Nate Taylor

There really wasn’t supposed to be a follow up to “The ONE thing I try to put in all my speeches.” It was supposed to be a one-off. But then I went to a conference and was reminded of several things to put in a speech. I’m contemplating making a series of blog posts, but ...

Next week as I head to Heartland Developer’s Conference (as an attender, not a speaker this year) I thought I’d share the one thing I try to put in all my speeches. It’s not something I’ve come up with myself. I’m far from the only person who does this. By and large if a speaker ...

Inside VisualStudio 2010, I had right-clicked on my solution and chose “Run Unit Tests”  Resharper went through and started running them.  All but 4 of them passed, and those 4 didn’t have an error message, but simply said Aborted next to them in Resharper.  As I took a look, Resharper grouped them under a {RootNamespace}. Looking ...

Yahoo Passwords Hacked Over the past few months there have been several breaches of security on major websites, for example LinkedIn and Match.com.  However within the past week a bigger name was hit: Yahoo! Now it wasn’t Yahoo! mail or anything like that. Apparently it was their Contributor Network which they bought in 2010. What ...

I came in and quickly put the delivery box in its spot, then I grabbed a box of pill bottles and started refilling the cabinets, weaving in and out of pharmacists as I did. I then went to grab the trashcans and started to empty them. At this point, Craig the pharmacist directed me to ...

Usernames & Passwords As I chronicled in a previous post, I recently wrote an application in Ruby that took advantage of OmniAuth for all of it’s user authentication. As I worked on the application, I decided that I would no longer write an application that did not use OAuth or OpenId to sign-up & log in. The fact ...

EX (I’m weird enough that I actually owned this CD in high school.) What’s this song talking about? In this song, Tennessee Ernie Ford is singing about what would have been a normal “Day-in-the-life-of” setting for workers in the 1800s, specficially coal miners. It was hard work, usually performed by people without many options. It ...

A couple weeks ago ArsTechnia ran a story stating that the Express versions of Visual Studio were going to be super stripped down. As a friend and I discussed on Twitter, I made the comment that the story made me want to learn Ruby. Not long after that, Scott Hanselman (best employee at Microsoft?) corrected ...

This past weekend my wife lost the crown on her tooth, and by Monday afternoon I had a better understanding of software design. How? Monday morning she called our dentist. We have new insurance, so she’s never been to this dentist, but we had to pick a dentist when we signed up (so I found ...

The first developer I ever worked with was named Fred.  I was only about 17 years old at the time, and had gotten a job working at an engineering firm after school. I did a lot of grunt work type things: assembled documentation binders, removed all old parts books out of the library, organized & ...