Guitar #3

Taylor_GS_Mini_e_Koa_FLTD

I am by no means a talented guitarist, although after more than six full months of trying I can report that I have indeed been making progress. Maddeningly-slow-make-you-question-the-whole-thing progress, but progress nonetheless.

I love to twang the strings and hear them resonate.  I love to palpate my fingertips and worry at my hardening calluses.  I love to sub-vocalize the name of a note only to find my fingers on the strings in the (mostly!) correct position. I’ve come to hate my all too weak and bendy ring finger but can’t help but be inordinately pleased those few times it comes perfectly into line without the least bit of wheedling.  I even love the stupid evil what-the-hell-could-they-have-been-thinking F-Major; the barred five-string chord from hell! Continue reading

I Need a [Web]Jobs

Once again, with the new formed buds of spring a-budding, it only natural for a young man’s thoughts turn to . . . WebJobs.  OK, probably not.  But this (not quite young!) man has a good reason to be thinking of such things: I’m giving a WebJobs presentation at Philly Code Camp 2016.1 later today.  The session will be more than a little hands-on, but I also have a smallish deck, with a number of highlights and resource links, that you can download: Batch Processing with Azure WebJobs.

For the uninitiated, WebJobs can be thought of the newish Azure tech that (most usefully!) enables workflow for the modern web.  Think image processing, shopping carts, database administration, Monte Carlo simulations, app “glue,” process control, AI, custom testing, IoT facilitation, site scraping, backups, pipelining, log ingestion and more.  Even better, WebJobs are super-simple.  You can be up and running in minutes, but more importantly, the “hard” stuff rarely takes more than hours.

If you work with the cloud: run, don’t walk.