A concise blog.

My latest project is a web application that tells you the asset allocation ofyour investment portfolio .   Happily, I just finished getting my Exam 70-761: Querying Data with Transact-SQL certification, so I thought that I’ll use a SQL database for the project.   One of the cooler features that I learned about while studying for my exam is a feature called temporal tables .   Temporal tables allow you to see what the data used to look like. It's a feature that is baked in to SQL Server 2016 and has been ANSI standard since 2011.  I thought that they would be really useful feature to show how the asset allocation changed over time.   Want to see what your portfolio looked like at the end of 2012?   Great Scott!! With temporal tables, you can!! Unfortunately, they aren’t standard in PostgreSQL.  PostgreSQL is my DB engine of economic necessity, and it doesn't support temporal tables out of the box (there are extensions that you can use ...

I’m always working to improve my code.    One of the ways that I do this is that I frequently work on Code Wars practice problems.   I was working on a   prime number generator   for a practice problem (if   you’re interested, the code is here: https://github.com/tmurphree/node-utilities/blob/master/primeNumberGenerator.js)   and I wondered, “Should I use a set or an array?” I solved the problem with both a set and an array, and I ran some tests* to see   how long the function took to run and how long the   searches on the results took.    The results were interesting: Operation Average time (ms) Array generation 18.2412 Set generation 44.3016 Array seek 0.021 Set seek 0.0099 The set took about 2.4x the time to generate as the array, but it is searchable in about 1/2 the time.  So the answer to the question  “Should I...

I just read a post from another developer about front-end frameworks and whether or not they're worth the trouble.  The conclusion: they're worth the trouble sometimes.  The best solution is to know your options and use them when appropriate.

One of the best investments that I made this year is a subscription to www.safaribooksonline.com ,   an online  l ibrary for technical books.    I’m working my way through the videos for Querying Data with Transact-SQL - Exam 70-761 Certification Training by Mark Long.   I got a good laugh from one of his comments: while talking about how important it is for database developers to have a good knowledge of the data that they’re working with, he said, “There’s is a solution for that!   It’s called ‘lots of time.’    After you spend lots of time with your data set, you get to know it better and better and become more proficient.” Well, I recently had a slightly different problem:   I wanted to install Node.js 8.9.1 (the current LTS version) on my Ubuntu laptop.    Since most of my OS knowledge is on Windows, I simply wasn’t able to get it to work. Then I remembered Mark’s wisdom: “There’s is a solution for that!   It’s...