# Starin’ at the Wall — JD Conley > Sometimes you just gotta take a step back and stare at the wall. Software, startups, and life by JD Conley. URL: https://jdconley.com/blog --- Software. Startups. Life. # Starin’ at the Wall. Sometimes you just gotta take a step back and stare at the wall. All writing71 stories · newest first July 18, 20136 min read ## [Worry Less. Do More. Be Fearless!](/blog/worry-less-do-more-be-fearless) "we better have health insurance" . . . "peyton got hurt" These are not the text messages you want to receive from your wife on Mother's Day, when you are four hours away from… [Read the story ↗](/blog/worry-less-do-more-be-fearless) ## [Install node.js in 10 Seconds or Less](/blog/install-nodejs-in-10-seconds-or-less) I've been playing around a bit with node recently. One thing it's quite good at is quickly bringing up a developer workstation. You can just run a quick command line to have… August 1, 20112 min read ## [How to Recruit Great Engineering Talent](/blog/how-to-recruit-great-engineering-talent) Raiders of the Last Nerd made the front page of Hacker News yesterday and went a bit viral around the geek ecosystem. For good reason. Fueled by accelerating technology… July 28, 20119 min read ## [Dearest Recruiter](/blog/dearest-recruiter) Update:I expanded on this a bit over here: http://blog.jdconley.com/2011/07/how-to-recruit-great-engineering-talent.html I'm taking some time out of my lunch break today, when… June 27, 20112 min read ## [ValidateInput Attribute Doesn't Work in ASP.NET 4.0](/blog/validateinput-attribute-doesnt-work-in) Today I decided to upgrade some of our new projects (top secret, shhh) to Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET 4.0, and ASP.NET MVC 2.0. There are about a million new features that look… April 19, 20102 min read ## [Mr. Sprite Sheet, Meet Ms. MovieClip](/blog/mr-sprite-sheet-meet-ms-movieclip) In Youtopia we wanted to have animations. We also wanted to have thousands of buildings on the screen at once. Anyone who has done a lot of Flash development will tell you that… March 9, 20107 min read ## [Angry Players Make Sunday More Interesting](/blog/angry-players-make-sunday-more) Youtopia has been growing quickly the last couple of weeks. It's fun to watch and the team is really excited about it. Of course, with the growth comes a lot of performance… November 22, 20092 min read ## [Ditch Your Events (Part 1)](/blog/ditch-your-events-part-1) About four months ago Max, Hive7's Lawful Evil CEO, decided we needed to take our games to the next level and build something fun and accessible that everyone who plays "those… November 16, 20096 min read ## [Anyone still out there?](/blog/anyone-still-out-there) Wow, I haven't posted in a while. In recent months I've been focused intently on a few things. Babies! My wife and I had twins in February. Learning a new technology while… November 13, 20092 min read ## [Functional Optimistic Concurrency in C#](/blog/functional-optimistic-concurrency-in-c) A few months ago Phil Haack wrote about how C# 3.0 is a gateway drug to functional programming. (Yeah, that's how long ago I started writing this blog.) I couldn't agree more.… June 26, 20096 min read ## [A new basket for my eggs](/blog/new-basket-for-my-eggs) Hopefully after reading that title you're thinking of the old adage "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" and not something crude. Ok, I admit, either way it works for me.… June 2, 20093 min read ## [ioDrive, Changing the Way You Code](/blog/iodrive-changing-way-you-code) Introduction In my lifetime there have been very few technologies that have created a paradigm shift in the software industry – I was born just after the spinning magnetic hard… March 12, 20097 min read ## [You might be a great hacker if you...](/blog/you-might-be-great-hacker-if-you) A number of years ago I was doing some mentoring at a California state agency that shall remain nameless. I got my butt up in time to be into their office at 8am. (Ok, I'll be… February 9, 20094 min read ## [Abstracting Away Azure: How to Run Outside of the Cloud](/blog/abstracting-away-azure-how-to-run) I had a lot of fun over our holiday break this December working on prototype projects for up and coming technologies. One of those projects dealt with Windows Azure, or, the… February 2, 20096 min read ## [Put down the abstract factory and get something done](/blog/put-down-abstract-factory-and-get) It seems as a group, us programmers have our priorities screwed up. Programmers value clean, concise code. Code that requires no documentation. Code that perfectly uses design… January 26, 20094 min read ## [Concurrency. It's like doing the dishes](/blog/concurrency-its-like-doing-dishes) Since we moved to Palo Alto I've had the luxury of walking to work every day. Usually that's where I do my deep thinking. By the time I cruise by the Whole Foods it's really… January 20, 20092 min read ## [Don't hire a programmer if they don't code for fun](/blog/dont-hire-programmer-if-they-dont-code) I'm not the first person to talk about this paradigm and I won't be the last. Every single programmer I've seen that is exceptionally good at their job also does it for fun.