The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
Work Life Balance
I have the reputation for working too hard. At least that's how my wife sees it. Luckily she's super supportive of my lack of work balance. I am sure if we had kids it would need to change.
If you follow me >Twitter then you'd know that I often am up late tweeting...I mean working. The thing is that I love my job. I don't feel like I'm overworking, but I likely am.
Over the past five years I've interviewed a ton of people for my podcast and the upcoming film. One of the things I asked most of them is about work-life balance. I've gotten a lot of varied experiences and opinions.
What to Really Learn to Break Into Software Development
One of the goals of my film is to encourage people that don't necessarily look like me to join the ranks of software developers. Because of this I get asked quite a bit about what are the best skills/framework/platform to learn to get a job in tech.
The answer that most people want is something like "Learn C# for back-end, Angular for Front-end, and SASS for design". But that's not the answer I like to give them.
It would be easy to look at the top languages in GitHub or the StackOverflow Surveys and take that as what you should be learning. But that clouds the real issue. In my 30+ years in software, I've learned so many different skills. And I don't think I'm alone. This means, over an average career, the skills you learn won't matter. What really matters is understanding why those skills are used.
SQL Saturday and DotNetSouth in Atlanta
I've had a great time this week attending two events and talking about things I love: .NET and Vue.
Was a busy week, but really had fun time presenting again. Lots of great questions!
Earlier in the week I had the pleasure of speaking at DotNetSouth, a new event by the people who brought you Connect.Tech. They run a great show. I talked about .NET 3 (and 5) as well as Vue.js. Here are the slides and code:
What Does the GitHub Registry Mean to Developers?
As you might have heard, GitHub has created it's own package registry. On the face of it, it might just feel like an opportunity to get more 'buy-in' into using GitHub, but I think something else is going on.
While most people are focusing on the support in NPM for the GitHub registry, they're actually supporting a package repository for a handful of package services. These include Nuget, Ruby Gems, Maven, and Docker. Why are they doing this?
The biggest benefit for people already using GitHub is to be able to expose their code as packages directly in the same environment. This limits the number of steps involved.
Using an InputMask with Vue (e.g. The Vue Ecosystem)
One of the first times I started working with Vue, I was concerned about it's long-term success. I was coming from Angular and their ecosystem is huge.
I was delighted to find that the ecosystem is pretty varied. The Vue website tries to make it easier to find the kinds of libraries and components that you might need. It comes from two places on the website.
On the Vue website, you can look in the Ecosystem menu:
Should I Be Using the ASP.NET Core SPA Templates?
I've been writing demos for Vue, Angular, and React for my SignalR micro-courses over on my Wilder Minds site. For Angular and React, I started out with the the SPA templates, but I found them confusing and hard to do a minimal example.
I tend to suffer from "You Moved My Cheese" and wondered if I was throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Let me talk about my experiences creating projects with and without the templates.
My initial problem with the templates is that they are using node under the covers to handle the build of the project. I hate that these details are hidden from me, but I'm confortable with having a console window to keep a watch on my webpack-based projects (the Vue CLI, Angular CLI and React CLI all wrap webpack).
Vuex and Asynchronicity
If you're using Vuex for state management in your Vue.js applications, there is a good chance that you need to use async operations (e.g. API calls). I have been doing this a while, but falling back to using Promises in most cases.
As I've been using async/await in C# for a while and wanted to try out async and await in JavaScript. In implementing the change, I thought I'd share how I did this in a simple Vue app.
To start out, I have a little demo project where I'm making some API calls directly in Vuex via actions:
Vue's Single File Components vs. React's JSX
I have to admit, my first experiences with React several years ago were meet with a lot of cynicism. The idea of mixing JavaScript and Markup made me clutch my pearls to the core.
Now I know that you can use React without using JSX, but I think that is missing the point in a lot of ways. Of course, I'm not a React expert so I am sure you'll let me know how wrong I am ; )
In case you haven't used React yet, let me just talk about how JSX works. In React, when you build a component, you're mixing JavaScript with markup. The idea is that during compilation, the markup is replaced with DOM code to build up the markup you're specifying. For example:
Using Vue CLI Inside an ASP.NET Core Project
As many of my readers already know, I've become enamoured with Vue.js. Because of this, I've been using it more and more on projects.
Since I also deal with ASP.NET Core almost exclusively, I've been at odds with how to get the two technologies to work well together. Originally I had just used the JavaScript file, but as I've started building larger pieces, I've wanted to use projects built by the Vue CLI in ASP.NET Core. Here's how I've been doing it. Might not be right, but it's at least a way ; )
I'm going to assume you have used the Vue CLI and ASP.NET Core before. So I'm skipping a lot of steps like creating the ASP.NET Core project. I'm also going to assume you've opened up a console before and ran commands. Lastly, I'm assuming you're using Visual Studio (though shouldn't be much different if you're not), and that you have the Vue CLI installed.
Creating a Vuex Plugin
If you're building larger scale Vue objects and you're not using Vuex to centralize your state, please stop and go learn Vuex. Really.
For those of you still here, sometimes it's helpful to be able to monitor state changes to perform other tasks. For example, to send messages or communicate with servers that aren't about state (e.g. SignalR is a good example). That's where Vuex plugins come in.
A Vuex plugin is a simple function that is called once during the setup of a Vuex store. Typically you'd just create the function/arrow function taking an instance of the store:
export default store => {
};
Inside the function, you just want to subscribe to changes to the store as you need. An easy way to think about this is to use subscribe to a mutation:
export default store => {
store.subscribe((mutation, state) => {
if (mutation.type === "setError") {
// Alert someone
alert("Error occurred!");
}
});
};
The mutation that is passed in has a "type" and a "payload". With these properties of the mutation you can determine what to do. For example, the above example just pops up an alert (a really bad thing to do btw) when setError mutation is called. setError is a mutation in a store: