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.

DO use IF ERRORLEVEL 1 ECHO error level is 1 or more to check for errors in your batch/command line scripts.

DO NOT use IF %ERRORLEVEL% NEQ 0 ECHO error level is not equal to 0.

Most of the time %ERRORLEVEL% will be what you expect but it isn’t guaranteed. %ERRORLEVEL% is simply an environment variable like any other. It just happens to fallback to returning the ERRORLEVEL value if an environment variable with that name isn’t defined.

Mostly I just read about new programming languages. Call it a hobby. Only once in awhile am I struck with enough interest to want to try something out on a real project. Go is the most recent of such interests. As someone who loves a lot about Node.js, I’m looking forward to seeing how Go compares and whether it solves my Node and JavaScript pain points.

Scores is my first app in Go. It is a very simple scoreboard app for “tracking personal records between friends”. You define a record like “max push-ups” and you create a scoreboard for it. The scoreboard is specific to your group of friends or “team”.

A friend got me thinking about this today. Does a business' website design matter? Does a business even need a website?

Question: Does website design matter to you? Maybe I'm a snob but I'm turned away from a business/person if they have an ugly website.

— Joshua Steubing (@joshuasteubing) April 10, 2013

The answer strongly depends on the type of business we are talking about. If the business offers digital services of any kind, then obviously they need a website and their design is going to play a huge role in their success. The real interesting discussion begins when we talk about brick and mortar businesses that don't offer any digital services.

A laptop style short keyed keyboard has been my instrument of choice for years now. They are easy to type on and fast. I gave up the stock Dell keyboards years ago for a bare bones Logitech.

A few months ago I started digging into mechanical keyboards. They had caught my attention and suddenly I really wanted one. I was ready for a new keyboard, as you can see my Logitech is positively filthy. Why clean it when you can buy a new one, right?