the cross-platform.

Oh, WinWhatever. But no 7-up integration. That's a doubter. That is. All right, yours. All right. Yours. So since we're all picking consoles, I'm going to pick my favorite, which is the Git Bash, which if you're not already using Git, A, you should be. You really should be.

But this is my favorite tool. You can just Google it. We'll have links to all of these tools in the show notes, but, um, it's, you need to have some, uh, you know, some being familiar with Linux or Unix type commands will definitely be, uh, will be helpful because everything, including your path is going to be treated, you know, Linux like, and it's going to come with its own set of Unix commands available for Windows. But, yeah, it's definitely my favorite way to Git. So do you add Git to your Windows path, or do you just use the Sijben window?

So I forget. Like, when you do the install, there's, like, these three options. Yeah. And one of them, I think the one that I do does end up adding it to the path if i remember right it's definitely the middle option and i don't remember what i've kind of gotten like numb to it and i'm just like click the middle right so you like this better than sigwin huh so oh so this is a great question thank you so i was a huge fan one b i was a huge fan of sigwin actually you Actually, you brought it up back in the day, but now this has simplified it greatly.

So, I mean, SigWin is great, and you can definitely do a lot more with it. So for those who aren't familiar with SigWin, that's a console where you can selectively decide what Unix tools you want want and you can add or remove them as you go along. And so it's really nice. And there's a whole suite of mirrors out there that are hosting different packages for it. And it's really awesome. And that was the way that I used Git for the longest period of time and was sold on it. And even when Git Bash came around,

I'm like, yeah, no, I got no time for that but uh the simplicity of git bash sold me on it to where i didn't have to worry about um you know using anything else to to you know interact with it and it had the majority of the git commands that i wanted to use anyways so yeah all right git bash one out cool So, yeah. All right. Get Bash 1 out. Cool. All right. And there was a recent update, you know, because of the, there might have been, you know, an exploit found in there. Might have been. Maybe. I'm actually surprised nobody picked Vim, but whatever. Because I'm sure that wouldn't start a flame war anywhere.

All right. So my number one pick is actually parallels for mac so i do even though i do dot net programming i like to do it on a mac and this kind of ties back into my screen flow suggestion so when i've recorded like the videos that i've put up on youtube.com coding blocks that was done using parallels so that I was running visual studio or SQL management studio inside the VM. Um, just like any other Mac application in its own window. And then, and then I record it with screen flow. And so it allows me to actually do any kind of programming, still use all my Mac utilities, use my Mac itself, which I love this computer.

And it's fantastic. So there's another piece of software out there called VMware Fusion. I've had a chance to work with both of them, and I prefer Parallels myself. I haven't done any performance testing. It just seems to be a little bit smoother and integrates a little bit better for me. I think for those that have, though, i remember right they were they were pretty close i mean it wasn't until you got into like specific uh like it was graphics that were more often than not going to be gaming and deciding factors which i was like man if you're going to game inside of a vm you've already got issues yeah go to boot camp right i mean if you're going to do that put a boot camp partition on there and just go that's a great thing that if you're not already aware of for either Parallels or

VMware Fusion, since you brought it up, your 1B. You can use a boot camp partition in either one of these. So you can have the luxury of when you need to boot directly off the raw hardware, you can boot Windows

in its own directly off of the hardware, you can boot Windows in its own, directly off of the hardware instead of being in a virtual machine. But for those other percentage of times where it can be in a virtual machine and you're not bothered by that, then you can just run it from Parallels or VMware inside of OS X and still access the same disk and same resources. Yeah, and it opens just like any other application on the machine, which is why I really like it because, like I said, I can do the screen recording. I can bounce back and forth between Visual Studio.

I can go into whatever. So it's a pretty excellent piece of software, and usually you can get it on sale for pretty cheap. You can snapshot and roll back too right um you cannot do that if it's a boot camp partition okay but if it's just a pure vm you can so you could i mean because it's basically just file on the disc right so if i finally hit up that canadian pharmacy and i catch something correct Correct. Just curious. Okay.

Not that I'm considering it. All right. So that's it for our individual top five. So now we are moving on to round two, which are the tools we all like. All right. You want to kick us off with number five? All right. So number five, we've mentioned it at least once on previous shows. I think twice technically.

Yeah, maybe. So Pluralsight. There's probably not a resource that any one of us use more as far as if we've got to learn something or learn about something quickly. This is probably the first place we go, right? I mean, we've talked before about... Well, if we're being, like, just to be clear here, you know, to the listener, we are excluding some of the, like, extremely common things. Like Google doesn't count. Right, right.

No, this is, I don't know, you're picking up... Stack overflow doesn't count. Right. You're not looking for a specific, how do I do this type thing. It's more about, hey, I'm looking at a new language or I'm looking at a new technology. I need the ins and outs of it pretty quick, right? This is the first place we probably all go before we get a book on, you know, deeper dives into the subject. So you can gauge how deep do you want to go in the topic, right?

