Ben Carpenter

Over the past two weeks, I've been working on studying for the Microsoft Programming in C# Certification. It's been a little bit of a struggle, figuring out exactly how to do the studying. All of my past exams have come about as part of a class. The exam is tailored to the class, so if you paid attention and did the homework and understood things as they came along, you should expect to be prepared by the time of the exam. In this case, there's just a standalone exam to prove you understand programming in C# to whatever standard they think is reasonable. And as far as I can tell, there's no way to know what their standard is without taking the exam. At the moment, I'm going through a course I found on Udemy that's supposed to prepare you for it, but I'm not sure if it really covers well enough all of the topics the exam touches on. I think taking the official practice exam will give me a good idea of how thoroughly I need to know the material, but it wou...

It's good to have projects outside of your work time. They can be sources of entertainment as just-for-fun projects. They can aid in career advancement as training projects. They can better the world as open-source projects or tools you make publicly available. But which project should you work on when you only have so much time to work on them and several different projects you want to work on? Here are some things to consider: 1. If you have some idea of what your schedule will look like, it may be a good idea to plan out, well ahead of time, when you're going to work on which projects. If you don't, you could spend valuable time trying to decide what you should work on at the beginning of every session. 2. Try chunking sessions together by project. If you have time two days every week for instance, work on the same project on those two days for that week, then work on a different one the next week. That way, you spend less brain power rearranging data at the beginning ...

I've decided to switch the Doctors of the Church site over from AngularJS to Angular (Angular being the new version of AngularJS; AngularJS is still supported and getting new versions itself, but I think there long term expectation is that it will be phased out). Some pros and cons: Pros 1. I think Angular is the intended future of the framework. I expect support for AngularJS to eventually drop off and I'll be shooting myself in the foot if I don't switch. And the size of this project makes for a very low conversion cost. 2. Angular uses Typescript, which is strongly typed. I believe this is better suited to larger applications. 3. Going along with Angular being the future, I expect that while my current work project is in AngularJS, we'll have to convert to Angular eventually. This would put me in a good place if I were familiar with Angular. 4. All the benefits of learning a new something: learning is a fun experience; it's another tool in my belt; it's goo...