Author: Derek Hatchard

Derek Hatchard is chief software architect for social products at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. These are the thoughts and opinions of Derek, not Salesforce. He's @derekhat on Twitter and on Medium.

Safety Nets for Professionals

I once encountered a small web development team that kept all its source code (Classic ASP) on a shared network drive. No version control. No organized backup. When someone was going to work on a file, he announced it verbally. If someone made a mistake that had to be rolled back, the sysadmin would grab the latest version of the… Read more →

Short Questions, Disproportionate Costs

Short questions destroy progress. They are the payday loans of the knowledge transfer economy: small, seemingly expedient transactions that frequently extract disproportionate costs. If you are a source of domain knowledge or the in-house expert on some technology or the original developer on a code base, you are an easy target for lots of small questions. If you get them… Read more →

Ending the Hiatus

Five years is a shamefully long blogging hiatus. It’s been long enough. I’ve set myself the goal of writing 12 posts this summer. In years past, I thought of derekhat.com as my venue for less technical writing and ardentdev.com as the place I would post content intended for a more technical audience; but I don’t write enough to justify two… Read more →

Improve Your Wireless Signal

The hard core geeks know that to optimize your wireless networking experience you want to select a channel that is unused by other nearby wireless devices. If you run Windows 7 (or Vista), use the following command at the Command Prompt to see the channels and signal strength of nearby networks: netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid The channel numbers will… Read more →

Solution to Dell Freezing After Resume from Sleep

I have been thoroughly satisfied with my Dell Latitude E6400 except for one large annoyance:  it regularly hangs when resuming from sleep mode.  It isn’t completely frozen when this happens – some applications will respond to mouse clicks but my web browser, IM, and Skype windows become unresponsive.  Eventually things come back to normal but the wait is embarrassing if… Read more →