Findings and thingies

Really interesting topic list from Chris O'Brien. A very broad spectrum of things which a Office 365 should be capable off to do. But I think you should have a very good understanding of all these topics even though you needn't have to implement them all by yourself.

Going faster with continuous delivery is a very interesting article from Amazon. You get to know how they improved their speed of execution by adopting a continuous delivery approach.

My money quote from Kevin Mas Ruiz article is: "Teams should not share code, but a common platform.". His article "To Domain Driven Design" is a longer read (dev.to says 7 minutes, which I doubt if you really would like to follow his argumentation) but a very useful one. Afterwards you might be starting to think whether it is still a good idea to share code in your specific context.

Emma Wedekind describes "How I Gained 65,000 Twitter Followers In One Year". One key fact which she mentions is to post content consistently. I think this a very good advise which I try to follow myself after getting back on track with blogging by simple posting these weekly sum ups of things I have read.

From my point of view it is very important that you are willing to disagree with someone even though she or he is your supervisor if you can't follow their arguments or might think they have overlooked something. A good way to approach your way to this disagree is written by Amy Gallo in her article"How to Disagree with Someone More Powerful than You".

Since Microsoft Ignite took place this year I was thinking of how to explain the term Citizen Developer to someone. I think my colleague Paul Heisterkamp wrote something (Link) which pretty much nailed it.

Figure: Citizen Developer/Every developer

Nevertheless I have some additions to the beforementioned text. From my point of view Pro Developers/Enterprise Developers in this context should focus on delivering kind of Lego bricks (in a way of building blocks which can be stacked together) to the Citizen Developers so that they can create a solution for their specific problem.

In addition Pro Developers/Enterprise Developers should also focus on building new skills which can't be automated in the future. But what are skills which can't be automated in the future? The article Are You Developing Skills That Won’t Be Automated? pretty much sums it up from my point of view even though not especially for developers.

After reading the article in my opinion Pro Developers/Enterprise Developers should always focus on creating solutions which add business value and moreover understand what problems people are trying to solve.
Therefore they should aid their colleagues/customers which are Citizen Developers by understanding their needs and providing solution blocks so that they can then create solutions as mentioned before for their problems on their own.

What do you think on this interpretation and outlook for the future of (Pro/Enterprise) developers?

Today everyone in software development should be doing CI/CD or at least know what it is. Three Common Pitfalls of CI/CD, and How to Avoid Them shows three pitfalls which you should not fall into when doing so.

Maybe someone who is reading about Kubernetes has seen the term »Service Mesh«. The Service Mesh: What Every Software Engineer Needs to Know about the World's Most Over-Hyped Technology explains what you need to know on this topic.

To know patterns is always useful when working as a developer/software architect. Options Pattern in .NET Core shows how you can use the former mentioned pattern to register your dependencies in an ASP.NET Core application.

If you liked what you read about dealing with the options pattern but don't have any experience in .NET Learn .NET Core is just the right article for you.

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.