Findings and thingies

It's a perfect episode among many great episodes. The high-concept risk paid off, and it still holds up a decade (!) later as dexterous writing and effortless comedy that allowed each actor to be in their element.

For me Community is definitely one of the best series I've ever watched. Especially the nice combination of empathy displayed combined with a nice (dark) sense of humour made it so special for me. I definitely agree with the author of the article that this episode is the best one of the series.

Azure Integration Services (AIS), comprising of Logic Apps, API Management, Service Bus, Event Grid, and Data Factory, helps customers connect applications, data, and services, on-premises and in the cloud. Azure Integration Services helps businesses boost productivity and increase agility with highly secure automated workflows and create new revenue opportunities with an API driven partner and developer ecosystem.

Being an Azure Solutions Architect myself and especially interested in data flows between systems, I can totally see why Microsoft has been put into this quadrant. But what really amazes me is that AWS doesn't appear in this classification at all.

Of course, AWS does not have this deep integration with numerous services as is possible with Microsoft's connectors, e.g. M365. Nevertheless, I personally see that AWS is also strong in this segment (integration based on PaaS) and should therefore also be represented in this classification.

What are your thoughts on this? Please feel free to get in touch to share your thoughts.

I experience a lot of random errors on Azure. Code Functions will randomly fail to trigger until redeployed, builds pushed into Oryx will not always successfully complete. There isn’t the feeling of robustness with it that you get elsewhere.

I also see things described in this post from time to time. Especially random error messages and inconsistent behaviour is something which really can drive you nuts.

Therefore, I agree with the conclusion the Microsoft should spent some time serious engineering on both security and availability.

"Our recommendation is to not buy new Chinese phones, and to get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible," Defence Deputy Minister Margiris Abukevicius told reporters in introducing the report.

Cheap devices come at a cost...

Gute Audioqualität ist der Schlüssel zu akzeptierten Audio- und Videokonferenzen über das Internet.

Etwas Aufwand in das Setup zu investieren, ist auch eine Form von Respekt, den man seiner Gesprächspartnerin oder seinem Gesprächspartner entgegenbringt.

Das hier!

Ich kann nur sagen, dass schlechte Audioqualität anderer Teilnehmer eine Audio- oder Videokonferenz für mich persönlich, um ein vielfaches anstrengender macht.

So to summarize, here are my key points from this talk, in a nutshell — please make these your key takeaways.

• Distributed teams are better than localized teams — not because they’re distributed, but because they’re asynchronous.
• Avoid anything that makes a distributed team run synchronously.
• Use less chat.
• Have fewer meetings.
• Write. Things. Down.

This post is such a good summary on how and why one should embrace and extend working asynchronously.

As you’ve come to expect, this Book of News is your resource for all the announcements we’re making at Microsoft Build. Here you will find details about enhancements and integrations spanning the entire Microsoft developer platform across Visual Studio, GitHub, Microsoft Azure, Power Platform, Windows and Microsoft 365. We want to make it easier than ever for developers to go from idea, to code, to cloud—and we want to empower all developers to do more.

If you didn't had the time to attend all or even any session of Microsoft Build 2021 then the book of news is the resource to get all the news from this event and announcements made by Microsoft.

For as long as the Power Platform has existed, developers have wanted a free way to experiment with it.
In 2017, the "Power Apps Community Plan" was introduced. Even though this was free, it unfortunately did not offer all the possibilities that developers would like to play with.

Since this Microsoft Build, we now know that it takes a bit of time for Microsoft to respond to the developers' pleas, but that the wishes are ultimately fulfilled.

And so the Power Apps Developer Plan was introduced yesterday. Compared to the old Community Plan, this offers significantly more functions that can be used.

If you want to use your work or school account instead of your personal account, no problem simply look at this guide: Citizen Dev. Journey - Setting up your Microsoft Power Apps Test Environment | LinkedIn

Whilst some people employ lightweight modelling techniques such as C4, most diagrams in use today, are what I call, somewhat derogatorily, masala diagrams. No hard feelings, I call my own diagrams like this. Why masala? Because they are informal; they cover multiple dimensions at once, they may be both structural and behavioural, logical and physical. They are often a mishmash of the 4+1 architectural model’s views.

I must admit that I never liked UML for describing systems architecture. I can't name any special reason for this. However, I really like the term masala diagrams for diagrams illustrated in the linked article. From my point of view these kinds of diagrams feed the needs of the separate roles in a business context. And somehow everybody looking at these kind of diagrams gets a grasp of how the system is architected and what its intension is.

Even though I still see why UML has been appealing in the first place to describe business models.

I've written about the maps of Stephane Eyskens before. I must admit that I did not follow up on the following publishing's by him. Today I just noticed that he added another map to his portfolio.

The Azure Data Architecture Map - Microsoft Tech Community

It is pretty neat that he simply put a link to all of his maps in his most recent post so that one has all information in one place.