Aaron Held's Blog

The Island of Misfit Toys: Making the Azure Private Link Video

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How my initial researched deep-dive created an excellent first storyboarded script, and how my second draft became the 5-minute explainer on Azure Private Link that I wanted.

2026: Year of Community

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI is making answers abundant and human connection scarce. That scarcity is about to become the most valuable thing we have.

The North Star: Why Engineering Teams Need a Vision to Navigate By

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve watched talented engineering teams burn out not from working too hard, but from working without direction. The pattern is always the same: leadership announces a new strategic pivot every quarter, teams scramble to adjust, morale craters, and your best people start updating their LinkedIn profiles.

The problem isn’t the changes themselves. It’s that without a guiding vision, every shift feels like a complete reversal rather than a necessary course correction.

Why Your Strategic Planning Fails (And How to Fix It)

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why Your Strategic Planning Fails (And How to Fix It)

I’ve seen more agile planning sessions derailed by politics than by any technical challenge. It always starts the same way. You get the right people in a room—Product, Engineering, Sales, Finance—and for a moment, it feels like a powerful alliance focused on building the future.

A spy’s guide to strategy helped me realize these sessions unfold in three acts: Alliance, Competition, and Endgame.

AI Won't Kill the Middle Manager, It Will Free Them

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I got into management because I saw myself as a player-coach. I could create software and make my teams more effective.

The most rewarding part? Shielding creative people from bad direction and then watching them delivering results. Success gave me more influence to shape process and continue to help my teams be their best.

Chris Dixon’s recent, high-profile shift from “Management” back to “Engineer” made me pause. He’s a true champion of the possible who had an outsized impact on my early career, and his move forced me to think about my own direction.

Streamlining Blog Writing with Claude Code: My Complete Workflow

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 20:00:00 -0500

Introduction

For over 25 years, I’ve blogged through countless iterations of my writing and technical processes. Recently, I’ve found something that makes writing enjoyable again: Claude Code. This isn’t another “AI will replace writers” story. It’s about how AI can enhance creative expression by handling the tedious parts of content creation. Crucially, it helps me overcome the final hurdle: actually publishing.

Most of my posts start as first drafts that never see the light of day. Now, my Robot Buddy guides me through the entire process, from idea to execution. In this post, I’ll walk you through my complete workflow from initial idea to published post, showing exactly how Claude Code integrates with Hugo, my static site generator of choice. You’ll see real screenshots, actual commands, and the genuine collaborative process that happens when human insight meets AI assistance.

Agile vs Economic Downturns

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How economic uncertainty erodes psychological safety and derails agile transformations.

The Weapon by Fredric Brown

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

𝗣𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗥𝗼𝗱 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴

𝘈 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘦𝘵 𝘴𝘶𝘣𝘶𝘳𝘣𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘈 𝘮𝘢𝘯, 𝘢 𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘵, 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘢𝘤𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘧𝘪𝘦𝘭𝘥. 𝘏𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘢 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘱𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳, 𝘢 𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘭 𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘦. 𝘏𝘦 𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘭𝘺, 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘤𝘦 𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘶𝘯𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥.

𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵, 𝘢 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘤𝘬 𝘰𝘯 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘰𝘰𝘳. 𝘈 𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘮𝘢𝘯, 𝘢 𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘳, 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘨𝘪𝘧𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘵’𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘰𝘯. 𝘐𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘶𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘦, 𝘰𝘳 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘴, 𝘢 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵. 𝘍𝘰𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘭𝘰𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘳.

We Finally Care About Context

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was reviewing an older repository during a production incident the other day and couldn’t figure out what sections of the code were doing or what the overall system looked like. It’s so frustrating to be in undocumented code.

Software documentation is a mature pillar of engineering these days. The tools are there, the patterns exist, the documentation standards are well-established. We just… don’t do it.

Why don’t we when there is documented correlation between high performing engineering teams and open and accessible codebases?

The Lost Art of Casual Conversation

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In our hyperconnected world, we've forgotten how to have meaningful casual conversations without agenda or purpose, or so I thought

How My Marriage Protects Me From Bots

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 10:59:22 -0500

A bot sends me an inappropriate linkedIn solicitation about adding fire to my marriage

The Aging Programmer

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 14:14:57 -0500

Kate Gregory's talk on 'The Aging Programmer' is relevant at any age.