So Pluralsight is probably, I mean, it made number five on our list and that's only because some of these other things we recommend, we just love that much. So anything in this top five that we all say they're pretty highly recommended yep and number four you got to have a great text editor we've got notepad plus plus or slash sublime here i myself am a sublime fan it's got tons of great plugins a million and a half shortcuts that do really weird awesome things and i love the i love the view of the the overview i don't even know where they call it in sublime but where you can see like

the entire document over on the right oh yeah map view and you can just like scroll over that i love that view in sublime that is fantastic idea i wish more uh editors had something like that yeah i like you can open directories too which is really nice for working on sets of files i don't know about plus++ supports that, but I use a Markdown plugin too, so every time I save, it generates a formatted rich text document for me, which is really nice.

Oh, that was a tip you were talking about. Yeah. Yeah, and we've mentioned for Notepad++, I mean, there's a lot of great plugins for each of these, but for Notepad++, we've mentioned specifically the Portman's T-SQL formatter, which is an awesome little utility in Notepad++. And Notepad++ is free.

Yeah. Sublime is not. It's like 80 bucks or something like that. Yeah, something like that. I think it was like $79. And here's the thing, like Sublime 3 is out in beta at least, I believe. Forever, yeah.

And there, yeah, yeah. It's just kind of annoying. Just like Gmail. Right. It'll come out of labs at least I believe forever yeah it's just kind of annoying just like gmail it'll come out of labs at some point but I mean both of them have fantastic plugin managers so you can just go to a plugin area and search and you'll find some stuff

I gotta say the templating system in Sublime like the shortcuts are just outstanding you can type five keystrokes and have a whole page of code. But both excellent, excellent resources. All right, so weighing in at number three, we recently talked about this one, and I think this might have been like a tip of the week one that Alan brought up, if I recall. But it comes in so handy and we use it so often, we just thought it deserved to mention, which is the Remote Desktop Connection Manager, which just, dun, dun, dun, got updated.

So maybe that log out button is fixed. Version 2.7 was just released uh november 18th and i think i think we actually talked about this in the show uh you know as a tip after that so i think that that release actually snuck in before we even realized it was there but yeah it's a great little tool you can have um a bunch of uh you know connections to different servers, and you can have them all grouped up, and you can have their credentials all roll up into a parent if you need to. There's a lot of really cool things about it that you can do with it.

If you do have multiple servers and you make connections to them simultaneously, you can keep them all docked together and just click through them and see the different servers one at a time. Or you can click up a higher level to a folder and you can kind of get an overview of all of those. So like what was going on on each of those. Or if you need to undock them and you can go full screen on them. It's a really nice little way to manage a lot of, if you need to manage a bunch of different servers

this is a great little tool for that and you can open groups too it's nice you got like five web servers you right click open group and they'll all pop up yeah yeah i haven't tried the the right click log off yet though yeah it's uh version 2.7 that was terrible daring daring enough to try that yet i gotta believe that believe that that was fixed though because one of the big features about this one though had to do with VMs, connecting to VMs too which I haven't really had a use

to play around with that yet to see how that works out. Cool. They say if you're remoting into machines and your automation is broken or it's just not feasible for you to set up automation yeah that's not realistic yeah if you're logging into two boxes uh you

know when it's every couple weeks and you know your automation is not broken you're just being pragmatic but it's something i like saying and turning my nose up at. That's your snobbery. Yeah, I passed it on. Now you can do it too. All right. Okay, who wants to take number two?

I think Outlaw's going to do it. Yeah, I mean, he's kind of in love with this one. Yeah, I'll definitely do this one. If you haven't already heard my voice enough, I'll talk about this one. So my favorite, let's see, browser plug-in for every browser, favorite website, favorite mobile app on every platform, LastPass. So if you're not already using a password manager, A, you're crazy. Absolutely. In the world we live in right now, you should absolutely be using a password manager. If it's not LastPass, pick one of the competitors, but you should be using one of them.

But this one happens to be my favorite. Like I said, it's available on every platform. They have a plugin on every browser on every platform. It can, obviously it's storing your passwords but it's doing it off securely you know as far as what last pass has they only have encrypted blobs they don't they don't have your data in the clear so from a trust no one type perspective they don't even have your password right right as i'm saying like they they know. They can't decrypt anything. And if you need to generate new passwords, they've got the generator in there to help you out with that too. It's just a great little way, great little utility and app so that you can have your passwords on any of the devices that you need them. But they can be secure passwords. And you can access them securely too. So another thing that

