Darren McLeod

 My wife is a professional dog trainer and behaviorist. Being the tech geek that I am I coded and maintain her website  https://dogsden.ca . She recently developed a training system called  Barbara Lloyd's Canine Cognitive Challenges , a framework that focuses on cognitive skill building for dogs rather than traditional command based training. It uses structured problem solving tasks to reveal how a dog processes information, forms strategies, and adapts to new situations. In other words, it trains the thinking system, not just the response pattern. Key outcomes of this cognitive approach include: • Stronger resilience and confidence in puppies and young dogs • Improved focus and decision making in adult dogs • Greater curiosity, autonomy, and emotional stability The program had great success in real world training, so she wanted to turn it into a scalable online course. I dutifully coded one up as a subsite under her https://dogsden.ca site. Got it all working...

There is a software development methodology that uses a Kanban board, but it isn’t called Kanban because Kanban isn’t a methodology . It’s just a method, a board with columns and stickies to track work, which this guide says can be used with any methodology and is not a methodology in itself. So I call it the Methodology with No Name(MWNN), like Sergio Leone's character the Man with No Name.  The MWNN is simple. You add a column on the Kanban board that is a prioritized list of work that is ready to start work on next. But the trick is that the column has a reverse WIP limit, where you make sure the number of stickies in the column never falls below the reverse WIP limit number. This way work is never stalled waiting for a sticky to be completely defined and ready to begin being worked on.  That's it. You just do the work in the usual Kanban way respecting WIP limits of all the columns. With the MWNN there is no need for sprints and sprint planning where you try to guess how m...

 For a long time, when I first started writing tests, I felt so unproductive writing tests. I would try to write the test as fast as possible so I could move on to the "real" code. Then one day when a production deployment failed due to missing a simple test I realized the critical value of tests, and that good tests are in fact "real" code and they do deliver immense value. I began to see tests as "support beams" for the application that prevent it from collapsing. What are good tests? Good tests are ones that fail only when there is something really wrong. Like the logic was altered unintentionally by some change. Good tests don't depend on data that might change. Good tests happen when you have complete control of all the inputs. If your test is failing when nothing is wrong then make it top priority to fix it, or delete it. No test > not working test. These tests will make you no longer trust your test results and they will lose value. You need ...

I love refactoring code. To refactor code safely you need automated tests. Some code, especially code not written using Test Driven Development(TDD), make it difficult to write tests for the part of the code you are looking to change. Usually what you face are a class that has many dependencies, so in your test setup, you have to create all these dependencies to inject into the constructor even though many or perhaps all of these dependencies don't even have anything to do with the part of the code you are looking to change. Or the method that you want to write a change for is private and the calling public method has a bunch of dependencies which again many will not have anything to do with the part of the code you are looking to change. You are thinking: "If only this code was in a public method it would be so much easier to test". But you may have heard somewhere that changing the code just to make it easier to test is bad.  This is a terrible line of thought that has ...

 I have gotten this error once before and ended up having to call Microsoft support and have someone walk me through the steps to fix this. We went through multiple things to fix it and I didn't write them down. Now when I try to sign into Visual Studio I get this error:  I then tried to sign in with my GitHub account and got a bunch of Error Script popups. Did some googling and found the solution to my problem here . Thanks to BigOine I went to Tools -> Options -> Accounts and changed "Add and reauthenticate accounts using:" to "System web browser" and I was able to login with my regular account and the {username}.visualstudio.com error went away.

 I had gotten a new laptop at work and had gotten everything transferred and working except when I tried to debug a web application in Visual Studio it would immediately stop and in the output window I could see the message "The program has exited with code 4294967295". I searched the internet and most of the solutions involved Docker issues but I wasn't running Docker. I discovered that I could run it in release mode and then attach a debugger to the process. It was clunky but at least I could debug again. A couple of weeks later my laptop got a Windows update and then I couldn't launch a browser when clicking on URLs in e-mails or in Teams. Searching for a solution on the web for that suggested looking at my default browser settings. Turns out my default browser was set to Internet Explorer 🤯. I use Edge and Chrome from links on my Windows Taskbar.  I changed the default browser to Edge and I could launch a browser from URL links again and finally debug a web appli...