Last week I wrote about recovering data after an unplanned outage, and this week I’m contemplating a thing that would be considered bad in those circumstances as well as in the context of writing: a blank page.
I’m feeling the psychic weight of the pandemic, despite having had a vaccination. After writing a blog post every week since November 2015, I’m also struggling to think of what I want to write about, so I’m going to riff on the idea of writing what I’ve been working on.
In July 2020 I engaged with a new customer to port their .NET Framework project to .NET Core 3.1 LTS (the LTS means long-term support: Microsoft supports LTS releases for three years). It runs on C#, and for the most part my team and I were able to do the work without too much hassle. It’s taken us to June, which is just under a year. A project of this magnitude was never going to take fewer than six months, but it had to be under two years, and that we’re at this point after 11 months is staggering.
I’ve also been working with another customer on a C# project that requires a user interface and underlying API for a touch-based kiosk system. While we didn’t have to write hardware interface code (that was outsourced to a third party), we’ve had to do everything else, including a UI mockup I did in a bitmap editing tool on my computer. That’s nearing completion as well (before version 2 starts of course).
Both systems talk to SQL Server databases. Of course. I might even share one of the cool WHERE conditions I wrote for bitwise comparisons in a future post.
Last weekend my spouse and I walked around a park in Calgary with a friend. So, at around 300 words for this week’s post, I’m going to leave you with some photos. Please take care of yourselves and remember to go outside once in a while.
If you wish to reuse these photos for any reason, note that they are not available for commercial use, but otherwise feel free to share and remix, with appropriate credit under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).