I like to do is on my machines, like I'll only have, um, certain machines are trusted. Majority of the machines that I touch are not. And so I'm always prompted to log in, but I'm also a big fan of two factor authentication. So, um, you can use, uh, like a, um, like a Google authenticator app, uh, or something similar to that, as well as a YubiKey for the multi-factor authentication. Um, but yeah, it's fantastic. And so just to expand on that, because I, I mean, this is still didn't even list all the features. This is actually one thing that's, uh, if you are using a password manager and you haven't talked to people in your family about this,

you probably should because it'll shock you how many people in your family use the same password for their bank, their email. There's a good chance if you're listening to this, your parents use your name as their password. Yeah. So, I mean, this is, this is literally something that you really should bring up. But one of the other things I want to talk about is it's free to use. So if you have a smartphone, if you have, you know, your desktop computer, like you said, there's plugins. Those are free to use in your browsers.

However, on your smartphone, you can go straight to LastPass.com and log in and do it. If, though, you want to be able to use.com and log in and do it if though you want to be able to use their application and make your life so much easier to where it will log into things for you you can pay 12 a year and a dollar a month yeah i mean seriously a dollar a month you're going to spend more than that at starbucks yeah and it will save you from being potentially like your life getting turned upside down oh Oh, there's so many great things. Like there's a security check. Well, there's also the thing that we use is sharing passwords.

So if you pay for the $12 premium account, it's the cheapest premium thing I know of, right? You probably spent more on Candy Crush. You don't have to pay to be a recipient of the share. Right. So you can share it without you ever seeing the password. So, yeah. So I could have a password to some website, and I could share it with a family member or a friend,

and I can decide if they see the password, if they make changes to the password, I can make sure that those changes are reflected back to me. It's a a great feature but again in order to share that password you have to be paying the 12 a year subscription but i do i i don't want to belabor this one too long but seriously you would be shocked how many people your friends your family don't know good practices around passwords like i mean i just talked to a family member the other day, and his password's the same for every one of his accounts. All that means is some hacker out there is going to find the site that's the easiest

to hack, and then they're going to go take that information and plug it into every site on the planet and see if they can get in. Well, for a long time there in the dictionaries, monkey was like the most common password. I thought password was. Was it monkey? Well, I think the ones that weren't password. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, again, our number two favorite,

and it might have made it to number one, if not four. Well, let's all say it at the same time. One, two, resharver. Resharver. Yeah. I bet no one saw that one coming, right? That's dirty. So the only reason this should not make number one is because it's not cheap.

That's the only drawback to it. But it's so worth it, though. Okay, it's expensive, you say. $350, right? $350 for, is that? Hold on. If you were a carpenter, and you had to go out and you needed to buy a miter saw, you rent it.

What you got? 30-day trial. And then you reformat. Were you going somewhere with this? You reformat once a month, right? No, I was going to say that, like, you know, depending on what your profession is, there are plenty of professions where you need a good tool for the job to help you get it done.

This is one of those. So that $350 price that you're talking about, I don't even think it was that much. Hold on, let me take that back. Up front, I thought it was more like $150. So it depends on whether it's for a company or for an individual. So let me take that back. I said it wrong.

So ReSharper for a company to buy for somebody is $250. If you're an individual and you want to get it, it's $149. Yeah, that sounds and if you want to get the ultimate which includes resharper resharper plus c++ jetbrains.net profilers and the code coverage tool which both joe and outlaw have gushed over we've talked about dot peak and dot cover that's a hundred dollars more so here's the deal and you gotta be doing a lot of c c++ development though i think for ultimate to be worthwhile no because that's the only one thing in there is that the other one are the profilers and the coverage tools so you're basically paying a hundred dollars for dot cover and um a memory

thing i believe no resharper ultimate was uh like six hundred dollars uh no not for individual that's what i'm saying oh right, right, right, right. So, again, I think we should kind of tell some of our favorite features about this. I think mine is when I was learning link, the fact that it would put like a little tool thing out there to the left. And if you write like a for loop, it'd be like, hey, do you want to turn this into a link statement? It was a great way for me to learn link queries. Yep. I mean, like seriously, granted, that's probably not the most useful thing that it has, but it was definitely good for me learning the ins and outs because I could look at my before and the after

and just keep control Z and control shift Z to see what changed, right? Yep. I got a good analogy for my favorite thing about it. Have you ever heard the horror story about going into a hotel room with a blacklight? That's how I feel about ReSharper. You look at some code, you know, like you just started a new job. And you see all these little hashes off to the right? Well, before you start ReSharper, you look at something and you're like,

all right, you know, whatever, it's all right, and you install ReSharper, and then there's like pink all over down the left side. You're like, all right, whatever, it's all right. And you install ReSharper and then there's pink all over down the left side. You're like, oh, what is this monster? I didn't even know. All these variables aren't used. Yada, yada. It's like the black light in the hotel room. Yeah, that's great.

