A couple of projects

At the beginning of the year, I wanted to get more involved with technology I really care about.

• It started with me gaining some confidence by taking a few courses, then contributing back to StackOverflow.  
• I wanted to learn more about Javascript and understand JSON, so I built a map using Open Data from Waterloo Region. 
• I learned so much using TileMill that I created a training video since there was not a lot out there on this.
• I maintain my VPS too, that houses my website; but it does so much more. 
• Even with all of this, I took a few course to learn more about mobile development (I love my iPhone) and I also decided to put some of these accomplishments up on LinkedIn.

1100 stage alerts (one of my favorite bugs)

This is a post I have had ready for about 5 years now. A long time ago, I caused a partial meltdown of our software. This was the email thread that went out by QA, and the reply from Dev. FYI: Stage Alerts are just emails sent to everyone saying something bad has just happened.

Note: this is the first time I have looked at it in about 3 years and its still pretty funny... well to me. Maybe you had to be there.

------------------------
From: QA Group
To: Dev
Sent: 1:40pm
Subject: 1100+ Stage Alerts in 3 hours

I've given up trying to keep track of the Stage Alerts. Since noon today we've had over 1,100.

I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure we (in QA) haven't reported bugs for every alert that has come through.

Just thought I'd send out a quick note to check and see if anyone in Dev has an eye on these alerts too.
------------------------
From: Developer
To: QA Group
Subject: RE: 1100+ Stage Alerts in 3 hours?

There alerts are caused by problems try to persist audit events to the database. I've discovered a couple bugs in our logging implementation, that were exposed by some unique data.

Specifically, there was a borrower user in the database with the following:

First Name: Jebediah Obadiah Zachariah Jedediah Springfield-KD
Last Name: Squeaky Voiced Teen né Jeremy Peterson/Freedman-KD

This extra long name ends up in an audit message, and eventually causes problems because it exceeds a length limit. I've updated the user to shorten the name so that no more alerts will be generated.

I'll attempt to cleanup any existing audits that are failing/retrying in the bowels of BizTalk.

An experiment with Open Data

TileMill - A quick tutorial on how to use TileMill with Open Data

I decided a few months ago to play with more open data sets. I went to the GO Open Data conference in May and that really got me excited about how we interact with data and use it. I thought "why not play with some new GIS software and see how it goes". With that in mind, I created a few maps and a video to help me remember how to use TileMill.

BTW: Yesterday, Github announced government.github.com which is a huge leap forward with regard to indexing and organizing open data sets. There is so much out there, now its a matter of trying to find good ways to use all of this information.