Author Archives: Laurence

Laurence’s List – Roadmap Features to Prioritize

by Laurence Posted on May 28, 2013

Is the number of issues in your backlog into the triple digits?  Angry customers, bugs that have you tangled in spaghetti code, the talking head just changed the spec AGAIN!!!… and now the President comes to your desk and says … Continue reading →

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MySQL query for obtaining unique list of domain names with count from email field

by Laurence Posted on March 29, 2013

The following MySQL query is useful for getting a count of all the domain names used by email addresses in your database.  It isolates the domain name (after the @ sign) in the email field. SELECT substring_index(email, ‘@’, -1), COUNT(*) … Continue reading →

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The Art of Spreadsheet-Fu – tips for manipulating data with Excel, OpenOffice, or Google Drive Spreadsheets

by Laurence Posted on February 14, 2013

This post demonstrates 5 examples of Spreadsheet-Fu to make quick work of menial data formatting tasks. Spreadsheet programs have useful functions built into them for string manipulation (concatenation, search and replace, formatting, etc).   It used to be just Excel and Open … Continue reading →

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A Critique of JavaScript MVC frameworks – Beware of Rampant Asynchronous JavaScript Calls

by Laurence Posted on January 27, 2013

Software professionals should be aware of the limitations that come with the current trend of building asynchronous heavy web applications. We are seeing a surge in serious and large scale JavaScript applications at the enterprise level. Here is a list … Continue reading →

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Thoughts on Require.js and a simpler approach to loading JavaScript

by Laurence Posted on January 10, 2013

Require.js is trying to solve the problem of dealing with lots of JavaScript. I have used it with Backbone.js, underscore, Dojo, and jQuery. It works well, but it does take some effort to get it configured and running within your … Continue reading →

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