That's an awesome analogy. I was actually going to mention some of the code cleanup features are awesome. Yeah. Ability to do the test runner. Finding replaces across your files or your solutions. Oh, fixed namespaces. Yeah, that. But I was thinking if you wanted to rename something, right, and it'll just find and replace it throughout all your files.

Because you could try to do it just by doing a find and replace as text, but that's not necessarily going to be as safe because maybe your use of the word string might have been inside of a string or part of a string, and it wasn't actually the type that was meaning to be renamed. That's a horrible example. Visual Studio actually supports that one now, which actually brings up a funny point.

It's like a lot of things that ReSharper did, Visual Studio has been kind of slipping in, and of course ReSharper has been slipping in new features too. But what's funny is a lot of times they'll say something cool that ReSharper does and somebody else says, oh yeah, Visual Studio's already got them. Like that's where it came from then. Yeah, it pretty much is. I mean, one of the key examples is if you're in an older version of visual studio

and you need some javascript support dude resharper will give it to you um however the newer versions of visual studio do a pretty fine job with javascript so um yeah it is true visual studio slipping some of them but some of it's just not as good. I mean – Yeah, and ReSharper has got its own compiler. It's really interesting how it kind of works, and it actually kind of compiles your code. It keeps a copy around, and so it gets to see what's not used. There's also different conventions where variable names, stuff like that, unused code. I keep saying that, but it's really awesome when you open up a file and you say, oh, there's three variables that aren't used. Why aren't they used anymore?

Yeah. And even for, I would say especially, I mean, we're experienced programmers, but for people who are fairly new to the programming world, like a lot of times you'll see a bunch of if-elses, you know, where you're assigning to a variable. It'll be like, hey, turn this into a ternary. And so it will kind of, it will lead people towards doing consistently better code as you move along as well. So there's just a ton of features in there. I love when you see condition will never be met. So it's like either you never set the variable away from false or something, or else you're checking if a non-nullable type is equal to null.

And you don't see that sort of thing normally with the compiler. You don't even get warnings for it. Yeah, it just ignores it. Yeah, it's nice. I mean, we could go on and on about it, but I think it's fairly safe to say if you're doing this as an individual, $150, if you're making decent money as a programmer, this will probably turn you into an even better programmer.

Agreed. All right. We got a few minutes left. Yeah. So how to make a good tool. I want to talk a little bit about what are some of the things in common with these tools and maybe some things that we don't like. But the first thing I wanted to mention is that if you really want me to love your tool,

then you need to support Chocolaty, which means I need to be able to support to install your app via command line which does not mean it has to be free it just means it needs to have something like uh sublime you can install via chocolate you just have to insert your key afterwards i'm not sure if resharper supports it but a lot of other things do that are paid but there are still ways around that so if you can make it happen support chocolatey so uh you know choco install sub it up yeah and actually along that lines i'm really big on the free trials like

you know i deal with a lot of computers i reformat often i do all sorts of crazy stuff a lot of times like beyond compare you, I install that tool all the time, but I don't always want to go look up the key that's in my email somewhere in order to hook it up right now. I just want to use the tool real quick, and then later at my convenience, I'll pop in my license. So I definitely like having that trial available. I do it all the time with ReSharper.

Yeah, I do that a lot too. I run that thing for 30 days before I type in the license I've owned for six months. ReSharper is a 30-day trial as well. Who had this next one? I think these are pretty much like all of Joe's France, really.

Just to be honest. I don't like icons and tools, especially when there's no text and I can't control F for it. So if it's like a windows app like please put the text don't make me hover to figure out what the hammer means so i like to be able to see that means thor comes down yeah it probably does and i like to be able to google for stuff too so put some some stuff up there and even along that lines this is definitely a rant i want to be able to copy and paste out of the application so don't show me a bunch of text in like a you know a window wpf app that i can't copy alert box

oh man those are the worst oh don't it's like especially if it's like a guid or something i'm like trying to type the error code like 1 8 8 11 f like no no copy paste guys oh microsoft is horrible horrible about that if you get a windows error it throws it up there and it's like hey you need to go to this site and it's like 5 000 characters long you never controlled c in this you can't you can't you can't highlight text no the ones i'm talking about believe me no no no you just control c the window huh yeah you didn't know this really like some of these windows some of the windows that you're talking about and not necessarily all of them but uh sometimes you'll get like an error message or

some random window will pop up and you just you you're in this little window this little modal right and it just has an okay option or an okay cancel or something like that just ctrl c and then go over to a notepad and ctrl v and you know whatever that window was you get the text representation kidding me nice that's much better than me taking screenshots yeah which i've done that's usually what it is yeah interesting i'll try that uh that's been around for a long time well this shouldn't be hard to replicate we can probably throw up an error windows pretty quick right that is right could not run seven up yeah all right so uh joe had another one here that i thought was kind of interesting so he was talking about copying data in sql server and if you've ever done that it's a right click on the database all tasks export data well you're

typically doing the same thing every time but you got got to click 50 checkboxes to do it every single time. And, and I actually agree with this. Give the, give the user some ability to say, Hey, make these my defaults or save this particular configuration that I just did, because I don't want to have to go check these 50 check boxes again just to do the same operation that I do every day 50 times so um you know ability to save common steps that one's that that one uh so macros is what you want not macro you want tools that have macros not necessarily a macro just hey this is the configuration this is my default configuration I want to I want to generate tables. I want to drop tables. I want to do this.