… January 19, 20092 min read ## [ASP.NET MVC sucks and so does jQuery and PHP](/blog/aspnet-mvc-sucks-and-so-does-jquery-and) Apparently, saying something sucks gets you a lot of hits. I think I'll use this tactic more often. My post on 10 Reasons ASP.NET Webforms Suck has been quite the talk in our… January 16, 20096 min read ## [Fire and Forget Email, Webservices and More in ASP.NET](/blog/fire-and-forget-email-webservices-and) Often times when you're working on a web site you want to fire and forget an email, a web method or, most common in our case, a Facebook call. There's a good chance there's a… January 14, 20095 min read ## [10 Reasons ASP.NET Webforms Suck](/blog/10-reasons-aspnet-webforms-suck) I've always been a .NET Fanboy. I've been on the bandwagon since its inception. I've developed quite a few shipping .NET products for the web, Windows, and Linux. I've given… January 12, 20095 min read ## [Debugging after a power outage](/blog/debugging-after-power-outage) Here at Hive7 we host all our servers with a hybrid co-location/hosting provider. When you host your servers in a colo facility there are a few key things you look for. Stuff… September 24, 20086 min read ## [ASP.NET - It's not just for DataGrids after all](/blog/aspnet-its-not-just-for-datagrids-after) Last night I gave a talk at the San Francisco chapter of the Bay.NET User's group. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for the great interaction everyone! I am also thoroughly… July 17, 20081 min read ## [Windows Server 2008](/blog/windows-server-2008) For anybody who's been watching you will have noticed that I have had some fun trying to get x64 Windows Vista stable on my workstation. Well, because of all that fun I've been… May 24, 20082 min read ## [A SQL Table Manhunt](/blog/sql-table-manhunt) As I mentioned in my last post I recently took on the exciting new position of Chief Software Architect at Hive7, Inc. We're building all kinds of great stuff. Our most popular… March 19, 20082 min read ## [C# 3.0 Overview](/blog/c-30-overview) It's been forever since my last post. I promise I'll do better. I've just been juggling three jobs. ;) But that has changed (more on that soon)!The last couple of nights I did… February 28, 20082 min read ## [A New Kind of Application Server](/blog/new-kind-of-application-server) As you probably know, I'm a cofounder of Coversant which, at its heart, is an XMPP development platform. Most of our larger customers (thousands of simultaneous users) are… February 4, 20082 min read ## [A Sorted Affair: History of the C# Sort](/blog/sorted-affair-history-of-c-sort) Next month I'll be giving a talk at the Sacramento .NET User's group titled C# 3.0 Overview where I'll be presenting the great new features in the third version of C#. I've… January 30, 20084 min read ## [Unadulterated Expurgation!](/blog/unadulterated-expurgation) Alright, so, occasionally I post something funny that happened recently. Yesterday I received a spam company broadcast email from an anonymous customer of mine. You know who… December 14, 20072 min read ## [Introduction to fbasync: an Asynchronous Facebook Library (Part 1)](/blog/introduction-to-fbasync-asynchronous) I'd like to start off by saying asynchronous programming is easy. Building asynchronous frameworks is hard, but using them is easy. Everybody doing programming in AJAX and… December 11, 20076 min read ## [Geeks With Kids](/blog/geeks-with-kids) I was just IMing with a good geek friend of mine. This is what happens when you give paranoid geeks kids (names removed for obvious reasons).(5:08:06 PM) Geek Friend: i'm outta… December 6, 20072 min read ## [Async Facebook Library Teaser](/blog/async-facebook-library-teaser) I've been trolling the Facebook Developer Forums recently and talking with other developers. I've also been reading a lot and trying to get a feel for what people might want… December 5, 20073 min read ## [An Entrepreneurial Story](/blog/entrepreneurial-story) I don't remember how exactly I got there, but while clicking through my morning feeds I ended up at the very interesting story of an Australian .NET micro ISV startup called… November 30, 20072 min read ## [Linq to Sql Surprise Performance Hit](/blog/linq-to-sql-surprise-performance-hit) A couple days ago I built Photo Feeds. I wrote about it here. After using the app a bit I noticed something peculiar. The page took a really long time to load. From my local… November 28, 20074 min read ## [How much space are all my sql tables using?](/blog/how-much-space-are-all-my-sql-tables) I deal with a few dozen databases on a daily basis. Often times I wonder "What the heck is making this database 100GB?" Sure, you can click around in Management Studio and find… November 27, 20072 min read ## [Photo Feeds Facebook Application](/blog/photo-feeds-facebook-application) I've built quite a few applications for Facebook. These include SoapBox, Friend Photosaver, Photozap, and my