Introduction When working in a software project adhering to Agile methodologies, there can be many stories and tasks being worked on simultanously, in various states, across the team. Maybe a few active, maybe some waiting for Pull Request reviews, etc. Sometimes it’s easy to lose track of tasks that have been in progress for a while. Here’s a way to draw attention to these tasks through the use of automated color-coding rules.

Hello from Hugo! I decided to retire my current blog, which runs on Ghost. Having a static site seems much more suited to my needs, and doesn’t have a monthly hosting cost, thanks to static hosting. As part of the migration, I seeded my new blog with a few not-completely-outdated posts from the past. Migration from Ghost isn’t the most straightforward exercise, as I’ve discovered. A short tl;dr about my migration experience follows.

I’m in Dublin for DECODED conference this week! And the Irish Tech News just published an article with a bit about me. Check it out here!

Today is Take Your Child to Work day. Well… when I’m not traveling, I work in my basement office. The kids spend plenty of time down there in general, have attended many a conference call, and have seen their fair share of code and whiteboarding. So today, we switched things up a bit, and I took my two daughters (young teens) to a local DigiGirlz event at Microsoft Store. The two-hour event was split: An hour of DigiGirlz, and an Hour of Code.

I had the honor of presenting a session during the 2016 Global Azure Bootcamp, a worldwide event held in 162 confirmed locations. The individual events at each location are typically run by Microsoft MVPs and community leaders. This year, I gave a talk in Redmond, on the Microsoft campus. Coincidentally, the event took place in the same building my team works out of. This event was run by Manesh Raveendran, a Microsoft Azure MVP.

Ryan CrawCour and I recorded a fun session for //build/ 2016: Modeling Data for NoSQL Document Databases Document databases are non-relational databases that store data as collections of JSON documents, such as: { "id": "P468", "title": "Modeling Data for NoSQL Document Databases", "speakers": [ {"name": "David Makogon"}, {"name": "Ryan CrawCour"} ], "synopsis": "...", "tags": ["data"], "level": 200 } If you hail from the relational database world, this type of embedded, denormalized document might seem a bit jarring!