Training a Model to Post on LinkedIn as Me

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

[Write your introduction here about why you’re training a model to post on LinkedIn as you]

The Challenge

[Describe the challenge of capturing your authentic voice and posting style]

Approach

[Explain your approach to training the model]

Data Collection

[Describe how you collected training data from your LinkedIn posts]

Model Selection

[Explain which model/approach you chose and why]

Training Process

[Detail the training process]

Results

[Share the results and examples]

Batman Is a Poor Executive

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Batman is a poor leader who doesn't effective solve problems

Triage, Diversity and Farewell

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 10:19:51 -0400

Leaving gopuff was hard, time to reflect and celebrate the team we had

Azure Static Web Apps with Terraform

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 08:33:08 -0400

Example of how to setup an Azure Static Web App Using Terraform

About Aaron

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been excited about software since I discovered Asyst in the late 80s. In grad school, I worked in a lab and analyzed data written on paper charts. I transcribed data points into an array using a ruler and notebook and calculated Fourier transforms by hand. Finally, an older grad student took pity on me and showed me this fantastic computer that could be connected to the instruments and do in a few hours what took me weeks to do by hand!

CosmosDB: Stored Procedure (sproc) to update a document

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A example of a CosmosBD Stored procedures (sprocs) that will do an atomic update.

CosmosDB: A Stored Procedure to merge documents on read

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

An example of an Azure cosmosDB stored Procedure to retrieve multiple documents and return a merged payload.

CosmosDB: Hello Stored Procedures (sproc)

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 21:45:20 -0400

A tutorial showing how a CosmosBD Stored procedures (sprocs) can be deployed, updated and tested from code.

Les Held on the Today Show

Sat, 09 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

My father was featured on Hoda’s Bucket list segment on the Today show.

My dad never really wanted to talk about his past in public, but recently he met one of the soldiers from the US 30th Infantry who rescued him. With the passing of the last of the group who rescued him, he know wants to ensure his story is told. The today show segment didn’t go into detail of his rescue, but men like Matthew Rozell and Frank Towers have documented it on Teaching History Matters

Answers Chat bot for your WordPress blog

Sat, 15 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Chat based interfaces, backed by powerful AI (Artificial Intelligence), are effective ways to connect with your customers.

Reading Exchange Mail with Java

Sun, 14 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Many times I’ve had to sweep an inbox and do something with the email. Typically the easiest way is to use IMAP, but our corporate email server has IMAP disabled.

Fortunately 2007 Microsoft Exchange has had a rich web service interface so I wanted to give that a try.

One of the main patterns used is to read an email and then move it to something like an ‘archive’ or ’error’ directory. Exchange supports arbitrary message properties such as ‘category’ and even custom properties, so adding a category tag of “processed” seems like a good idea. I wanted to experiment a bit.

Practical Hypermedia for our post ORM world

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post is for people who have started learning about hypermedia and feel that it over complicates the elegance of REST. When I started hearing about hypermedia I felt it was adding architecture acrobatics for the sake of buzzword enhancement. After having applied these techniques in a few places not only have a drunk the cool aid, I’ve setup a stand beside my desk. I look back and try to understand where my initial negative reaction came from. I realized that many of the examples were trivial and did not demonstrate the reality of what hypermedia brings to the table.

JIRA story point totals using Ruby and Rest

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m using a hosted version of JIRA and needed to obtain quick totals based on filters that I have setup.

I could not find any easy documentation online so I thought I’d share my quick hack.

The REST API is very well documented and uses the same JQL as the filters do.

In order to view the commit list for an iteration I have some JQL that looks like:

fixversion = 20120611 and fixversion was 20120611 ON “2012/06/11” AND status NOT IN (canceled, “on hold”)

Embracing change

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a month past due so here is my obligatory “I changed my job” post.

Over the last nearly 8 years at Comcast as part of the ‘Online’ group and later as founding member of mighty Comcast Interactive Media I’ve made many business connections, met a number of excellent peers and forged a few relationships that will last a lifetime.

As a happily married 40+ dad with mortgage and college payments I often feel over the hill with regards to blogging and living out loud. As a Manager with a sometimes disproportional ego I also felt an obligation to ‘disappear’ for some time in order to give @tomjbarker room to make the team his own. I’ve no doubt that he will take what we started to the next level.

Crowdsourcing the arts and a misunderstood artist is seen in a new light

Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend I attended a gallery opening of an exhibition called ‘50 Americans’ featuring the work of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Usually I have to spend the first few minutes or an Art exhibition reading the background to understand the story that the gallery is telling through the art. This one was different.

Rather then view the Mapplethorpe images through the lens of an expert Sean Kelly’s people found 50 Americans, one per state, to curate the selection. They were nervous about what selections the wisdom of the crowd would choose to surface. Some people involved with the Mapplethorpe foundation were initially skeptical of the project.

Using python-dulwich to load any version of a file from a local git repo

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

On Monday we are kicking off an innovation week (more to come on that topic) and I’ve devised a little project that includes nearly every buzzword I’m interested in.

I’m spending some time doing some technical spikes to see what is possible and I found a need to load a particular file from a git repo given the path and tree hash.

I grabbed my trusty python, dulwich (native python-git library) and gave it a shot. After a few minutes writing complicated looking recursive code I jumped over to irc where the friendly author pointed me to a convenience function that does what I needed.

the measure of Awesome

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Development at work has been trending well in the new year and the team is getting excited about our formal incorporation of practices such as TDD and pair programming.

I’m definitely perceive an intangible benefit in culture and fun. With a full test suite and engaged developers working out loud coding is fun again.

I give a lot of thought to developer efficiency and generating metrics around our output is very important to me. We are at a point in this iteration where I have too many stories in progress and it is taking a few extra days to get work completed and accepted. This does not concern me greatly since this is a new team and it usually takes a few turns to get into a rhythm. I was walking down the hall and one of developers said that things are going ‘Awesome’. I said “Great, but awesome is not a metric”.

OSX vs Ubuntu, Windows wins?

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since Barcamp I’ve been shopping for a personal laptop for general use as well as a development machine that I could use for work. Our work issued machine is a loaded mac powerbook. With a unix core osx has given me much of the power that I used to enjoy when I’d used linux as a primary os. However Apple is not doing wonders for free software and I felt the need to get back to my roots and move back to Linux.

BarCamp Philly 2010 Summary - Opendata and beyond

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

When wrapping up the VIm talk @trevmex mentioned that people share their dotFiles on github. This blew my mind. I can sit in front of anyones desk and start using their eclipse and immediately be productive. The secret to VIm is the years of refactoring the configuration and shortcuts, known as the dotFiles. You probably couldn’t even execute a mapped command on my machine since I map the leader based on my keyboard.

Jugaad - India's Agile style

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been reading about India’s concept of Jugaad, possibly poised to enter our buzzword vocabulary since it came up in the context of what Obama can learn from that country.

Where the Agile Manifesto starts with “Individuals and Interactions” the Harvard Business Review kicks off Jugaad with “Thrift not Waste”.

All too often I’ve seen Agile work because a scarcity of resources (money, time or knowledge) pushed an otherwise waterfall loving group into giving Agile a shot. The tenants of Jugaad resonate with me as a more general philosophy about how to get things accomplished then Agile’s focus on “working software”.

my Barcamp Philly 2010 summary

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Every year Philly’s BarCarmp gets better. Last year I met great people and learned new tactics from my peers. This year I enjoyed a number of roundtable discussions where we taught each other and had my core paradigms challenged. (of couse still met great people, but that is implied)

The day opened last night with a fantastic hosted party @indyhall. It had a vibe that reminded me of my college days where the future was bright and everyone you talked to has excitement around what they were doing. I loved being surprised by people. Even the kids from Phillymagic had more going on then I would have thought. First off the magician was a Rensselar student and I was saddened to learn the bars I institutionalized as a student were no longer in vogue. More importantly he was not just flipping cards for pay, he is building out an online hub for magicians to fill a market need that he noticed. I’m barely through my first tequila and completely impressed by this fellows accomplishments in building a passive income stream is a business he loves.

Cianfrani Park Dog Owners don't get it

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

After spending a day immersed in the utopian community of http://www.barcampphilly.org/ I came home to dystopian reality of dog owners in my local park. Basically Cianfrani park is a nice little community park that has been overrun by rude dog owners recently. I love dogs, having raised three. My dogs didn’t need a leash and I walked them daily off-leash, so I understand these people.

The contrast in the community is striking. At barcamp I was surrounded by people that see the web as a way for people to collaborate and communicate. These dog owners put up a site to champion their cause rather then conduct a dialog on the ‘official’ site. On the site some poster says that ‘unjust laws call for civil disobedience’. Most of the dog owners are very nice and considerate. It only takes a few bad apples to ruin a reputation. This injustice I understand since I ride a motorcycle and automatically get associated with obnoxious load harley’s and kids that recklessly weave through traffic.

PPA ending 65mpg & free parking

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A friendly PPA agent gave me some unpleasant news today. I was respectfully loading my bike and moving it from its unobtrusive parking spot on 20th and Market when he walked by.

I’ve notices some motorcycle shaped parking spots on that corner and knew this news was coming. Turns out that if you charge 50% for motorcycle parking but put 4 bikes in a car slot you can still earn 2x in parking fees.

Feel bad for GM, I couldn't make this up

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I went researching to Chevy Volt to find some facts to offset my calculator below. I did get lots of feedback about people thinking that price is not the only factor here.

So when I went to chevy to look at ‘affordability’ I found this. Check the URL [caption id=“attachment_229” align=“aligncenter” width=“441” caption=“GM Working on affordability”][/caption]

ROI of MPG

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been car shopping lately and thinking about what mileage I need in the new vehicle. The cars that I like and are more fun to drive hover just under 30mpg while the 35+ models tend to be a bit mushy on the gas (or tiny)

Today I came across this: http://www.comcast.net/articles/finance/20090811/US.GM.Volt.Mileage/

GM is unveiling a car that get 230MPG in the city! I thought that was awesome until I came across 3 facts

Specialization is for Insects part II

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Came across the Heinlein quote again today: http://personalmba.com/core-human-skills

this time in the context of a “Business” professional. There is another point made in the blog post about how to be successful. You can either be an expert in a narrow field (top 1%) or be very good (top 25%) in multiple fields. The author calls these “Core Human Skills”

This is worth a read, and I will definitely abstract these concepts out in my interview process.

