Findings and thingies

From my point view anyone working in a field where one needs to keep their knowledge up to date needs to embrace lifelong learning. Upgrade your learning + an example study plan for data structures and algorithms shows a great strategy how you can improve your learning game. #AlwaysBeLearning

Azure Functions got some new features. Jeremy Likness shows how you can facilitate all these features in his blog post Serverless HTTP With Durable Functions.

Very interesting read on the top 10 areas of app development which are being reshaped by Power Apps. Power Apps Top 10: innovation areas that are reshaping app development.

Just a month after Hacktoberfest Microsoft Azure Functions announces its #25DaysOfServerless challenge. You can find all the details here: Introducing #25DaysOfServerless, an Azure Functions Challenge

Baseline of The epistemology of software quality is the following quote:

You could make people feel like they’re important, because people are important. No method, tool, or language matters nearly as much as our own minds.

Interested in knowing what happens inside your brain when you feel stressed? Valentin Sawadski has written a nice sum up and some more effects in his article Brain Chemistry For Developers - What exactly is happening in your brain that makes you feel stressed, happy and tired at work?

When getting started with Kubernetes most people wonder how Kubernetes relates to Docker. Kubernetes vs. Docker: A Primer explains how these two relate to each other.

Most of the time nowadays it is not important to know everything off the top of your head but know how to the find the relevant information quickly. How to Get Smarter Without Knowing Anything shows some basic concepts which you can follow to find relevant information more easily.

Dona Sarkar provided a pretty impressive amount of resources which you can use to get started/get deeper into Power Apps on the Power Platform. Dona Sarkar @ LinkedIn

That's it for this week. A little bit lesser than the former weeks but this week was kind of intensive so I haven't had the time to study more material in detail.

After working for quite some time in IT I didn't know the true origin of "Agile". Great to hear something about how Agile came up back in the days. In this episode of The Changelog Uncle Bob Robert C. Martin brings the some light into this.

After listening to this episode you're maybe going to rethink of how you're doing Agile in your context.

As mentioned last week I still attended more sessions at Microsoft Ignite. So following the remaining sessions which I attended and I would recommend to anyone interested in latest Microsoft technology.

• In A Vault for your CI/CD Pipeline Joey Lorich explains how Terraform KeyVault can be integrated in your CI/CD pipeline to keep your secrets secret.
• Pretty amazing to see that testing tools will be available for Power Apps in the upcoming weeks. Optimize your apps with quality tools for Power Apps demonstrates all the upcoming possibilities.
• Very interesting to see how Azure Functions can even be run on-premises using Docker/Kubernetes. Serverless Kubernetes with Azure Functions and Azure Kubernetes Service demonstrates how even the tooling for scaling up/down is available when running Azure Functions in Kubernetes.

I attended more session but from my point of view these sessions would be only interesting for people who currently want to dive deeper into the Power Platform.

Nevertheless here are some more interesting things which I found this week.

It is always good if you can name things when trying to improve them. This is even more important when you are trying to refactor code. Refactoring - What problem on your code do you want to fix? explains which common patterns can often be found before starting to refactor.

The one mistake I made as a developer I wished I learned sooner goes in detail why it is important to protect your time and how you can achieve this.

I think that the characteristics mentioned in Seven Common Characteristics of Creative Thinkers are very useful especially for developers. I think so because from my point of view developing software is kind of a creative skill because often you need to find a solution for something which hasn't been done before.

Having a basic understanding of how a server works is a invaluable thing for a developer at least from my point of view. The introduction to servers I wish I'd had is a great introduction how you can get a better understanding of servers.

Spending this week at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando I will provide links to some sessions which I attended and I think could be interesting for other people.

• Being a social developer - Even though this was a non-technical session it is my highlight from this Ignite. Scott Hanselman talked about what should be important in your life and professional career. If you have only have time to watch one video go for this one.
• Unleashing your organization’s creativity and innovation with a deep dive into the Microsoft Power Platform - This is the key note kicking of a track of sessions dealing with the Power platform and the possibilities resulting from this platform.
• Empower everyone in your organization to drive digital transformation with the Microsoft Power Platform - After the keynote this was a session going in detail how the Power platform can enable users creating their solutions for business problems. It is great to see how a different mindset enables everyone to create solutions. I guess we will see a big shift in the next years towards end users even not working in IT creating their own solutions.
• Managing and supporting Power Apps and Microsoft Flow at scale - Very interesting to see how the company Schlumberger transformed the way how their internal governance is setting the boundaries for their users to create solutions themselves.
• Continuous Infrastructure - leveraging Terraform with Azure Pipelines - Great introduction by Joey Lorich on how Terraform together with Azure Pipelines can be used to define your infrastructure as code. There will be also a new extension for Azure DevOps which integrates Terraform even better. This extension is right now in preview and you can register for this preview here.
• Professional Power Apps development patterns: Error handling, logging, and telemetry - Todd Baginski showed how logging can implemented in Power Apps even though the platform has no native way of doing this yet.
• Building serverless web applications in Azure - Very entertaining and informative session by Daria Grigoriu and Burke Holland on how you can leverage serverless design patterns to create a web application.
• Exporting CDS data to Azure Data Lake – enable modern analytics and gain insights on your data - Sabin Nair and Mudit Mittal demonstrated the way to export data from CDS (Common Data Service) to Azure Data Lake. This is right now in public preview and they are asking for feedback so they can make sure their solution meets customer demand.

