Bienvenue! Welcome!
My goal is to help you work faster.
I must speak and teach until I hear 10 people say, "That thing you taught me? I used it! And it saved me time!"
(Ahem ... although maybe blogging slower than I'd hoped. Ugh, coders' repetitive stress injury.)
So check out the tutorials. Play with code. Tell me about your triumphs.
Transforming CommonApp into Salesforce EASY question responses
11 Aug 2022
I just posted how to use Oracle’s UNPIVOT to turn a “wide” table into a “skinny” one with just “field name” & “field value” columns … but why? Let’s take a look at an example from higher education with the Common App and Salesforce EASY / EDA.
UNPIVOT to key-value pair in Oracle SQL
11 Aug 2022
I always forget how to use UNPIVOT, and so many documents are focused on numbers data, not generic key-value data. Here’s the thing I actually often need to do.
Continue ReadingCover letter workshop - WITness Success / Minnebar
23 Jul 2022
Below are notes from the cover letter workshop at the July 2022 WITness Success Salesforce community conference and the June 2022 Minnebar un-conference.
Love to protect voting rights in rural America?
Donate to fellow WITness Success speaker Cece Adams today!! Can the Salesforce Ohana help her reach her goal? I think so!!
Cece is running for a small, “down-ballot” local office in northern Illinois that has a big impact on access to the ballot box. She’s also prioritizing fully funding her local schools, building out workforce development programs, providing wage supports for essential workers caring for our elders, fixing roads, and encouraging public health.
Every $10 or so is another lawn sign she can get into a supporter’s yard!
(She didn’t ask me to do this, I just met her at the conference and think she’s really awesome.)
Welcome to Minneapolis, Salesforce!
12 Jul 2022
Welcome to Minnesota, WITness Success and Midwest Dreamin’ Salesforce community conference attendees! Wondering what to eat, drink, and do for fun while you’re here? I’ll show you a few of my favorite spots.
Continue ReadingSkyvia test - Salesforce to database
28 Jun 2022
Whether I can trust it with corporate data is another question, but my first question about Skyvia, which promises to intelligently back up Salesforce orgs into enterprise relational database management systems, works as well as it says it should.
Continue ReadingEnterprise application diary
22 Jun 2022
The past few years of working with enterprise (in-house) applications has been a delightful synthesis of content from almost every course I took about software engineering (infosec, networking, software development lifecycles & architecture, design patterns, quality assurance & testing, project management, database design, database administration, web site development) and every meetup/conference I ever attended, and I wish I could find something like Andrew Tanenbaum’s Structured Computer Organization to TL;DR it all for the world.
I know, it’s called “DevOps,” right? :P
Anyway, I’m feeling really “galaxy-brain” across all of the silos of computer expertise that we carve day jobs into, and I’m craving a way to TL;DR decades of learning into a shareable nugget of knowledge.
Continue ReadingPulumi & AWS minimum viable build
20 May 2022
Thanks to their website & my old notes on provisioning AWS resources with Terraform, I figured out a minimum viable build with Pulumi for creating a resource inside an AWS playground from A Cloud Guru.
Continue ReadingSSH or SFTP into a Linux server from a Windows machine with key-based authentication
17 May 2022
SSH and SFTP are protocols typically used for “remoting into” a server running the Linux operating system, much like you might use the “Remote Desktop” protocol to remotely operate a Windows machine.
Continue ReadingFind a library job with Python
20 Apr 2022
I’ve got a friend who needs a new library job. To help, I wrote a Python script to scrape New York University’s jobs site, New York Medical College’s jobs site, and Yonkers Public Schools’s job site, looking for the phrase librar (which hopefully covers “library”, “libraries”, and “librarian”).
Check a URL with Selenium IDE
06 Apr 2022
It took me a while to figure out how to get Selenium IDE to click a link, wait for the new tab’s page-load to settle down, and validate the URL of the new page, but I did it.
Continue Reading