Author: sensei
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Self-serve Backup Configuration Automation Application
While working for a major financial company, I became the development owner of an application to allow the self configuration of application server backups, There were approximately 20,000 servers in this organization and Petabytes of backups occurring nightly There was a dedicated team of people configuring backups and they were crushed with the load. To…
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Why I prefer an Agile/Scrum approach to software development
After 30 years of developing software I came to the conclusion years ago that in most cases, an Agile approach to development is superior. The problems with SDLC are several fold. Most are based on deficiencies in the human element… Embarrassment of divulging lack of expertise, the vanity of believing one can know everything in advance,…
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Stumbled on a Javascript Bug
Wow, This is rare. While writing code, I stumbled on a bug in the language. In my application, I’m using the mod operator (%) and I have used it for decades successfully (although not only in JavaScript). So the thing I’m working on has a circular array so I need to move the index…
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Replacing a 100 Year old Bond Ticker Tape machine
A major financial organization had a problem. It seems that there was a very minor piece of information that is published in their newspaper on a daily basis and the machine for reading it was ancient. The machine was a ticker tape machine! They needed a replacement as the old machine was dying and ticker…
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High Performance Outage Tracking Dashboard
This application was for senior managers wanting to monitor the current global status of major incidents… ones significantly impacting a global financial company. It has been my experience that when working with executives, they generally was as little fuss as possible. No user id’s no passwords, at most a URL bookmarked. So this effort was…
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Term Life Insurance Billing Rewrite
This project was for a life insurance company that had a legacy Life Insurance and Billing system built in dBase. The system allowed the entry of customers, calculated the rates based on their age and a few other statistics, then produced a bill for mailing to the customers and tracked the payment status of the…
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Pepsi Challenge Running Race customer aquisition Software system vintage 1982
“The Pepsi Challenge” The Pepsi Challenge was a running race series sponsired by Pepsico where participants times were tracked and tabulated and Pepsi sent everyone a coupon for a 2-Liter bottle after their race. Our role was to create a database system that enabled the entry of the race results by staff, generated the age/sex series…
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Let it Blow
It’s done. I blew 4-6 inches of cellulose … 23 bags in all. It looks like snow storm up there. I learned a few things during blowing: You have to break up the cellulose fed into the blower and do not over feed it else you will clog, You can hear both correct treatment…
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Documenting what is there.
I Plan on videoing the whole attic before blowing in case I ever need to know where or what something is as it will now be buried under 4 inches of cellulose
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Building structures in the attic before blowing insulation Part II
I’m almost done 1) I’ve built the sub structure for the storage platform 2) Built the sub structure for the gang plank 3) Built the dam around the air handler 4) Am about the build the dam around the access hole In thinking about moving around int he attic after blowing insulation, I…