I don't think dropping tables should be that quick. When you create the script to do the thing, but that's what I'm saying. When you check those options, you want those to stay there. Yeah, and Beyond Chimera does a great job of this by letting you save sessions. I can say, div this folder with

this folder, only show me JS files, use know use a binary comparison yeah does win merge do that yeah and i can say that so you know by after a year on the computer i might have you know five or six different comparers kind of saved i don't have to think about it where they are you know there's none of that cognitive dissonance it's just click all right diff it out you too mine's free all right um so another one honor the theme if it's some sort of utility that's a plug-in to an existing application or if it's or if it's something else that you're using you know use what's there make it look the same like it uh one that um an application that i used a while back that was java one thing that drove me crazy is it looked like because it was java it looked

like a java application i wanted it to look like windows like you know did you have to like open up a command prompt and you know start java probably i mean it's been a while but i don't know it's just one of those things like if you're if you're on windows 8 make it look like windows 8 if you're on windows xp it should look like xp you know honor the operating system or the theme or whatever application you're in you know make it look somewhat consistent where if you're trying to write it to be multi-platform figure it out wow words of wisdom by alex underwood there we go um all right all right who's got this one uh just another one i had was um writing the standard out and standard error not such a big deal for windows tools but uh it's kind of annoying when things don't have a good

way to output so you can't really automate them and also really wanted to pitch for config files like being able to save things is nice but even better is being able to take those files with like your keyboard shortcuts or your color scheme or whatever and be able to take that and port that to another computer is huge all right so speaking of config files so in other words you're not a fan of the registry or shortcuts i should say i'm not a fan of the registry. Dude, if you build an application and it has a lot of functionality in it, please give me shortcut keyboard mappings. I do not like going through menus. I do not like doing those things.

I want to be able to hit a key on my keyboard or two or three. I do not like that, Sam. That's right. And don't make me take these hands off this keyboard. Yeah, I mean, like, these hands were built for a keyboard give me shortcuts so yeah that's that's actually one of my big things is and a lot of windows things have that somewhat built in already where you can alt something to get a menu or something but but having shortcut keys goes a long way to making an application usable especially for programmers indeed Indeed. Yeah.

So what do you say? We've got the new year coming up. We do. You want to get into some resolutions? Absolutely. I know it's kind of like a double-edged sword. You know, it's like by making a resolution, I'm pretty much guaranteeing that I'm not going to do it.

All right. I kind of like where we're going with this. But part of me just likes also, you know, kind of getting organized and trying to think about it, high-level goals. So maybe if I reach for the stars, maybe I'll get somewhere. You'll land on the moon. Okay. Let's hear your first one. All right.

So for me, the first thing is I really need to stop whining about JavaScript. Okay. So this is the first thing you're not going to do this next year. That's right. So this is a little backwards. January 1 is going to be... I guess another way of phrasing this is just trying to get more in touch with my

UI side. So I need to focus more on UIs, and I know that it's uncomfortable for me, and it's not something I'm particularly good at, but there's a lot of value to it, and I think maybe because I'm so bad at it, hopefully, that spending a little more time thinking about it and working on it would give me

some pretty big returns so yeah I'm going to try to stop whining about JavaScript I'm going to try to work with things like Unity and HTML 5 and Windows app stores and stuff stuff it's not January 1st yet

so does this mean Angular is in your future some Node.js maybe Hey, it's not January 1st yet. So does this mean Angular is in your future? Some Node.js maybe? Yeah, maybe. What kind of framework are we thinking about? Ember? Backbone? I think Angular is interesting, but I'm also interested in others. It's already been a week. Hold on. WPF mobile stuff too.

I count that, so it doesn't have to necessarily mean JavaScript, but it does mean I should stop whining about JavaScript. All right. Do you want to give one? Are we doing these in a... Yeah, sure. I can go. So in the vein of bettering myself

and from an educational point of view, I want to get into Ruby and Rails development. I want to, maybe not career-wise, but definitely from my own kind of experience and just expanding my own breadth there, I'd like to put Ruby in the toolbox. Do you have a specific app in mind? Nope, nothing specific in it.

