Disqus - Latest Comments for samdelagarza

Re: Bikepacking Big Bend: The Other Side of Nowhere

samdelagarza — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 13:58:26 -0000

We just did the ride at the end of February 2021 and it was fantastic! We were planning on doing the 60mi IMBA epic ride; however, we ran into water issues. On Day 1 we planned on arriving at Pila Montoya (~mile 20) but we ended up stopping at Rincon 2 campground (~15mi) due to running out of water. On Day 2 we went over to the Crawford Ranch house for water from a spring which was flowing on that day...(note: the spring is not at the Crawford ranch house, but near the dry riverbed behind it... ~.25mi to hook around back). After getting water we came back out... The trail was great...well cared for but definitely GO WITH TUBELESS TIRES...there are enough thorns to cause a few punctures during your ride.

We did hear from a few riders that the west side of the trail (past the ranger station at ~30mi) is in bad shape...so your mileage may vary.

Another note, since we arrived after the front office was closed we booked a primitive campsite online at the Grassy Banks campsite. The front office has plenty of water so load up!

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Re: A REST Backend For Ember.js With Node.js, Express, and Mongoose

samdelagarza — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 11:51:47 -0000

You should just be able to take the object returned from mongoose and set the properties to another object in express and return that new one.

Re: A REST Backend For Ember.js With Node.js, Express, and Mongoose

samdelagarza — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 10:19:39 -0000

i've been doing node/express dev for a few years now...I admit that I prefer Hapi.js...it's quite less verbose than express and has a lot of flexibility. Plus it reads more easily.
I just recently started working with Ember and wanted to say that your post was great! I didn't learn anything new on the ember side that I haven't already learned, but I think you did a great job summarizing the necessary parts and this will serve as a great reference article for others at my company.

thanks!

Re: Developing iOS8 Apps Using Swift – Create a To-Do Application

samdelagarza — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 10:23:15 -0000

one other thing, you don't need to use NSMutableArray but instead you can use the new array type so you would define: var toDoItems: Array<todoitem> = []

and then update the adds to: self.toDoItems.append(item);

and then update the count to: self.toDoItems[indexPath.row]

newer style.

good and *quick* work! :-)

Re: Personal Technology Changes

samdelagarza — Wed, 29 May 2013 21:51:56 -0000

Not first.

Re: Fickle Bits: 2011 Ultimate Tools List for Mac

samdelagarza — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:17:53 -0000

I'd love for you to update this list for 2013

Re: Respond to change with Object.observe - HTML5Rocks Updates

samdelagarza — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:01:38 -0000

I agree that an ObserveOnce would be great.

Re: Respond to change with Object.observe - HTML5Rocks Updates

samdelagarza — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:44:21 -0000

I would also be interested in "pause" which is nice when you want to batch many updates to an object and only notify one time. This is similar to "silent" in backbonejs or effectively the use-case for throttling in knockoutjs.

Also, I would like to observe at a more granular level, instead of only being able to observe an object, I would additionally like to observe specific properties on an object. Otherwise every time this needed to happen every developer would have to write the same lines of code in order to accomplish this same task.

Re: Backbone vs Knockout

samdelagarza — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:12:53 -0000

I can say that I've used both in large JavaScript applications. I have to completely agree with what Derick highlights in this post. Both are very good libraries and their powers can be harnessed to bring a lot of power to any frontend Dev.

I too agree that if a team is inexperienced with building large client side apps the knockout approach will not provide any app structure opinions and thus could result in a badly designed app. However, this isn't because of KO, it's the dev's fault.

I personally enjoy backbone's opinionated approach as it provides a team lead a place to direct novice js app devs (or at least novice to large js app design) for app design.

At the moment I'm enjoying working with reauireJS

Re: ORMs don’t kill databases. Developers do.

samdelagarza — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:41:12 -0000

we use nhibernate on our team, but we've also used nhibernate profiler from the very beginning and until we understood the better way of writing our linq (for nhibernate) we would closely look at the sql that was generated. Ayende has a good presentation on TekPub and he DOES go into detail about writing better queries for nhibernate. I guess knowing this up front made the difference in the world.

I wouldn't avoid using an ORM in the future unless there was a real reason.

Re: Intro To Backbone.js: How A Winforms Developer is At Home In Javascript

samdelagarza — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:50:40 -0000

by the way, you should jump on the google group for backbone: http://groups.google.com/gr...

Re: Intro To Backbone.js: How A Winforms Developer is At Home In Javascript

samdelagarza — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:49:37 -0000

Hey guys, I can speak a little to the "Why"...as an enterprise .net dev with 14 others on this team all writing js for a highly interactive app.

1.) Our application is essentially a specialized report runner, number cruncher and modeler for hospitals throughout the US. We were tasked with re-writing the criteria for running these reports. It was a long page full of html form elements, so we decided that dynamically adding criteria on demand would be nice.