Project Management is critical for Useless projects

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This about this:

If you have a project with an estimated cost of $1MM and you expect a return of $1.1MM then strict governance and process controls are critical to success. A variance of 10% will take you from profitability to a loss.

If you have a project with the same estimated $1MM cost but an expected return of $50MM then project management is less critical. a 10% variance will not really matter in the big picture. Given my fictional example even a 100% to 500% cost overrun could happen and keep the “success” label.

Designing a new Infrastructure is like buying a new car

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Because I happen to be both buying a new car and deploying new infrastructure the realization dawned upon me about how similar these two activities are.

You start the investigation with some preconceived “gut-level” notions. code: Multiprocess distributed job engine is what I need car : I want a Mazda 3 with “Zoom Zoom”
Everybody has a story about why your choice is bad code: “In my last job I used a python-C++ wrapper from vcron” car : My cousin"s friends brother had a mazda and the engine fell out on 95

HOA - Case study of failed political systems

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I love to rant over how bad HOAs are. There are so many case studies in my life where otherwise happy friendly people become tyrants when given a bit of power. From the band leader that threatened my wedding would be a failure to the people that run the Home Owners Associations.

It takes a certain type of fellow to run an HOA. My buck’s county HOA is much better then the one in Manalanapan. They forced me to keep human feces in my garage, (more about dirty diapers and not allowing a gargage can to be on the side of the house) and would not let a neighbor keep a boat in the lot because it was not a car.

Google's iterative design for search

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The google blog recently put up a remarkably content-free post on their product blog about how they use iterative design and usability studies to develop enhancements to their core search offering.

Official Google Blog: Behind the scenes of the Search Options panel.

We do similar testing for our search product (http://search.comcast.net) and we actually run 8-12 live tests at any given time. The real users using the product in the wild give us fantastic insight that is combined with the more traditional studies in order to guide us.

Insta-Tag Cloud

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Cute tag-cloud generator off my feed

[](http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/875557/Aaron%27s_Blog ““Wordle: Aaron’s Blog”)

Paper prototyping success!

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Over in CIM we are working on a major CMS overhaul based on Alfresco. Alfresco gives me the solid foundation of what I need in terms of content APIs, scalability and workflow. Unfortunately the UI leaves something to be desired.

I’ve decided to focus my teams efforts on the Editorial interface of the CMS and really want to get it right. CMS projects in general are prone to dissatisfaction and most people using ’enterprise’ CMSs don’t really like them.

The Taking of Pelham 123

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Taking of Pelham 123 on Fancast!

I went looking for the trailer of the original Pelham 123 and was plesantly surprised to find the full lenght movie on Fancast!

This was one of my favorite movies as a kid and well worth watching. There are some comments out there about how this is a well done film in terms of pacing, so I hope that they model that in the remake.

I really enjoyed Taken

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Just watched Taken and it was a well done film.

It had a pace more akin to the Bourne movies with a better actor at the helm. I don’t know why it didn’t do so well at the box office, I thought that it had more emotional impact then any recent spy type movies I’ve seen. The action sequences were more of a desperate warrior then a calm martial artist and every scene imparted tension.

Peeling back the onion of stupidity

Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve mentioned the book Adrenaline Junkies in a previous post and I’m not seeing the value in a common language for discussing problems.

Today’s pattern is the ‘Onion of Stupidity’. This is a common pattern where you build up hack upon workaround upon compromise, inject a little shortsightedness and wind up seeing a good chunk of your effort goes into cleaning it up. A colleague here promoted the term “technical debt” to describe issues were we these types of issues and help us prioritize them. I’m thinking that my Onion is more about ‘strategy debt’. The onion is usually built with best intentions at all sides.

Just show up

Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes the answer really isn’t that hard.

We were recently having a lunch conversation and talking about how to get involved in the local tech community. Kevin simply stated “Just show up”. It was a stunningly simple answer.

To people that have had the great experience of being involved in the Philly tech scene this seems obvious. As a Gen ‘X’er that moved around the east coast during the dotCom days let me say this is an unual and fantastic community. Back in the day there was some feeling of elitism and you had to demonstrate some effort to be included in a ‘community’. Its true that a ’noob (great word, best contribution of the ‘millenials’ so far ;) could show up at the local Linux install day and get some help setting up slackware on left over office equipment, but they were not taken seriously in the ‘real’ meetings.

coupling de-coupled CMS

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m hip deep in the design of a new CMS to power some large scale sites. The big buzzword going on at this level is around how the CMS products are designed to be ‘de-coupled’. Specifically we are talking about decoupling the deliver of the site from the management of the content.