Really. I just, I, you hear so much about it and it's just one of those things that I honestly, I feel guilty as long as it's been around and I still haven't gotten around to it because, you know, like at first when, when it first came up, I'm like, eh, it's another fad. It won't last. And then, you know, a couple more years go by. A decade later. Yeah, crap. That thing's still around, huh? And it's got quite the following. And, you know, yeah, like you hear nothing but awesome things about it.

Except for performance. I mean, okay, well, but I've definitely heard that, like, in terms of being able to turn things around fast, you I've I've heard nothing but awesome things about it so you know even if I don't do anything with it professionally I would just like to better my own self by um you know taking the time to get to know it you know so you want it in the tool belt so if you have a need for a lightweight web application that you need to get done fast and I't want to spend a lot of time with, then you might want to go with Ruby on Rails. Yeah, and Rails specifically is supposed to follow a lot of the best practices and patterns. So I like that.

I mean, we've done multiple episodes now on patterns, and I'm sure there's going to be more to come because we haven't even come close to covering them all but um yeah so there's a lot of good foundational kind of principles about it that I like and like I said I already feel guilty about you know having overlooked it all these years anyways yeah and I didn't mean to diss it you know you can use it for larger projects too but no it just sounded like that's where the the niche you were looking to fill I mean well but i mean like you you say that about the larger apps i mean there's definitely some oh massive some definitely you know uh you know large infrastructures that are right down the back of that so yep yeah so mine is a little interesting is i want to create some sort of course. Like a golf course? Not so much. A race course.

Most people go broke. It could be a race course on programming. So I don't know. I've been thinking about doing something on maybe Angular or I don't know, maybe some other UI, maybe AXDJS, maybe some C Sharp stuff. I don't really know database. I mean, I like it all. So I've just been trying to think, I mean, we've done some blog posts here and there, and they've all been kind of, you know, piecemeal. We'll, we'll throw one out there and

it's one little piece of a puzzle somewhere and we'll do another one. But I think a lot of times, like with programmers, they have a hard time seeing what the whole picture is like. Even if you started a new framework like Angular, one of the things that's not apparently clear to people who start these things are what does the file structure look like when you're done, right? Like you have this app. Well, all the examples online are here. This is how you tie up or two-way bind a controller with something else, right?

Well, where do these files go and how do they tie together and how does it all work? So pretty soon on Pluralsight, I'll be watching one of your courses. I don't know. I don't know. But I don't know. I've just been trying to think of things. So, I mean, if you guys, if there's anything that anybody's interested in, let us know and, you know, Ruby, can you do a course on Ruby? I know where a good free one is at Codecademy. So, and I mean, that's also one of the challenges too, right? There's tons of information out there, but this is just more for, I don't know, doing it. Because I enjoy doing this.

We all enjoy helping people out. And this is just something that would be kind of fun. And I don't know. We'll see. Yeah. All right. All right. So another one for me is I want to get more in the practice of writing more functional, kind of a little bit more reactive type code. So I know a little bit about functional from reading Hacker News and Reddit, and I definitely like a lot of things about it.

I know I don't want to go full functional for a lot of reasons. Now, when you read Reddit for your functional or reactive stuff, what kind of kittens are we talking about? Different kind of Reddit. So, slash R slash programming, mentioned a little bit earlier. So, yeah, if you go there and everyone's going to be slamming comments around, it's full of trolls, can be a really negative environment. And the only people that don't get any crap

are the Haskell and Erlang programmers, of which there are, in the real world, probably like 10. We are not about to go down in flames on this show, are we? It's not a show unless I say 10 risky things. But anyway, there's

a lot of benefit to programming a functional style and i'd like to reap some more of those benefits cool all right so uh another thing that i would like to be better at i need to social better i'm i'm horrible about it it's just i don't want to see your life on facebook i don't care so you're starting instagram but i need to try to be better at this thing so who should i be snapchatting to you're gonna say your name on there it's not it's just like but any of the social platforms like i just need to get better i I'm probably, of all of them, I'm not good at any of them. And by that, what I mean is I'm not in the habit of caring enough to share,

like, hey, look at this meal that I'm eating right now. So I don't have 3 billion tweets or Facebook statuses or... Or 30. Or 30. And you want to fix this. But I feel like I should get to this. But it's just that even on Google+, it doesn't matter what

the, what the platform is on any of them. I'm just not as social as I probably should be. Cause I feel like, I feel like in this day and age, like it's not an option, right? Like you just, you need to do it period. You need to, you need to be on the various platforms and not just one, but you need to be on multiple of them. So, you know, pick your few favorites and, you know, be better at it. And I just feel like because I'm so not interested in sharing the little minutia that happens in my day that, but yet other people do. And hey, you know, good for those people that do because sometimes, you know, you never know what's going to stick and become the next viral post. But, you know, because I never throw that spaghetti against the wall, obviously nothing's going to stick. And there are a lot of benefits to social networking.