latest creation (late last night) is called Photo Feeds.Photo… November 27, 20071 min read ## [FileVersionInfo - My Long Lost Friend](/blog/fileversioninfo-my-long-lost-friend) I've been doing .NET development professionally since the first public beta release of the 1.0 framework. That's... well, a long time. It constantly amazes me how big the… November 26, 20072 min read ## [Command Line VS 2008 Project Upgrade Tool](/blog/command-line-vs-2008-project-upgrade) I've converted a few projects to 2008 RTM now (from 2003 to 2005 to 2008 beta projects), and I wish John Robbins had published this blog earlier. For those of us that don't… November 21, 20071 min read ## [More Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 to RTM Upgrade Gotchas](/blog/more-visual-studio-2008-beta-2-to-rtm) Yesterday I posted on the first thing I ran into. Today I ported another project and hit a couple more snags. Linq to Sql Unicode Byte Header Linq to Sql Add/Remove Method… November 20, 20072 min read ## [Small Gotcha in .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 to RTM Upgrade](/blog/small-gotcha-in-net-framework-35-beta-2) Visual Studio 2008 was officially released today to MSDN subscribers so I took the leap and did the upgrade. I ran into an issue with a simple fix that I thought everyone… November 19, 20071 min read ## [ASP.NET MVC Framework](/blog/aspnet-mvc-framework) I'm a huge fan of Test Driven Development and I've been looking forward to the ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) Framework to increase the level of testability of web… November 13, 20071 min read ## [Dvorak's Gone Mad](/blog/dvoraks-gone-mad) Maybe I'm just young, arrogant, and naive, but I think John's getting a little senile. In his latest rant for his PC Mag column he bashes Google's plans for the Open Handset… November 9, 20073 min read ## [Vista Rant](/blog/vista-rant) Next month Vista will have been out in RTM for a year (it was released on 11/30/2006 to the volume/dev world). Why is it then, that it still doesn't work?When I originally… October 7, 20073 min read ## [Asyncify Your Code](/blog/asyncify-your-code) Asyncify your code. Everybody's doing it. (Chicks|Dudes)'ll dig it. It'll make you cool. Pretty much everything I build these days is asynchronous in nature. In SoapBox… September 28, 20075 min read ## [Stringbuildify!](/blog/stringbuildify) A task that I often end up doing when coding an actual web site (i.e. not writing a sample or some such) is adding client script to a page/control in codebehind using the… September 27, 20072 min read ## [ASP.NET Centric Extensions](/blog/aspnet-centric-extensions) I've been loving the new Extension Methods in Orcas. If you haven't had the pleasure of working with them, well, you're really missing out. They are utility at its finest. Here… September 19, 20073 min read ## [List of Country Names](/blog/list-of-country-names) Today I had to build yet-another-list of country names for a web site drop down form. I did some Google searching for about 10 minutes and didn't find anything that was free. I… September 5, 20071 min read ## [Don't forget to close your Linq to Sql connections](/blog/dont-forget-to-close-your-linq-to-sql) Today I was working on some Linq to Sql code that dealt with an event management system. There are events people can attend, and attendees fill out a form to register for the… August 30, 20072 min read ## [Clean Up a String for a Url](/blog/clean-up-string-for-url) This is a quickie. Yesterday I was doing some Url rewriting for a project and accepting user input for said Url. It's basically like this blog system. I can specify the… August 28, 20071 min read ## [using (wcfclient) { } kaboom!](/blog/using-wcfclient-kaboom) I've been doing a lot of WCF development lately (love it) and ran into a bit of a stumbling block. The proxy client generated by Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 doesn't handle fault… August 22, 20072 min read ## [Relocation](/blog/relocation) Well, I've officially relocated my blog here, to jdconley.com. The old blogging engine I was using really sucked. This one seems a lot better. And if I don't like something,… August 21, 20071 min read ## [Friend Photosaver for Facebook](/blog/friend-photosaver-for-facebook) By now everybody who knows what Facebook is, knows they announced an open platform for integrating with it. Interestingly enough Microsoft was a launch partner of theirs so… June 20, 20072 min read ## [Simpler isn't always better - AsyncOperationsManager](/blog/simpler-isnt-always-better) AsyncOperationManager... die! We have a new invitation system coming out soon for SoapBox Communicator and I was doing a little premature optimization, err, I mean, capacity… June 8, 20074 min read ## [XMPP Presence Priority](/blog/xmpp-presence-priority) In XMPP (the messaging and presence protocol SoapBox uses) you can log in simultaneously on multiple systems. How your contat list is displayed and how messages are routed are… May 8, 20075 min read ## [Building Reactive User Interfaces in .NET: ISynchronizeInvoke