Have you heard of magic numbers? Some file formats are designed such that files are always saved with a specific byte sequence in the header. JPEG, PDF, and ZIP are all such formats.

You could look for ZIP files by searching for all files with a .zip extension but a better way would be to look for all files that have 50 4b 03 04 as the first 4 bytes of the file. All ZIP files will start with those bytes. Not all ZIP files have the .zip extension.

One of the things I always look for when getting familiar with a new language or environment is examples of the physical file structure and logical organization of the code. How do you layout your project files? What is idiomatic?

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t always as simple as finding a few open-source projects on GitHub to reference. Believe it or not, there are a lot of pretty unorganized coders out there. I admit to being a bit OCD with my project structures. I like them clean, organized, and consistent.

Sometimes you want a .cmd wrapper for your PowerShell script. Usually for me this is so people who aren’t familiar with the command line can double-click to execute the script.

This batch file should be saved alongside your PowerShell script, like so.

.\
  |- my_script.ps1
  |- my_script.cmd

my_script.cmd will execute the same named .ps1 file in the same directory, so my_script.ps1 in this case. Any arguments passed to my_script.cmd will pass-through to the PowerShell script.

Backups are like changing the oil on your car. It’s the best thing you can do to extend the life of your engine and the best thing you can do to save yourself when your hard drive crashes, gets stolen, or otherwise corrupted.

I work remotely and needed a backup strategy for my work laptop. My company encourages you to keep critical client files and such in your personal share on the network. Most of our employees work in office so this is perfectly reasonable as the norm. (Though I bet a ton of stuff still ends up on local machines!) As a remotee however, this isn’t practical for reasons that are hopefully obvious to everyone.

Push ups. Every hour, on the hour. Can you handle it?

I’ve been motivated by a friend to start this challenge. Every hour, on the hour, I’m going to drop and do a set of push ups.

Remembering is the hardest part. Timers are easy to set but also easy to ignore. My solution is to make myself a massive nag screen that will flash every hour while I’m at work.

Sign up, confirm your email address, login. The three steps that almost all web apps share.

It isn’t hard to get this process right but it does take some planning. I’ve had to implement this a lot so I finally decided to document it. This is my boilerplate for a user sign up process. The interaction flow that I use as the starting point for sign-ups in my apps. Along the way I’ll point out some key UX (User eXperience) tips. I hope this saves you some time on your next project.

If you’ve been following my Tableau via PowerShell series then you already know there are a lot of cool things you can do with Tableau workbooks using PowerShell. Up until now I’ve been sharing helper functions in a stand-alone fashion. No longer.

I’d like to introduce you to TableauKit. A pure, script-based PowerShell module for working with Tableau files.

Say what?

Today TableauKit is shipping with the following commands:

This is part 2 of my mini-series on exploring Tableau workbooks with PowerShell. If you missed it, you should read Part 1: Opening Workbooks, before continuing.

Welcome back! Last time I showed you how to open a Tableau workbook (TWB or TWBX) in PowerShell so you could start exploring the raw XML. Today I’ll show the next logical thing, saving the changes you make.

If you are only opening TWB files, then saving your changes couldn’t be easier. Since TWBs are just XML files we can simply write it to a file, like so.

Enum constants in Go have a super power. As opposed to C# where you only have two options for enums, either you assign each value yourself or let the compiler increment each value by one, Go has a third option.

Auto-incremented enum in C#

enum Example
{
     One = 1,
     Two,
     Three
}

Go’s third option is that you can make use of repeating expressions. This works because of Go’s iota enumerator. The best example can by found in the Effective Go docs.

In this mini-series I’m going to show you some cookbook style examples for using PowerShell to explore your Tableau workbooks. Follow along, this is going to be fun!

Tableau workbooks (TWB files) are just XML files. Packaged workbooks (TWBX files) are just ZIP files that contain a TWB and various assets, like data extracts for example.

This is wonderful because it means it is very easy to go spelunking through workbook files without a guide.