Like, you know, it's nice to be able to ask, you know, for a real-world example of the visitor pattern and, you know, have someone you know throw one at you. So, you know, that's really nice. And especially in this kind of LinkedIn time of, you know, time of days, it's nice to be able to kind of have that network there and working for you. Yeah, and it always kind of feels awkward too because, like, you know, if somebody, you know, messages me and then I'm like, well, I don't know how should I respond. Or, like, if I message them, then I'm like, oh, I hope that didn't sound – did that come across right?

You know, it's just, like, in – like, I go through this, like, you know, we've joked around about my OCD before about, like, you know, it goes crazy when it comes time to social, and it's just like, ah, I don't know what to do. All the words. Yeah, and next thing you know, it's, like, three weeks have gone by, and you still owe mommy email yeah yeah so oh god especially like on to the emails so like you know it's a good

thing we don't get a lot of emails to code to comments at coding box rather than going through the uh the contact form because like if you're waiting on me to reply to some of those emails i'm gonna be like really bad about it i might like he might be lucky to be like get a thanks out of me like hey thanks it's not because i'm trying to be rude or anything it's just like um i don't know maybe am i socially awkward i guess like you know no you are i think digitally you were digitally socially awkward yeah yeah so if we could coin a new term i am digitally socially awkward like who's dsa and by by the way, I really liked it. This is probably your kid's worst nightmare. Dad's trying to use social media more.

Yeah. What could go wrong? Yeah, this will be awesome. It was funny trying to get him to actually open up some of his LinkedIn profiles. I was like, why do you even have one, dude? You know. I just wanted to keep it to myself. I wanted to look at my own wall.

It's my stapler. I look pretty. All right. So my other resolution is I want to be better about creating content, especially for this. And so I'm going to try to make myself write either a blog post or do a video every month. So

don't know what the topics will be, but you know, something that will help out with programming, learning stuff, whatever, but just being a little bit more diligent about it, because I think I did like maybe four this past year and it just takes a lot of time. And so you have to set aside, like, I mean, anytime we write one of these things, like it spans multiple days. And so I just want to make sure that I kind of stay on top of it because, you know,

it helps you guys out. It helps us out. It keeps the skills sharp. So that's pretty much what it boils down to. Yeah, and I have a lot of respect for content producers. You know, it's really easy to retweet

or to, you know, just kind of click like on that Facebook page. And it's really hard to make something and put yourself out there, especially when there's so much good stuff and you're competing against the whole rest of the internet. So I think it's really important to try and do that. And I think you reap a lot of rewards from being a content producer.

Or you get shot down, bang, bang. That might happen too. So yeah, either which way i might i might create some content and i might not publish it anywhere so yeah and i've got one more here so i ended up writing about this on our facebook page actually which we don't keep up with very well but you should still go friend us oh are you waiting on me to do some social like on our facebook page yeah so uh one thing i want to do is is stop saving things to my desktop on my computer. And really what I mean by that is I just need to be more digitally organized.

And a big part of that for me is email categorization. So it's so easy to just kind of like click on my – I got a way to help you break that habit. Yeah? What's that? I don't know about if this is worth you, but as far as saving things to the desktop, just right-click and turn off the ability to show anything on your desktop so you only see the background oh but i don't actually go to my desktop to find this stuff i still go through explorer it's just a place to dump same here yeah but but really i don't even use the desktop that much the email

is a bigger thing for me it's so much easier on the phone to just like kind of slide archive slide archive slide archive and i search for something like I'm looking for my new order confirmation and I find my confirmation, it's on page 3 after 150 pages worth of spam emails I never unsubscribed from. So I need to get better about kind of deleting stuff out of my email because I'm losing searchability

and usability from it. Yeah, I hate that they did the archive. Good luck for you. Yeah, I'm working on it. I have have like 5 000 unread emails in my inbox so yeah whatever i like inbox zero but it's tough to maintain yeah i've been doing that and didn't even realize that was a thing or i was doing it before it was a thing and they don't still do it and i like having an action folder it's like if there's an email i need to respond to then take it out of that the inbox so you know the inbox is that's crap no no no no but if you can leave it in the box then you go in there and you like you just your mind just like spins flag each email in there

just flag it either either flag it or search do i like this whole like gmail years ago broke me of the whole folder categorization crap. Just search. Yeah, but see, I like to only have a few things. That's why I have 5,000 unread in my inbox. I like to have zero in my inbox. So if I'm looking for something I need to do or respond to, then I want to go to action. By default, when I get a buzz in my pocket,

I don't want to open it up and see the 20 things I need to do by the end of the week because it stresses me out. It makes me think about things when I should be focusing on, you know, the drive through. Well, you know, what's interesting. And this is funny. Like I know I get the, like the Twitter emails that come in and I get the, uh, various different emails that come in. Like somebody subscribed, somebody wrote on this, whatever. Um, most of them are, you got retreated, you got favorited. That's just stuff that makes you feel good. But then if you don't immediately get rid of it, it just junks up your inbox, right? Yeah, you're going to see that email like 10, 100 times until you finally get rid of it.

