Yearly Archives: 2013

C# / .NET / dotnet / CodeProject / Programming

Yield! Reconsidering APIs with Collections

Yield: A Little Background The yield keyword in C# is pretty cool. Being used within an iterator, yield lets a function return an item as well as control of execution to the caller and upon next iteration resume where it left off. Neat, right? MSDN documentation lists these limitations surrounding the use of the yield keyword: Unsafe blocks are not allowed. Parameters to the method, operator, or accessor cannot be ref or out. A yield return statement cannot be located anywhere inside a try-catch block. It can be located in a try block if the try block is followed by a finally block. A yield break statement may be located in a try block or a catch block but not a finally block. So what does this have to do with API specifications? A whole lot really, especially if you're dealing…

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December 26, 2013
Articles / Leadership & Management

Happy Holidays – Weekly Article Dump

Happy Holidays The holiday season is upon us, so I'd like to start by extending my best wishes for you to have a safe and happy holiday. I've personally been pretty busy the past few weeks wrapping year-end stuff up at work, so I'm looking forward to a few days of being able to catch my breath a bit. If you have some time off from work, I'm hoping you'll get a chance to do the same over the holidays. I can't sit idle for too long though. I don't like not feeling productive, so once I've caught up a bit on some well deserved rest, I'll be right back at it! The holidays and end of the year are a great time to reflect on everything that's happened in the last 12 months. Did you have goals that set you…

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December 25, 2013
Articles / Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Charity Water – Weekly Article Dump

Charity Water We have a lot of pretty awesome people at Magnet Forensics, and every day I'm reminded just how awesome. A colleague of mine, Danielle Braun, had what I thought was an incredible idea for her birthday. For Danielle's birthday, she's not asking for more new clothes, for her parents to get her a car, for help with paying off tuition, or for some new fancy tech gadgets. But she's not asking for nothing. Danielle is asking for your support with Charity: Water this year. Charity: Water is a non-profit organization with the goal of bringing clean water to people in developing nations that don't have access to it. Reading their mission page probably opens your eyes a fair bit about the lack of access to drinking water in other countries. They're not about some complex and elaborate plan…

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December 9, 2013
Articles / Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Movember Wrap-up – Weekly Article Dump

Movember Wrap-up At the start of December, it's time for a lot of us to shave off our glorious Movember badges from our upper lips. This year, MoMagnets did an absolutely amazing job raising money for Movember. At the time of writing, we're sitting at just under $2400! An incredible effort by Magnet Forensics and all of those that helped with their generous contributions. My 'stache didn't quite get to where I wanted to this year. It was close, but it was another connector-less Movember for me. I was almost able to get some twisting done for some not-so-legitimate connectors. Oh well... Here's what I ended up rocking for most of the month: My final Movember creation: The Anti-Connector. Matt Chang definitely took the lead for raising the most of all the MoMagnets members at over $700! Mica Sadler is…

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December 3, 2013
Programming / Software Engineering

Code Smells – Issue Number 3

Code Smells Welcome to the third edition of Code Smells! Periodically I’ll be posting about how to detect code smells and what they mean in terms of the big picture of your code. The previous installment can be found right here. What’s a code smell? Wikipedia says it perfectly: In computer programming, code smell is any symptom in the source code of a program that possibly indicates a deeper problem. Code smells are usually not bugs—they are not technically incorrect and don’t currently prevent the program from functioning. Instead, they indicate weaknesses in design that may be slowing down development or increasing the risk of bugs or failures in the future. These code smells are often based on my own opinion and experience with programming. If you disagree with what I'm saying in my post, please don't hesitate to post a comment.…

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November 27, 2013
Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Performance Reviews – Weekly Article Dump

Performance Reviews It's almost the end of the year, and performance reviews for many companies are just around the corner. This will be the first time for me sitting on the other side of a performance review. I'm excited, and to be honest, a little nervous about how it will all play out. I know our HR manager has done an excellent job putting together our initial take on performance reviews, but it's still going to be up to me to ensure that all aspects of a performance review are communicated properly to my team. It's definitely going to be an interesting time of year! I've started doing a little bit of reading on performance reviews. From what I can tell, the general consensus is that most performance review systems are flawed and nobody knows the perfect way to do…

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November 25, 2013
Articles / Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Deloitte Companies to Watch – Weekly Article Dump

Deloitte Companies to Watch Another impressive accolade for Magnet Forensics! Deloitte has placed Magnet on their top 10 companies to watch list! To qualify for the list, the companies need to be operating for less than five years, be based out of Canada, and put a large portion of their revenue to generating intellectual property. Our CEO, Adam Belsher, had this to say about the award: “We are honoured to be named one of Deloitte’s Companies-to-Watch. This award recognizes the hard work and dedication of our team. We’re thankful for the success we’ve achieved, and we’re incredibly proud to be contributing to the important work done by our customers who use our solutions to fight crime, enhance public safety, protect companies from fraud and theft, and ensure workplace safety and respect for their employees.” Magnet Forensics Press & Events The event…

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November 17, 2013
C# / .NET / dotnet / CodeProject / Programming

Lambdas: An Example in Refactoring Code

Background: Lambdas and Why This Example is Important Based on your experience in C# or other programming languages, you may or may not be familiar with what a lambda is. If the word "Lambda" is new and scary to you, don't worry. Hopefully after reading this you'll have a better idea of how you can use them. My definition of a lambda expression is a function that you can define in local scope to pass as an argument provided it meets the delegate signature. It's probably pretty obvious to you that you can pass in object references and value types into all kinds of functions... But what about passing in a whole function as an argument? And what if you just want to declare a simple anonymous method right when you want to provide it to a function? Lambdas. So…

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November 14, 2013
Android / Articles / Leadership & Management

Article Summaries: Weekly Article Dump #17

Articles It’s official: Video games make your brain bigger: I don't have much time for video games anymore, but this is still totally awesome news. It's in. It's official. Video games can actually make you smarter. How great is that? If you're like me and you find you don't have much time for games any more, it might be worth picking up a hobby game. It's a great way to relax provided you don't get too addicted to it and apparently it can make you smarter. Perfect combo! The myth of the brainstorming session: The best ideas don’t always come from meetings: I thought this article was pretty interesting because we do a lot of brain storming at our office. Sometimes I like to think the sessions go smoothly or that they're productive. When I contrast them with particular cases…

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November 11, 2013
Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Matt Chang – Team Magnet Recognition

Matt "Chang-a-rang" Chang If you saw this post, then the face above is no new face to you. You're familiar with that beautiful 'stache already. Okay, so I'm being a little misleading... Matt Chang doesn't walk around with that glorious caterpillar on his face all year round. We're working on that though. You're likely wondering why I'm putting incredible pictures of Matt Chang on the web and why I'm even writing this. Previously I mentioned that I want to start recognizing the people I work with when I feel that they're going above and beyond. I did this with Cam Sapp not too long ago, and I plan to keep doing it for all of the great people I work with. There are a million ways to recognize someone, whether it be in team meetings, personally, or by doing what I'm…

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November 7, 2013

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