Matthew J. Clemente

File this under interesting SQL features that I just learned - you can GROUP BY and/or ORDER BY the numeric column position in your SELECT statement, rather than writing out the full column identifier. If that's unclear, an example should help clarify.

May 11, 2021
3 minutes

This post touches on two subjects - the first involves reading a range of lines from a file in ColdFusion - and the second is a question: if you have a useful CFML function, where can you share it?

Apr 23, 2021
3 minutes

For reasons irrelevant to this post, I wanted to run a query directly via the PostgreSQL JDBC Driver, bypassing cfquery. To be clear, up front, I do not recommend doing this and I don't know of any practical use case for it. But, because I couldn't find much online, I thought it worth documenting.

Apr 07, 2021
2 minutes

A quick note on a very convenient PostgreSQL function that I learned today - GREATEST - which can be used when you want a database column updated only if the incoming value is greater (more recent) than the existing value in the column.

Mar 22, 2021
2 minutes

Despite 10+ years of CFML programming, I'm still stumbling across new functions. Today, it was the awkwardly named but surprisingly handy ucFirst, a Lucee-specific function for dealing with string capitalization.

Mar 02, 2021
2 minutes

Two days before Thanksgiving, I decided to put together a simple way for our family to share pictures, because we couldn't be together in person. The idea: smart photo frames that everyone could text pictures to. Here's how I got it working.

Dec 22, 2020
9 minutes

The applications I've built up to this point haven't needed to account for time zones (and for that I consider myself fairly fortunate), which is probably one of the reasons that I only just discovered that ColdFusion's date/time functions can accept a timezone parameter.

Nov 30, 2020
3 minutes

Recently, I set up a demo Github account. I already had a demo GitLab account. So now I have two GitHub accounts, two GitLab accounts, and a Bitbucket account for good measure. It took me a few tries to get the multiple accounts working correctly, so these are my notes, in the event that I forget, or need to set it up again.

Sep 15, 2020
5 minutes

During a recent live-coding session, I tried to build a website uptime monitor with Pipedream. Even with a few digressions, I managed to get most of it done within the hour, and figured that the process and platform were worth sharing.

Sep 06, 2020
4 minutes

My shell startup has felt laggy for a while, but never quite slow enough that I felt compelled to track down the cause. Until today. Today I finally put in work, managing to shave nearly a second off its load time through a few adjustments to my setup with Oh My ZSH.

Jun 26, 2020
10 minutes