This is very understandable, as your backend needs can be very different then the portal. The backend CMS has rigid security and workflow concerns and the front-end is optimized to serve pages fast.

grails java.sql.SQLException: Table not found in statement [insert into

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m spinning up a new grails experiment this weekend and ran into an error that I could not effectively google. So hopefully by adoping the very SEO style title others will benefit.

I really want to like grails, it is a full stack web development framework modeled after Ruby on Rails but written Groovy with full access to the JVM.

I have an excellent project in mind for some facebook integration using a Java library I’ve some experience with so grails seemed to fit.

Smartzone shortcuts

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m starting to get used to Comcast’s smartzone webmail front end. It is an ajaxy / desktopish mail client that exposes way more functionality then the old one.

This type of functionality usually comes at a price, and in this case the price was having to use a mouse.

There are a number of keyboard shortcuts, but the it is a full page help buried in the preferences pane. I prefer the narrow right-hand window like the type seen in some Microsoft office products.

good meal at table 31 in Philladelphia

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We went to Table 31 at the base of the Comcast center for dinner tonight. It was an excellent restaurant week menu. Most of the places doing restaurant week push the up-sell pretty hard but this was an exception. They had the all inclusive $35 menu on the table. Even better they had a selection of wines under $50 that they recommended and our was very nice.

The waiter was very nice and handled my ‘special needs’ diet. Well at least I think that he did, but I’ll know for sure tomorrow if I accidentally ingested some wheat.

Ardith learns about reducing scope

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So tonight my 10 year old decided that she wanted to learn flash. We are going through a basic tutorial but she decided to make a cat (rather then a circle) walk across the screen.

This is clearly scope creep! There was budgeted time after dinner and before bed for a circle slide, not a walking mammal.

After some time she said that it didn’t look right and wanted to spend more time in order to make it walk more realistically. I said that it was bedtime. Like any good developer faced with their project time getting cut she looked to reduce scope.

first 'real' refreshPhilly event

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The first round of ‘official’ speakers set the bar pretty high for refreshPhilly.

Tom Boutell from www.punkave.com gave us a talk on symphony and set the tone of the crowd as a hardcore web devs followed by Phil Charron and Russ Starke who brilliently challenged us to the core.

Dragging up memories of aquaman they threw down the simple question: So what exactly are we going to do for Philly?

Mummers here and abroad

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Philadelphia: 1, England 0

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“180” caption=“Philly mummers”][/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“180” caption=“English Mummers”][/caption]

virus alert!

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

While hunting online for that movie with the couple who pay thier neighbors to act normal so they can sell thier home I got redirected to this nicely done virus page.

Its a convincing experience to get the user to download and install the application. I wonder if these criminals would be open to oursourcing some IA work that I need done?????

[caption id=“attachment_114” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Well done social engineerig page to install a virus”][/caption]

missing my mac

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My sleek mac is more like a Jaguar then a chevy. Yes it is in the shop.

My machine and 4 of its cousins left our office last week for an undisclosed service center for an indeterminate amount of time.

I’m using a Dell laptop. The dell hardware is really solid as is the wireless connectivity. The operating system is windows on top of full drive encryption so the software experience leaves something to be desired. When I unplug the wire it immediately hops onto the corporate wireless network, something the mac can’t do (yet).

Netbeans for HTML-CSS work?

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Due to an unfortunate series of work related events I find myself writing php code. Not only php code, but wordpress php code. That however is the topic of a later post (as is plugins that edit core code using regex based searches)

I did the work in textmate but decided to spin up my new Netbeans 6.5 in order to test the subversion functionality.

Immediately I noticed that Netbeans picked up a tag mismatch and highlighted it nicely:

Giving up on Apple (mouse)

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

My girlfriend’s mom bought her one of those inexpensive ‘wireless’ notebook mouses. It is not even bluetooth enabled, it requires a USB adapter.

I used it over the weekend and found it much better then my hip Apple mouse. Although I can’t squeeze it ( www.apple.com/mightymouse/ ) it is much easier to use.

The tilt wheel concept is more precise then the little ball on the apple and the optical sensor works across any surface. This mouse works on my office desk where the apple mouse fails (and a dog did eat my mousepad)

javaFX sneaks out the door

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Sun released version 1 of javaFX today - http://www.javafx.com/

Its a competitor to Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, but based on the java developer created demos it just does not look complelling enough to matter.

Adobe had been making some great progress in the Flash virtual machine and the number of advances in Flash10 really impress the coder in me. As a development manager I’m seeing Actionscript programmers reach an impressive level of maturity, with unit testing, automated builds and solid object design.

A House With No Front Door Keeps you off the streets

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I found an interesting article today.

A House With No Front Door

It is written by a product marketing professional lamenting about dealing with ‘resource constrained’ engineering teams.

Seeing as how I come from a resource constrained engineering team I thought it was an interesting read. The premise of the article was the disconnect as described:

Perhaps it is my job to get this perspective across to them, and I try to do that, but the gulf between the “feature triage” perspective that many engineers have, and the “holistic” customer or market perspective that is needed is enormous.

Chef Ramsay as a model manager?

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I was watching Kitchen Nightmares where Chef Gordon Ramsay verbally attacks restaurant owners in order to point out the areas where they lack.

I used to think he was just another character on TV but there was a turning point in that episode. The owner was berating everyone around him and causing so much stress that his customers noticed and his business was failing. People from the Chef to the Hostess noticed the problems but they didn’t try to fix the core issue. This owner was a good enough chef to start a successful restaurant and then use that to open a second one in a beautiful space.

BarCampPhilly part 2

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Arpit led another session about how and when to use Flash in an Ajax world. One of the attendees was a Microsoft Silverlight manager and was a solid hour of dispelling myths about RIA in general. There is still a large population that thinks Flash/Silverlight are bad for SEO and not enough people know of Adobe’s recent collaborations with Google and Microsoft, including project Ichabod that makes Flash more indexable than Ajax (some details here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/adobe_ichabod_flash_ajax.php). We also talked about how the RIA vs traditional html choice is often made unconsciously before the IA/Design phase and what we need to do in order to help inform that choice. Arpit is going to have a conversation later with a manager from Microsoft concerning Rich Internet Application development in Philadelphia.

BarCamp or Mac ad?

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Sorting through Barcamp photos. Is this a session or mac ad? Macbooks and iphones everywhere. I’d love to know the percentages.[caption id=“attachment_66” align=“alignnone” width=“450” caption=“Mac ad or conference session”][/caption]

BarCampPhilly was a success!!

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The BarCamp happened yesterday and Philly’s brightest and most enthusiastic ‘interative media’ professionals came out in force. Barcamp is a type of grass roots conference setup by the people bottom up rather then by a company top down.

I talked a lot, learned a lot, drank a lot and made some friends in the process.

Each session exceeded my expectations in different ways. My talk on the how we build and operate http://www.comcast.net was very well received and it was very telling to step up from the weeds and view this creation with my peers. As much as we need to move forward sometimes we at CIM forget how far we have come. Since this was an untelevised, ego and marketecture free event we openly discussed what we did right and wrong. Having this talk with people that live through this grind every day is very different then having it with people that learned the ‘right way to build websites’ from books or blogs.

will our perception of civic duties ever be the same?

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The vote turnout is really impressive. Its more like a party or superbowl.

Normally people are quiet while waiting online to vote, and if there is conversation is complaining about the need to wait.

Even the tv spots this election were a higher production quality as compared to years past. Maybe we need to let Fox and CNN bid for exclusive coverage rights.

Anyway after I voted I took the kiddies to vote at the Bucks county kid election:

best election video so far

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The combination of cutting edge on-demand video creation and old school guilt!

Watch it

Edit from 2025: Back in 2008 I really thought we would be doing more of this on demand video creation. Now that AI is here I do expect to see this again. But this spot proved we had the technology back then. It was easy to insert text or product placement into videos and skilled designers make it seamless and interesting. It’s a bit sad that this will come to fruition with AI making soulless art because the business teams have no concept of the creative design process. What’s worse is that people will be amazed and accept this drek, never able to imagine what could have been.

public takes action to stop a police beating

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I came across this video on a soccer/fan site and would love to know the context. My multilingual friends are encouraged to reply….

Phillies Parade!

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The fountain is green:

The Fans are lined up:

Like a zombie hoard the fans assemble….

Its coming soon!!!

…and John took much better photos then I did:

Accidental Obama supporter?

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I think I just became an Obama supporter. I didn’t mean to but I was pressured into it by the propaganda.

I’ve actually been on the fence until the Palin decision. (I have daughters and have a strong opinion about the difference between family values and statutory rape)

Anyway I got an email that was anti-Obama in silly ways. I could name a number of things about him that truly concern me. I’m not sold that he would make a good president. Unfortunately our election is not about if he will be a good president, it is about if he will be better or worse the McCain.

"really dumb idea" or "I hope my mom does not read this"

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I checked the weather and rode my motorcycle down to Philly with plans to ride back to Bucks County today.

It was raining and very windy in the city so I left a bit earlier for safety sake. It was cold but the road was not too slippery until I ventured onto 95N. As soon as I got the bike up to about 40mph I got hit with a crosswind and felt the back tire move sideways. At this point higher brain functions kicked in and I slowed for the next exit, Aramingo road.

