I love writing code and building awesome stuff, but there are times where fighting the urge to Reddit for 14 hours feels like this:

When this happens, I break out my secret weapon: *The Pomodoro Technique. *The basic premise behind this technique is alternating your time between spending several minutes on nothing but working towards a certain goal (let’s call it the hot period) or deliverable and a few minutes on anything that isn’t work (*the cold period). *

Many developers and sysadmins starting out with Powershell will assume that this:

$arr = 1..10
$arr2 = @()
foreach ($num in $arr) { $arr2 += $num + 1 }
write-output $arr2

is the same as this:

$arr = 1..10
$arr2 = @()
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $arr.length; $i++) { $arr2 += $arr[$i] + $i }
write-output $arr2

or this:

$arr = 1..10
$arr2 = @()
$arr | foreach { $arr2 += $_ + 1 }

Just like those Farmers Insurance commercials demonstrate, they are not the same. It’s not as critical of an error as, say, mixing up Write-Output with Write-Host (which I’ll explain in another post), but knowing the difference between the two might help your scripts perform better and give you more flexibility in how you do certain things within them.

You’ll also get some neat street cred. You can never get enough street cred.

Computing is expensive. Desktops and laptops cost lots of money. Printers cost even more money. (Printers are really funny, actually; buying one or two isn’t so bad, but once you’re managing tens or hundreds or more laser printers and printing hundreds or thousands of pages per day, the cost of toner/ink and repair skyrocket like a SpaceX shuttle.) Desks cost even more money. Accessories cost even more money. The list goes on and on,infinitum ad nauseum.

Now that we live in an age where downloading high-def movies takes less time than starting up your car, leveraging the cloud and having people bring in their own devices has become a highly lucrative alternative. The bring-your-own-device, or BYOD, movement has picked up a lot of steam over the years, so much so that Gartner expects for “half of the world’s companies” to enact it. Over a billion devices are expected to be using BYOD by 2018, and as more and larger companies begin to take advantage of cloud computing, this trend will only accelerate.

I’ll spend the next three posts talking about three key components of most BYOD environment:

1. Virtual desktops,
2. Laptops and desktops, and
3. Mobile phones and tablets

I’ll explain who the major players involved with each component are, their importance in BYOD and some things to watch out for during considerations.

I’ve developed a system over the years that has kept my inbox mostly empty all of the time. It has worked for me even when I was getting 100+ emails/day, so I’d say it scales fairly well. It also works well even in the absence of Gmail’s additional feature set (I use Office 365 personally, but this worked when I used Gmail, Apple Mail and my own mail servers back in the day.), which is nice should you ever choose to use a desktop mail client.

This might not work for you. You might even be doing some variation of this already. If that’s the case, feel free to tell me off!

Finally, if you don’t want to worry about any of this stuff and don’t ever see yourself having to use Outlook or Mail.app ever again, try Google’s Inbox and tell me that all of this is useless in the comments!

Without further ado, this is how I email:

This Thursday, we’ll talk about a system that has been extremely critical (and extremely taken for granted) for shaping the Internet as we know it: the domain name system, or DNS for short.

Before I explain what DNS is, I’ll talk about something I try really hard to hate but ultimately can’t: Starbucks.

I go to Starbucks at least once a day. Given that Google has more coffee machines (and baristas!) sitting idle than my handy downstairs Starbucks does on even their busiest days, this is slightly embarrassing to admit. I love their drinks, but as a recovering coffee snob, I passive-aggressively hate that I love their drinks. My relationship with that Seattle staple is kind of like how a lot of people feel about Taylor Swift: they’ll hate on her forever but will never admit to playing 1989 on repeat.

Wait, that’s just me?

Okay. I can live with that.

Scenario

A file share that a group in your business is dependent on is running out of space. As usual, they have no idea why they’re running out of space, but they need you, the sysadmin, to fix it, and they need it done yesterday.

This has been really easy for Linux admins for a long time now: Do this

du -h / | sort -nr

and delete folders or files from folders at the top that look like they want to be deleted.

Windows admins haven’t been so lucky…at least those that wanted to do it on the command-line (which is becoming increasingly important as Microsoft focuses more on promoting Windows Server Core and PowerShell). `

I was trying to put a bunch of slides together today but had a lot of trouble doing it because my Mac would freeze up every minute or so for about 10-15 seconds. If you’ve ever tried mowing a lawn with no gas, you kind of know how this feels. It was infuriating.

In search of anything that might improve the state of things, I stumbled upon this interesting solution that seems to have made the slowness go away!

If your Mac is freezing up or acting slow in general, give this a try:

In Powershell, a typical, run-of-the-mill pipeline looks something like this:

Get-ChlidItem ~ | ?{$_.LastWriteTime -lt $(Get-Date 1/1/2015)} | Format-List -Auto

but really looks like this when written in .NET (C# in this example):

Your servers are useless, and you should sell them.

Many businesses small and large buy servers for many wrong reasons. Some businesses want a server for an application they wrote. Some others want to keep their data “private.” Others still want servers for “better speed.” All of these reasons are wrong. There are only three reasons that I can think of that justify the purchase of physical servers (feel free to list more in the comments!):

1. A regulator your business is beholden to requires it,
2. Your app really does need that kind of performance (read on to find out if this is you), and
3. You have a strong passion for burning money.