Right. And so I don't know. That's my problem with email, and that's why I probably don't manage it well because there's so much noise that comes through that I'm just like, whatever. But as far as the inbox zero type philosophy is concerned, i'm not like setting aside like some people have like well i will only read my email at this time in the morning or in the afternoon crap like that like i don't do that but i definitely you know uh like i said without without even trying to adhere to some inbox zero type philosophy i do end up having inbox zero only because like

you know at the times when i have a moment like having inbox zero only because like, you know, at the times when I have a moment, like if I'm standing in line at, you know, the, you know, for lunch or something like that, you know, then, you know, I can, I can read through so that the, you've been favorited or whatever, that, that random kind of crap that comes through, you know, that I should be better about responding to. I can, I just read through it then. Right.

Yeah. We all manage it differently. There's no doubt about that. Yeah. All right. Well, you say we wrap this one up with some tips of the week. Let's do it. Yep.

All right. I guess I'm going first. So I read an interesting study a while back and I've kind of been thinking about it ever since, but basically said something to the effect of people being more honest in the morning. So now that you know that, you can schedule your day accordingly. So you can write – Wait, we're recording at night. Yeah, everything we've said is a lie.

Yeah, so, you know, like maybe you're more prone to overpromising at night. So maybe you should save off and write that status email in the morning. You know what I'm saying? All right. Save yourself some trouble. So just schedule accordingly. Nice. Okay, so my tip of the week, and I'll give full credit where credit's due,

but I cannot, I won't be able to pronounce his name, but I'll pronounce his Twitter handle, uh, H mem copy. He, uh, he tweeted a message about resharper's greedy brace feature. I didn't even realize this existed and apparently neither did he, but we'll include a link to his tweet where he shows a working example of this. But basically what happens is let's say you have a block of code and you want to put that inside of, uh, like any kind of other block, like a four each or a while or a try or whatever it might be. And so you write your, you write your, um, like in his example here that he, he shows in the tweet, you write your try statement and you stub out the, uh, the curly braces. Right. And in the past, maybe you would either copy and paste the block of code

that you wanted to be inside of that block, or you would delete the closing brace and then move it down to the bottom and then let your ID or ReSharper automatically reformat everything accordingly. But instead, what you can do is go to your closing brace and then control alt shift up or down, depending on the direction you need to go, if you've got too much. And you can move the brace down and it'll reformat the code in line as you're going. And it's called that greedy brace operation. It is awesome to see this in action. All right. So my tip of the week is, this is more just for people that may just skim over things, but in link, a lot of times you get a list of objects and you want to sort that information. Well, a lot of people probably just use the order by because they're used to like link to SQL or something. Well, that creates a copy. So if you had two megs of RAM,

take it up. Now you got four megs. Um, one of the cool things that you can do is you can use link sort and that will sort a list in place. So, or, or, uh, an enum or whatever it is. Um, but then that will, that should eat up less memory on your heap. It may not perform quite as fast as doing the order by cause you're literally just, um, creating a copy and sorting on the fly as opposed to having to shuffle things around in the same collection, but it can save space on the heap. And it is nice if you're trying to order a collection that you're going to use further down the page without having to have multiple variables exist and by default it uses

quick sort algorithm and i found a nice little link that had a great little animation to show you how the quick sort works and if you want to go into the implementation details of that you can look at that too so That's actually from Wikipedia. There's actually that animation. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh. I believe there's similar animations in Wikipedia's article on sorting algorithms.

Oh, very cool. Yeah, it's excellent stuff. So that link will be in the show notes, and that is my tip of the week. Very nice. Yep. link will be in the show notes and that is my tip of the week very nice so yep so uh this month we talked about some tools and uh also our new year resolutions uh on the technical side so the things that we're not going to do right uh i don't know i mean we still get to whine about javascript i'm confused i'm gonna try not to okay for at least until February sometime. Does it last that long? Well, that's about the time that all the gyms empty out, right?

Yeah. That's exactly what I was basing that on. All right. So as we said before, be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, and more using your favorite podcast app, and be sure to leave us a review. We greatly appreciate that, and it does go a be sure to leave us a review. We greatly appreciate that. And it does go a long way to help others find us. And as I've said before, you know, mention us to a couple of friends, share the word, you know, and let them know.

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that alan has coming wasn't there one on Link? Oh, it was like Link versus Never Gonna Get It Never Gonna Get It Happy New Year Make sure to follow us on Twitter at CodingBlocks Happy New Year, Happy Holidays, everybody be safe

and best wishes for the new year, right? Yeah. Maybe.