Specialization is for Insects

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The other night we had a security issue that came up at 3am. Our combined response toolkit included DNS changes, akamai CDN configuration, adserver updates, javascript, HTML, and lots of good old fashioned interpersonal communication and persuasion. In these days where I’m working with dedicated ‘Javascript’ engineers that don’t read Java and operations people focused on CDN configurations that don’t know the application innards the concept of specialization is a concern.

I just had to click this ad

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I had to click on this minimalist ad. I had to know where it went…..

reminiscing the cache wars

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Recently at work people are discussing the merits of different cache servers. That brought back memories of my days as the R&D Product lead for a line of cache systems.

The high point was participating in the two week “Cache Bake Off” hosted by NLANR (the team broke off and formed The Measurement Factory. This was great fun where engineering teams from major companies got together to have thier systems pounded in a no holds barred performance test. I was working for a hardware company that had thier sights firmly set of being the leading tier two vendor (Tier one was considered too competative to take exponential growth risks). I think my gear nailed it by achieving 80% of the performance of the leadning brand at 1/5 the price. (And you could cluster 2 for less then half the cost and have over 50% better performance - if you order now you can get fee overnight shipping).

1800 got Junk?

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I recently purchased a ‘pre-forclosure’ townhouse and it was cluttered with a serious amount of stuff.

My first thought was to rent a dumpster and hire some movers to help me empty the house. That would have cost about $6-$700. I’ve been seeing the 1800 Got Junk trucks around the neighborhood so I thought I’d give them a try.

The website was excellent with a design and IA that allowed me to quickly accomplish what I came there to do. I setup an appointment for the next business day and got a price estimate.

the trifecta of personal projects

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The joys of home ownership pressing demands at work have stifled my personal innovation time. Sometime in the last millennium I used be enjoy writing exploratory projects and releasing libraries that others may find useful.

Over the last few months I’ve been looking for inspiration for a project that would help me explore some ‘search’ related ideas that have been bouncing in my head.

I came across a project idea that represents the perfect personal trifecta!

The real meaning of agility

Sat, 31 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Agility is one of the most abused terms in my profession.

Recent events in my day job have caused me to rethink what agility means. We have a very elegant, loosely coupled system that allows us to build entire sections of our website in hours. The framework handles everything from CDN integration to doing automated profiling every build.

Software engineers have to be good at identifying the bottleneck, and over the past few days I saw how the larger teams ability to react mattered much more then the codebase itself.

Iron Man - great past the end

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I thoroughly enjoyed the Iron Man movie. My son wanted more of a SpaceMarine clunky feel to the armor, but I though they nailed exactly how I saw Iron Man from my youth.

At least half the theater stayed past the credit roll, I was surprised by how many people knew about the extra bit.

It took some real willpower to sit through the endless list of names after consuming a super giant-sized soda and getting to a 2 hour movie 45min early

SpringSource - proving once again Java doesn't get the web

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I just read an article in a java trade mag entitled: SpringSource CEO: “The Future of Enterprise Java is Clear and Bright”

The premise sounds positive. Basically they took OSGI, Spring and threw it on Tomcat as a web server. The idea of being able to deploy OSGI bundles with the bag of beans development style of Spring is really compelling.

What this negative post is about is how they still don’t get the ‘web’. My biggest issue with Java web development is that not enough attention is paid to modern web basics. The very first thing that I noticed on the SpringSource website was the 15 year old style url.

Rest as a boring servlet

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A coworker whipped up a generic REST interface for any Ruby on Rails activerecord (data model). What he described (in 5 minutes) was a nice implementation. I wanted see how the generic django REST interface was coded.

http://code.google.com/p/django-rest-interface/

I was pleasantly surprised to realize that they Python developers simply used the normal form processing to handle rest and didn’t invent a new paradigm.

On an early project we tried to implement RESTlet for a java based REST application. Under load we saw some strange problems and the code was reverted to normal servlets without too much pain.

Motocycles and Python turn toil into joy

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So today started out great.

Temperatures in the 80’s, so I took the kiddies outside. I put my cellphone on the trunk of my sisters’s car, put the kids on their bikes, put skates on my feet and rolled out to enjoy the day.

Things were going well with my littlest one making turns at each end of the block. My sister pulled up and shouted some encouragement as she drove past. I waved and noticed my black cell phone on the white trunk of her car!

csv to xml via python

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Today at work our main Flash developer asked me about expanding his skills and learning either Ruby or Python. My personal preference is towards python but ruby has its place. Flash is really doing well in the Java/Enterprise space lately so I went that way.

Most of the Flash backend in our work is xml based so XML was on my mind anyway. Recently we needed to mock up a xml data data file for a project while the real APIs are being completed. We had the data in a csv file so we asked some developers to whip up a xml file.

