The Blog
My Rants and Raves about technology, programming, everything else...
Goodbye MSDN Magazine...You Meant So Much To Me
I was talking with David Berry when we both heard the news about MSDN Magazine shutting down after the November issue. I'm really saddened by it.
The reality is that MSDN Magazine had a dramatic impact on my career, both as a reader and an author. I'd like to share my memories of it.
Years back (I think 1998) I went to one of my first development conferences in Boston. There I saw Chris Sells, Don Box, and Jeffrey Richter for the first time. I left there wanting to figure out how to speak at conferences. I loved the idea of sharing my experience with others. Code camps and user groups were in their infantcy so I didn't know of another way to scratch that itch.
Atlanta Code Camp 2019 Registration Now Open
)Are you in the Atlanta Area? Want to hear me and a great group of speakers talk about everything in development? If so, it's time to register for this year's Atlanta Code Camp.
I'm planning on talking about gRPC and Vue.js (though the speakers haven't been selected yet). I'm looking forward to being at the entire event this year since I'm not travelling.
This year's event will be held on September 14th, 2019 at:
What I Learned Upgrading the Atlanta Code Camp Website
I've been updating the CoreCodeCamp project (the basis for the Atlanta Code Camp's website) for this year's Code Camp. Most of the changes are under the covers, but I wanted to talk about what I learned.
The goal of the upgrade was two-fold: upgrade to .NET Core 2.2; and move the Vue.js code to Vue CLI (to improve loading performance). It also allowed me to do some rudamentary clean I've wanted to do. On to the lessons...
In the past few years, I've run the Atlanta Code Camp website by the seat of my pants...and it cost me. On several occassions, pushing a new build to the website brought down the website (sometimes my fault; sometimes Azure's fault). I was convinced I needed to use Azure Development Slots to address this.
The State of Writing Services for the Web
I started writing services in websites back in the .NET 1.0 days. Originally I was doing just POX (Plain Old XML) services in a very crude way so we could get the job done for our internal systems back in the early 2000's.
This means I've been through the "new tech" crazy with services for a long time. I've spent much of the last year digging into different tech for services to interact with websites (though many of the same issues are for rich clients and IoT). I'm not done and don't know how right my assumptions are yet, but I thought I'd try to start a conversation.
While I've lived through POX, SOAP, and REST...I don't think this is another wave. I think this is a widening of options for services. But what does the service ecosystem look like right now? (Caveat: I'm going to miss your favorite idea, so feel free to add to the discussion below.)
Changing Nested State in Vuex
I've been updating the Atlanta Code Camp website to improve our administration workflow. With the Call for Speakers coming up soon, I wanted to make sure we had a good way of picking only the best talks.
One of the things I've done is move it to a Single App with Vuex at the center of it. But I ran into an oddity with Vuex that I thought I'd share.
Much of the work I do in Vuex has to do with adding, updating and removing objects from the state. That works exactly the way I would expect. For example, I have a lot of mutations that looks like this:
Did Vue.js Just Blink?
There is a lot of buzz around the internet about Vue.js 3.0's announcement about a new composition model. There are a lot of questions about it and I think much of it is 'they moved my cheese' more than 'they're breaking everything'.
So let's talk about it...
Evan You's announcement in London last week scared a bunch of people, including me.
What's New in ASP.NET Core 3 Preview 6
ASP.NET Core 3 seems to be taking a similar tact to version 1 as it is adding a lot of functionality and phasing it in with different previews. While a lot of the articles seem to be focusing on the non-ASP.NET features (e.g. WPF, WinForms, etc.), I thought it would be nice to let those of you who are ASP.NET devs know what is in Preview 6 just for you.
It feels a lot like the ASP.NET MVC/API side is being treated as mature and stable as there is are not a lot of surface changes. Microsoft does seem to be doubling down on Razor Pages and Blazor. It feels like they want .NET Core to be a good fit for different styles and backgrounds of developer. This release is no different.
Let's take a look at the details:
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: