Recent Blog Posts

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New Web App: Simple Stock Ticker

Check stock prices with this React web app

Simple Stock Ticker is a React-based web app that calls a .NET Core Web API, which ultimately pulls data from an open API. It allows you to see the latest price of a stock and some basic information about a company. Download the source code or view the demo here.

• Keith Ott
• News
• May 24, 2020
• 1 Minutes

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I Tried Google Stadia

Is this the future of gaming?

Google Stadia is offering a two month free trial of their Pro service, so I decided to give it a spin. For what’s sold as a hardcode gaming platform, in reality it’s a half baked solution in search of a problem.

• Keith Ott
• Reviews
• April 12, 2020
• 3 Minutes

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How to Move a Window that's Off your Windows Desktop

A cool trick to move a window back to your desktop

Microsoft Windows has had a weird bug for years; sometimes, when you remote into a computer or unplug a monitor, one of your windows will get hidden off the screen and you’ll be unable to resize or move it. Here’s a simple trick I’ve been using for years to get those hidden windows back onto my desktop.

• Keith Ott
• Tutorials
• March 17, 2020
• 2 Minutes

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New Game: High Low for the Commodore 64

High Low ported to the Commodore 64

I’ve been reading Ready Player One lately, and it inspired me to dust off some old Commodore 64 programming knowledge. I decided to port High Low to the Commodore 64.

• Keith Ott
• News
• December 28, 2019
• 1 Minutes

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Xbox One Error Messages SUCK! Let's Fix Them!

An exercise in improving a specific Xbox One error message

Recently I went to play a game on my Xbox One, and I was greeted with a rather unfriendly error message. The problem was that the game I was trying to play was part of Microsoft’s Games with Gold program, and my Xbox Live Gold subscription had expired. However, if I didn’t know about the stipulations of the free games available with the Games with Gold program, I would have been thoroughly confused. The archaic error message I received did almost nothing to help me.

Let’s look at everything that’s wrong with this error message, and then let’s redesign it to solve these problems!

• Keith Ott
• Software Engineering
• July 13, 2019
• 7 Minutes

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NPM Considered Harmless

Package managers have their issues, but you can - and should - use them

Throughout my career, I’ve run into a handful of people that have the opinion that we shouldn’t rely on a package manager, such as NPM or NuGet. The arguments fall into three main categories: concerns over security, concerns over the long-term availability of package manager services, and concerns over it being easier to manage dependencies yourself.

If you have any of these opinions, let me be the first to tell you it’s okay to rely on package managers such as NPM or NuGet. And there’s a variety of reasons why.

• Keith Ott
• Package Managers
• May 26, 2019
• 6 Minutes

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Bill Split and Tip Updated

A new release of an old classic

Google recently informed me that they’re going to be pulling some of my Android apps from the Google Play Store, because they’re built on some really old versions of Cordova that have security flaws. For Bill Split and Tip, I figured this was a great opportunity to not just upgrade, but to re-platform it on Angular 7 and release it as a Progress Web App (PWA).

• Keith Ott
• News
• May 19, 2019
• 2 Minutes

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Blazor: First Look and Impressions

The future of web development or a passing fad?

I keep hearing more and more about Web Assembly, and since I’m primarily a .NET developer, I figured it was time to play around with Blazor. I recently went through Microsoft’s Build your first Blazor app tutorial, and here are my initial thoughts and reflections on it.

• Keith Ott
• Reviews
• May 11, 2019
• 5 Minutes

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Staying Cool When Firefighting Production Outages

She's on fire and she burns through the night at the speed of light

I work for a large, international company on one of their main e-commerce websites. This past week, the company had a substantial product launch (one even the CEO was heavily involved in), and the website I work on released some few features along side it. And all the new website features went live without any issue.

…okay, obviously not. There were some serious launch issues, and I took point on fixing most of them. It was a full, non-stop day of updates to nervous managers, researching, fixing code, testing, and releasing, but by the end of the work day we had the issues fixed. I did a lot of things that day, but one thing I didn’t do was panic.

• Keith Ott
• Software Engineering
• April 27, 2019
• 6 Minutes

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Real Properties With Moq

They're real and they're spectacular!

I was recently using the C# Moq mocking library, and I needed to not only initialize a property to a value, but I needed the property to be updated by the code.

• Keith Ott
• Tutorials
• April 19, 2019
• 2 Minutes

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Software Engineer vs. Computer Programmer

A developer by any other name would smell like coffee.

People who write software for a living go by many names: computer programmer, software developer, software engineer, heck, even sometimes the (derogatory) term code monkey. But what’s the difference? One might say it’s a difference in education, or its just semantics and it’s all the same. If we’re specifically talking software engineer versus computer programmer, I believe there is a world of difference.

• Keith Ott
• Software Engineering
• March 30, 2019
• 4 Minutes

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Don't Copy and Paste from Stack Overflow

Why you shouldn't implement the copy/paste design pattern.

I recently saw an post online asking “Why should I hire a software engineer if I can just copy and paste from Stack Overflow?” The answer was “Copy pasting: $1. Knowing what code to copy paste: $100,000/year.”

• Keith Ott
• Software Engineering
• March 30, 2019
• 2 Minutes