In case you missed it, I designed a solution last year to collect session feedback for my annual Data Saturday Stockholm event, and I made this solution publicly available to anyone who runs a similar event. The setup is really simple – you just plug in a Sessionize API key, it collects all the necessary details on your sessions and speakers, and you’re off to the races. If you want to set it up in your own environment, that’s fine too – it’s all open source.
As of a few days ago, there’s also a handy reporting functionality, so you can send out feedback report links to all your speakers.
Today’s post is not about SQL Server, but if you’re working in Azure from a dynamic IP address, you might still find it useful.
Recently, my home ISP has started changing my public IP address. This causes me some headache because I have a couple of Azure Network Security Group rules (think of them as firewall rules) that specifically allow my home IP access to all of my Azure resources. When my home IP changes, those rules have to be updated accordingly.
So I made a PowerShell-based solution to automatically maintain them.
Virtual machines cost money when they’re powered on. Most servers obviously need to be on 24 hours a day. Others, like development machines, only have to be on when you’re using them. And if you forget to turn them off, they’ll empty out your Azure credits (or your credit card) before you know it.
Today, I’ll show you how to set an Auto-shutdown time to turn a VM off if you forget, as well as have Azure notify you on Slack 30 minutes ahead of time, so you have the option to postpone or cancel the shutdown.
Ok, time for a short “professional development” post to balance out all of the technical stuff.
For a couple of years, I worked as a spin instructor on the side. It was initially something I wanted to try for the challenge, it proved to have a lot of other benefits to my life besides the obvious health impact.
Performance tuning, IRL edition.
I picked up a huge amount of tricks and patterns along the way. Some of them may appear a little abstract, like working with diverse groups of people, dealing with motivations and meeting expectations, getting comfortable with public speaking and managing nervousness. Others are much more tangible, like microphone skills.
Then again, there are plenty of superpowers that will probably never be very relevant to my (current) line of work, like counting in a beat of a song.
But I digress: Having that extracurricular activity has an immense potential to improve your ability to do other things that you love or get paid for. You don’t have to go and apply to your local gym, and it doesn’t even have to be very expensive – just pick anything that challenges you.
You’ll find that even though the specific superpowers from your hobby may not apply at all to your work, there will be unexpected, derived skills and understandings, that will help you grow as a human and as a professional.
I’m sure there’s a management book on the topic, but this is my short version of it. Now, go and do awesome things!
If you’re an organizer, sponsor and/or an exhibitor at a SQL Saturday event, you often collect raffle tickets from attendees. In exchange for giving you their contact information, they have the opportunity to win cool raffle prizes.
Here’s the thing, though. Raffle tickets can be a bit painful to scan on your mobile phone. You point the phone at the QR code, then click the URL that opens up the browser, after which the SQL Saturday web service takes another second or two (or three) to load. This is fine when you have just a few tickets, but it can be mindnumbing if you have hundreds.
I wrote this quick-and-dirty script to let me know if I happen to forget to turn off a P15 instance, or if I configure a service with a super-expensive performance tier without realizing. Maxing out your free Azure credits may be depressing enough, but emptying your credit card could really put you in the hurt locker.
So, here’s a Powershell script that warns me before any of this happens. It uses the Azure Consumption API to check how much money we’ve racked up on a subscription so far, and if any single instance exceeds, say, 50% of that total cost, it sends a notification to a Slack channel.
I just recently had the opportunity to sit with Aaron Nelson and go through some really cool Powershell features, and I’m certainly going to spend time getting to know Powershell a lot better. If you didn’t know, Powershell isn’t exclusive to Windows anymore – you can actually run a basic set of Powershell features, called Powershell Core, on Mac OS and Linux as well.
I take all my conference notes on my laptop, or occasionally on a tablet. Sometimes, I’ll want to take a screenshot of a powerpoint slide or a demo to add to my notes.
Here’s a trick to beautify those screenshots very easily:
The Microsoft Office Lens app (App store | Google Play) is an excellent document scanner, that you can also use to snap pictures of business cards, signs or basically anything rectangular with a little contrast around the edges – like a projector screen.
It’ll identify the framing and correct the image, so you can save it as a picture or a PDF, or beam it to another mobile device or computer.
Point it at the screen:
… and once you’ve taken the picture, it’ll beautify the image:
I often manage to get a smile (ranging from surprised to knowing) from people when I open my backpack to fetch a cable adapter, so I figured I’d write a short post about what I carry with me every day.
I like that there is a “Compare” function right out-of-the-box in Visual Studio, and even though many regular developers will choose to download a third-party application for the job, it’s perfectly fine for me.
Two problems: First off, I couldn’t find a straightforward way to open “compare” in the Visual Studio IDE without right-clicking an existing item in a source control repository. And second, wouldn’t it be cool if we could put a shortcut to it on the Windows “Send to” context menu?
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