So we wrote a large js file to describe the html, business rules, client-side validation that each criteria would use. Then we had a formbuilder which was the driver for the criteria getting painted on the "canvas" (what we called the area where the criteria was placed in the DOM, not to be mistaken with html5 canvas). We also had a formbuilder.events file which would listen to certain events (deletion, addition, validation etc) of the criterias placed on the page. And we had other things.

The result: we started with a team of about 6 and now we're 14 what we saw was that controlling the js produced by the team was easy at first.

But as time moved on people would place templates all over the place, events were scattered, etc. etc. The app had clean code everywhere except in the js.

SO THE WHY:

- So what bbjs gave us was a well documented unified way of doing most things.
- It gave us great documentation, so getting new team members to understand "how" to do things was much easier.

Re: Solving Backbone’s “this.model.view” Problem With Underscore.js

samdelagarza — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:11:23 -0000

Derick, great write up. My lack of bind understanding bit me a few times at the beginning of my working with backbone a few months ago. And yes, I too feel a little like you regarding the model.view = this; :-)

I look forward to your other backbone.js posts.

Re: Kinect finally fulfills its Minority Report destiny (video)

samdelagarza — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 14:05:10 -0000

Actually Greg, I would call myself an expert, I'm a software engineer and have been working with .net from pre-beta days and have extensive experience with the MS Tech stack and in fact still use it daily at work.

And let me give you a list of examples:
* Linq-to-Sql (ORM) & Entity-Framework (A competing ORM from a completely different business unit inside MS).
* .Net framework VB.NET vs. C# (There isn't a single voice but they both do the same...well almost.)
* BizSpark (You'll find several developers that got screwed last year due to a mistake in their part...and trying to fix it always went to some call center and the issues never got resolved. It wasn't until I tweeted my experiences with #bizspark that I got some action taken.)
* Kin (wasn't that a phone?)
* Visual Studio 2010 - wpf mess, it has TONS OF BUGS.
* Ria services vs. Silverlight vs. Mvc/jQuery team (again no unified voice)
* Being a big proponent of Silverlight, yet using Flash on most of it's marketing websites (except the big ones: i.e. microsoft.com)
* Why does MS sell sharepoint as a social platform, but yet none of their blogs are hosted on sharepoint, but rather community server (or I guess Telligent Server these days)?
* I can go on for a very long time here...

I NEVER said that they didn't sell well in the enterprise, and well let's face it...most innovation doesn't happen in enterprise it happens in startups...thus the reason why Google,Oracle,Microsoft,Apple buy a lot of small startups.

My point I guess was this: I think what they've done is exciting. But why are scientists at MIT the ones seeing it's potential? If this were truly an innovative company, then we'd see Kinect as a gesture based system with a developer SDK for windows 7 TODAY.

my two cents.

Re: Kinect finally fulfills its Minority Report destiny (video)

samdelagarza — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 09:53:48 -0000

The reason I don't believe Microsoft to be an innovative company is because they have no visionary that is steering the company in one direction. Every product, every unit operates separately of the other, the synergy between products (outside of xbox360 & it's ecosystem) is disjointed at best.

I'd have to say their xbox360 unit is innovative; however, as you already know the visionary of that group has already left.

I too believe that the shareholders of Microsoft are fed up with it's CEO and will oust him within the next 2 years.

Re: Kinect finally fulfills its Minority Report destiny (video)

samdelagarza — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 09:38:13 -0000

This is not a show of Microsoft's innovation, but rather of their pocket book. They purchased this technology from another company...and I'm saddened that kinect wasn't acquired by a more innovative company...I know microsoft will drop the ball on this just as it has with everything else.

Re: Reporting In NoSQL

samdelagarza — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:15:36 -0000

Great post Rob.

Here's a blog post on how to get started with MongoDB & C# with code: http://jasona.wordpress.com...

Re: Heroku | Heroku Casts: Windows Setup

samdelagarza — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:01:36 -0000

great post.

Re: Heroku | Manage Heroku with your iPhone

samdelagarza — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:04:30 -0000

Just coming over from the .net camp and would be happy to take a free copy.
My running blog posts on my experience is here: http://samdelagarza.wordpre...

Re: Status Update – ASP.NET MVC 2 and Mastering Nhibernate

samdelagarza — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:04:13 -0000

Being hasty just to meet deadlines is not what quality is about. Thanks for putting up with the noise and holding your ground on this. Apple seems to have made great progress with this style of thinking.

Re: UI Design First, Then Everything Else

samdelagarza — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:53:24 -0000

I've been developing my web apps this way for 10 years now. And it's proven highly effective.

1.) Less API Bloat as I only write what I need.
2.) API is more efficient. When I go backwards (which to me is db -> BL -> UI) I create an API that is far more robust than what the Application calls for.
3.) I'm surprised that so few people do it this way.

Here's the path that I typically take:
1.) UI
2.) Db
3.) BL