Design for people For the first time in maybe a decade, I attended a local, in-person, community-organized conference where I wasn’t a speaker. I had a front-row seat at Town Hall Seattle for CascadiaJS 2026, and the change of pace was exactly what I needed — no slides to rehearse, just two days to listen, ask questions, and meet people. CascadiaJS has a reputation as the warm, slightly silly, deeply human corner of the JavaScript world, and it lived up
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Update 3/7/20: Added Oregon State’s Online Bachelor’s in Computer Science Update 5/22/17: Added Techbridge girls in the list of other resources In more than 20 years in technology, I’ve met plenty of great women developers. And yet, men outnumber women in tech by a large margin. Major tech companies are being challenged to increase diversity and inclusiveness. Learning coding is a big opportunity for people of all types. With the help of a female friend, I’ve compiled a list of
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If you could talk to you Amazon Echo about SharePoint, what would you discuss? Conversation as a Platform (CaaP) is a hot topic in technology in 2016. The Echo device just celebrated it’s second birthday, Facebook Messenger just launched a new commerce model and millions in China are using messaging apps to transfer money every day. My Story with Personal Digital Agents I’ve been exploring conversations with personal digital agents like Alexa, Siri and Cortana for more than 2 years
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Aerodynamic in Sonic Pi sounds great. There’s just one thing that bugged me. The bells. The walk-through, featured on Hacker News, Techcrunch, Twitter and more, explains the code for the song in detail. And, the author writes that the sound, or timbre, of the bells in the intro isn’t quite right. Working on this project takes me back to my college days. Back when I was a Music Performance and Computer Science double major at Northwestern, I would get questions.
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Full Session Recording Last Wednesday, I presented a session on SharePoint’s Business Connectivity Services at Microsoft’s TechEd 2014 North America. It’s mostly demo and the recording is available on Channel 9. To start, I show connecting to a SQL Database from SharePoint Designer, creating an external list, modifying it’s views, adding an external business Data Column to a Document Library and surfacing the External Data in a Word Document. Development Example Part of Demo When @jthake told me my session
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The Question A reader asks: I’ve been given a custom web part based on the SharePoint 2010 Core Results Web Part. The web part overrides OnInit to provide a custom search query to the web part. I need to modify it to add a button in a new column. How can I do that in a way that adapts to the proper document content type? Re-Factor Personally, I’ve used the Core Results Web Part to aggregate Document Results before, but I
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This week I started 2 classes on Coursera and even completed the lectures and assignments for 1. It started a month ago when some friends on Facebook turned me onto a Massive Open Online Course site, or MOOC, called Coursera. I looked at the offerings at the time and subscribed in an upcoming class titled “What’s Your Big Idea.” Then this week when the first class started, I ended up enrolling in “Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems.” Coursera
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Question from a friend A friend of a friend asks: I know there’s stuff all over the web that tells developers how to programmatically store documents into a SharePoint 2013 document library, but what source would you recommend? One of the groups on one of my projects has an image capture application built in Visual Basic. They need to be able to create folders within a SharePoint 2013 document library and store reports in that folder. And my friend adds:
Read more →Troubleshooting SharePoint requires understanding the 8 Windows Services the platform depends on. Use this table to help identify services while researching issues. Also, pay attention to the account the service uses to run. Security All of the services run with the permissions of the Local System with the following exceptions: SPTimerV3 runs as the account you designate in the SharePoint Configuration Wizard as the Farm Account OSearch runs as the service you configure for it in Central Admin SPTimerV3,
Read more →If you are in the Austin area, don’t miss my upcoming presentation to the Austin SharePoint User Group: ———————————————————– Join us for the February 10th Meeting of the Central Texas SharePoint User Group! “Integrating External Data with the Business Data Catalog” February 10th Meeting Description: This session will take an in-depth look into the Business Data Catalog (BDC) with Microsoft SQL Server. It will include an overview of the Business Data Catalog, an introduction to configuring the BDC, and a
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