on Idle Time](/blog/building-reactive-user-interfaces-in) One of the most common things to do in a multi-threaded .NET Windows Forms application is to use the ISynchronizeInvoke interface on a Control to marshal things into the UI… April 10, 20074 min read ## [YouTube Getter](/blog/youtube-getter) Usually everything I post here is serious business. Well, not today! Today, we're going to look at how to get the raw video stream for YouTube videos. Why, you ask? Well,… April 5, 20073 min read ## [Validating JabberID Nodes (XMPP/SoapBox User Names)](/blog/validating-jabberid-nodes-xmppsoapbox) One of the most common, and tedious, tasks that comes up while writing software is validating user input. "Don't trust the user," the mantra goes. Even with current development… March 13, 20073 min read ## [Installing Coversant Products on Vista](/blog/installing-coversant-products-on-vista) Due to the enhanced security in Windows Vista, not all Coversant products are able to be installed out of the box. Luckily, this is really easy to work around and rest assured,… December 14, 20061 min read ## [XSLT For MSDN Product Keys](/blog/xslt-for-msdn-product-keys) Here at Coversant we're Microsoft partners. We have MSDN subscriptions for all our developers/testers, and we share the same set of license keys. Rather than give everyone… November 21, 20062 min read ## [Compact Framework WaitHandle.WaitOne Gotcha](/blog/compact-framework-waithandlewaitone) I ran into a behavior in the 2.0 Compact Framework today that was most vexing. It wasn't hard to find like a subtle race condition. It wasn't an issue that only duplicated with… November 8, 20062 min read ## [The Catch with GoDaddy Dedicated Hosting](/blog/catch-with-godaddy-dedicated-hosting) I'm not known to get easily frustrated or publicly rant about something, but here goes. The public web site and soapbox.net IM service for Coversant is hosted with GoDaddy… September 29, 20062 min read ## [Gentoo Linux MAC Based Host Name](/blog/gentoo-linux-mac-based-host-name) We use Gentoo for all our Linux development (yeah, we do Linux -- coming very very soon). In fact we are currently putting together a test lab with quite a few computers using… September 25, 20062 min read ## [SoapBox Platform Possibilities](/blog/soapbox-platform-possibilities) Our customers do some very interesting things with our platform, including: RPC – The asynchronous nature of XMPP along with its addressing and our platform make it ideal for… September 16, 20064 min read ## [Cross Platform Deployment Project Bootstrapper](/blog/cross-platform-deployment-project) I think we are one of a very small set of companies out there building consumer grade, shrink wrapped products on .NET. Why? Well, I'm not sure. It might have to do with… September 1, 20063 min read ## [Using the MySql Command Line from C#/.NET](/blog/using-mysql-command-line-from-cnet) We have added two new data access providers to the upcoming SoapBox Server 2007 release. We now support PostgreSql and MySql as well as Microsoft SQL and Oracle. The code for… August 1, 20064 min read ## [More on Interop](/blog/more-on-interop) I'm sitting on a plane on my way back to Sacramento (a whopping 1 hour flight) and I thought I'd try to give a little more information about the interop event. After two days… July 26, 20063 min read ## [Interoperability - Yup, we got it covered](/blog/interoperability-yup-we-got-it-covered) Today was the first day of the first ever official XMPP Interop Event. In fact, it was probably the first day of any open instant messaging and presence interop event, ever. We… July 24, 20062 min read ## [How to Build Scalable .NET Server Applications: Memory Management](/blog/how-to-build-scalable-net-server) I'll get this out of the way from the start. This series of blogs will have nothing to do with ASP.NET or web services. However, if you plan on writing you own implementation… June 26, 200610 min read ## [Fun Installing Vista Beta 2 on AMD x64](/blog/fun-installing-vista-beta-2-on-amd-x64) As a self proclaimed geek and MSDN subscriber I feel as though it's my duty to explore all the new software that Microsoft comes out with. This last week I have been embarking… June 2, 20064 min read ## [.net 2.0 web service hair puller](/blog/net-20-web-service-hair-puller) Every couple of weeks I spend four hours doing something that should take five minutes. It just happened, and now I feel compelled to take another few minutes and explain so it… May 12, 20063 min read ## [from the trenches of my first software startup](/blog/from-trenches-of-my-first-software) I was born and raised an entrepreneur (I'm pretty sure that's how you speel that). During my lifetime my dad never had a single "real job". He has always been a small business… May 9, 20064 min read ## [FakeOutTheUserToThinkWeDontUseAnyMemory](/blog/fakeouttheusertothinkwedontuseanymemory) There comes a time in every project where the developers realize we are building software for the users, rather than for ourselves. A user's perception can be the difference… May 8, 20063 min read