Findings and thingies

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

Having done some work around PowerApps recently I found the following two links very useful.

  PowerApps Canvas App Coding Standards and Guidelines

  PowerApps and Microsoft Flow Governance and Deployment Whitepaper is now available

Moreover I watched a webcast which showcases the internal use of PowerApps at Microsoft.

  Walk through creating the internal Microsoft PowerApps Tool “Thrive” application with Pat Dunn

Azure Cloud Shell Tips for SysAdmins Part III - Using Azure CLI - Using Azure CLI is a great way to manage your resources in Azure.

Am I an expert developer or just an expert googler? - This a good point. You needn't feel guilty when googling something but it is more important to fully understand the solution you have found.

Azure Application Architecture Guide - If you are thinking about redesigning, moving existing applications or creating a new application in Azure this is a good point to start with.

One simple action you can take to prevent 99.9 percent of attacks on your accounts - I couldn't agree more. Start using MFA wherever it is possible.

Composing better emails - I couldn't agree more to the improvement suggestions for composing better emails.

Leveraging the Dependency Injection support in Azure Functions - Great introduction to using Dependency Injection in Azure Function and why you should do this

microsoft/PowerToys: Windows system utilities to maximize productivity - The good old PowerToys are coming back to Windows. Especially FancyZones is really looking very promising.

Having done this in the past time for some time I would like to get traction in this again. So I will try to post a weekly collection of links which are interesting from my point of view. Sometimes including a personal comment. Most of the content will be tech related.

So this is the first edition of this for calendar week 35. The upcoming weeks this post will be always published Friday morning. Due to the fact that I only started to gather content for this post in the middle of the week there are only to recommendations for this week.

The state of software engineering - Especially interesting because of the comparison to other professions which do exist quite longer than software engineering.

Understanding Azure Durable Functions - Part 1: Overview - Very good introduction to Durable Azure Functions. Til today the tenth part of this series has been published by Jason Roberts.

After starting to publish content on this domain I used a custom static site generator which I built using .NET core. Then after some time I switched to a custom static generator which I have built using python.

Then after some time I came to the conclusion that building and maintaining my own site generator doesn't provide any real benefit to me. Therefore I decided to switch to Hugo. After preparing my theme and migrating the content this page is now running based on the output of Hugo.

The content is now stored in a Github repository which triggers a webhook after commits. This receiving part for this webhook is running on my server. After receiving a webhook trigger from Github the script runs a git pull for the repository and starts processing with Hugo. After some seconds the new content is then visible on this page.

Stephane Eyskens has published his third architect map.

You can find his new map here: The Azure Infrastructure Architect Map

Because I simply always keep forgetting how to un-/set proxy settings for Git this is my reminder for the future.

Set proxy

git config --global http.proxy http://<username>:<password>@<proxy-server-url>:<port>
git config --global https.proxy http://<username>:<password>@<proxy-server-url>:<port>

Unset proxy

git config --global --unset-all http.proxy # to remove it from the global config
git config --unset-all http.proxy  # to remove it from the local repo config file