More links for sessions will follow in the next week as the Ignite only ends on Friday and this is only content from the first two days.

In addition there are some other findings for this week.

Adam Marczak created a very interesting way on how to manage billing information for Azure. Automating Enterprise Azure billing using Logic Apps for 0.03$/month.

There will be a big change in licensing options for the Power Platform coming up in November. Microsoft to enable end users to buy Power Platform licenses without administrative approval - This will change a lot for many companies how governance must be handled for this platform even though it opens the platform for solving business problems more easily from a users perspective.

Mastering Git From Beginner to Advanced Step by Step With Graphical Animation Commands is a good entry point for people who would like to get started with git or improve their basic knowledge.

After getting the basics from the former introduction you can dive deep into git with a talk given by Mark Erikson about git internals. The blog post Git Under the Hood: Internals, Techniques, and Rewriting History points to his slides.

Writing commit messages is not that hard even though most projects with more than one person struggle to keep these messages consistent. Darkø Tasevski has written an article on this topic. How are you writing a commit message?

Remote work seems for many people very easy to handle. But my from point of view you need to take care of specific aspects to get the most out of it for you personally and for your team. Krzysztof Peksa has written about this topic in his article Deep remote work. I personally think that the communication aspect is most important for anyone working remotely.

What should a Product Owner (PO) do? It depends most of the time on the specific environment where the PO is working. One main task for a PO is indubitable ordering the backlog. The article Balancing Dev & Ops: What is a Product Owner to do? by Ben Flath provides some strategies on how to tackle this challenge.

Even though there is still stuff in my pile from my vacation I hadn't had enough time this week to read a lot. Therefore the weekly this week is a little bit shorter than it should be.

I often do see people struggle to get started with Git and get a grip of the basics. Simon Waight wrote a got introductory text for Git: Make working with Git an easier commitment.

Great tips from Haseeb Elahi for people who just start their career in tech/coding.
What Not to Do as a Programmer - My List After 2 Years of Working In Teams Especially on number one and five I couldn't agree more. You don't write code just to be art. You write code to solve problems. This provides value from your code. Moreover getting feedback on your code is important to improve your skills.

Even though I do listen to many podcasts because of my daily commute I never really felt the urge to post something about one specific episode. But on this episode of You Are Not So Smart I couldn't agree more with the following punchline: "Meetings are only bad if we make them bad, and since they are crucial to the cohesion of any institution..."

Scientist Steven Rogelberg explains how and why meetings could and should be improved.

Following a discussion on dev.to Jeff Holland tweeted about a very nice and helpful extension for VS Code. REST Client which allows you to send HTTP request and view the response in Visual Studio Code directly.

14 VSCode Extensions That Will Improve Your Productivity provides another 14 useful extensions for VS Code. From this list Bracket Pair Colorizer is my personal favourite.

In addition I want to provide another favorite of mine which I recently discovered. Git Graph enables you to see a nice graph of the commit history directly from VS Code.

Coding practices your future self will love you for - Most of this should be common knowledge when developing applications but especially for beginners it is very useful to read this summed up in one article.

From my point of view it is important that developers even when they are working with some kind of ORM have a basic understanding of how a database is working internally. SQLskills.com published an article which links to all their SQL101 articles. Even though these articles cover topics which are mainly useful when doing database administration there are gems like SQLskills SQL101: Indexing Basics which can be very useful when dealing with performance issues in your application.

I guess there are three types of discussions between developers which will never come to an end. Using tabs or spaces, Vim or Emacs and which font to use in your editor of choice. Microsoft has added another font (Cascadia Code) to the latter discussion. For a font it has some nice features like programming ligatures, it is monospaced and more importantly it is open source.

There Is No "Right" Way: Git Rebase vs Merge sums up that there is most of the time no right or wrong way to do something. It all depends on your workflow and the environment you are working in.

If you are interested in distributed transaction architecture you should definitely look at the Webinar: Comparing Distributed Transaction Architectures for the Cloud Era. Florian Haas tweeted this.

Being on holiday for two weeks I had to skip publishing a weekly in CW 39 & 40. But unfortuately due to my vacation the stack of things to read simply piled up. Having almost no free time I couldn't read all articles in my pile. Need to do this in the next week.

API Testing Guide for Automation Success - Great introduction to API testing. The article describes how and why API testing should be done.

Recently I discovered the content platform dev.to. In contrast to other platforms like medium.com the goal of dev.to is not centralizing all the content but providing a platform where individual content can even be cross-posting from your personal blog is welcome. Due to the huge amount of content which is published for me personally it is hard to find the real treasures buried there. Nevertheless I found a series of articles which tries to explain how, where and when application developers can start to improve security in their applications in the context of SDLC (software development life cycle).

Pushing Left, Like a Boss: Part 1