Michael Clayton

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I watched Michael Clayton today

A decent legal / espionage plot. Predictive enough. The lawyer is defending an international chemical company for years. One day he goes off his anti-depressants and decides to champion the farmers being killed by the chemical additives. Drama ensues when the ‘fixer’ Michael Clayton is set on the case.

But the lawyer who had the breakdown was Michael’s friend, and since Mr. Clayton has a good relationship with his son, so we assume he is not wholly evil. Its a good thing we don’t live in a world with people that would allow this to happen. A quick googling shows that our government recently decided to immediately phase out a harmful pesticide (that has been in use since 1950s) by 2012.

Book Signing @ Kesher Isreal

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I attended a book signing and talk by Harry Boonin at Kesher Isreal today. He gave an interesting talk about the history of the temple and an insight into the history of the Jews in Philly. An interesting bit was his mention of a part of the building’s history where the Christian community collaborated with the Jewish community during a move and had mutual respect for each others religious paraphernalia. I have to wonder how the different communities could understand each other without wikipedia!

Glock Day!

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

What better first post for my renovated, Philly style blog, then to mention “Glock Day”.

A local range in the city (Philadelphia Archery and Gun Club) hosted some helpful representatives from Glock and offered free test firing of their models.

The staff was helpful and it was fun. It reminded me of testing racing skis at Killington. Except less of the fresh mountain air and more of the smell of gunpowder.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Screenshot Capture Checklist

Before Starting

Start Hugo server: hugo server -D --navigateToChanged
Open second terminal for Claude work
Clear terminal history if needed
Position windows optimally for screenshots
Prepare screenshot tool (Cmd+Shift+4 on macOS)

During Capture Process

Pre-Screenshot Checklist

For each screenshot:

Check window positioning and sizing
Ensure good contrast and text readability
Remove any sensitive information from view
Verify proper terminal prompt/cursor position
Check browser zoom level (100% recommended)

Screenshot Quality

Use PNG format for text clarity
Capture at full resolution, resize if needed
Ensure maximum width doesn’t exceed 1200px
Check that all important details are visible
Verify text is readable at various sizes

Capture Sequence by Step

01-Setup

01-terminal-hugo-server-running.png - Hugo server startup output
01-browser-localhost-preview.png - Local site preview
01-terminal-project-structure.png - Directory listing
01-terminal-dual-setup.png - Both terminals visible
01-hugo-server-output.png - Server running confirmation
01-terminal-directory-listing.png - Project files with ls -la

02-Planning

02-claude-planning-conversation.png - Initial planning discussion
02-claude-todowrite-output.png - TodoWrite tool in action
02-terminal-specs-directory.png - Specs folder creation

03-Research

03-claude-web-research.png - Claude research capabilities
03-terminal-grep-results.png - Searching existing content
03-claude-context-gathering.png - Information synthesis

04-Structure

04-terminal-mkdir-post.png - Creating post directory
04-editor-front-matter.png - Setting up post metadata
04-terminal-file-structure.png - Final directory structure

05-Writing

05-claude-editor-split.png - Claude + editor view
05-claude-collaborative-writing.png - Writing process
05-editor-revision-history.png - Content evolution

06-Testing

06-browser-live-reload.png - Live reload demonstration
06-mobile-responsive-view.png - Mobile compatibility
06-browser-navigation-test.png - Navigation verification

07-Assets

07-terminal-assets-listing.png - Asset organization
07-terminal-image-optimization.png - Image processing
07-browser-page-speed-test.png - Performance testing

08-Review

08-claude-content-review.png - Content review process
08-terminal-hugo-build.png - Build validation
08-browser-final-preview.png - Pre-publish preview

09-Deployment

09-terminal-git-status.png - Git status check
09-terminal-commit-message.png - Commit message creation
09-github-actions-triggered.png - Workflow start
09-github-deployment-success.png - Deploy completion

10-Monitoring

10-browser-live-site-post.png - Published post verification
10-browser-azure-dashboard.png - Azure deployment status
10-browser-social-sharing.png - Social sharing functionality

Post-Capture Tasks

Review all screenshots for quality
Rename files according to naming convention
Move to appropriate subdirectories
Optimize file sizes if needed
Write alt text descriptions
Update blog post with image references

Quality Assurance

All text is clearly readable
No sensitive information exposed
Images demonstrate workflow accurately
File names match documented conventions
Screenshots tell coherent story
Alt text written for accessibility

Backup Strategy

Keep original high-resolution versions
Create web-optimized versions for blog
Store in version control with post
Document any special capture circumstances

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Screenshot Organization for Claude Workflow Blog Post

Directory Structure

Naming Convention

Format: `{step}-{component}-{description}.{ext}`

Step Numbers: