Reading Notes #499

Good Monday, 

Monday means it's reading notes times. Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Suggestion of the week

• How to Separate Production, Test and Development Resources in Azure (John Kilmister) - Great post. It is an extremely frequent question, and I am happy to have now documentation to support the best practices.

Cloud

• Azure Apps Autopilot (Justin Yoo) - A great DevOps post that great an automatic deployment process. Very inspiring, I think I may is some of it for my AzUrlShortener.

Programming

• Automate code metrics and class diagrams with GitHub Actions (David Pine) - Very cool post and GitHub action. Will it come next weekend's little project to give it a try? I'll let you know.

• Blazor&Dragons! How to consume gRPC-web from Blazor – part 1: the client (David Guida) - A pretty cool first part of the tutorial. Who said learning cannot be fun.

• Windows Package Manager 1.2 (Demitrius Nelon) - I just try it and it works so well. This is good news and there are already so many packages available.

Podcasts

• Adam Shoalts On The Importance Of Solo Adventures In Life (What's Essential) - As I was listening to this episode I was thinking what an interesting guest. Adam Shoalts, explains a few anecdotes of his numerous expeditions, and how the essential it most of the time in the middle of them. Then at the end, I connected the dots! Adam Shoalts author of the book Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic, I read that book :) and it's was part of the Reading Notes #460

• Headphones Vs. Earbuds Vs. AirPods: Which Is The Best Podcasting Audio Equipement? - (Feed Your Brand) - Really interesting episode about gears... And excellent timing, because yes I need some new ones.

• Entrepreneurship as a developer - (Software Engineering Unlocked) - WHat does it means to think at scale. I am not quite sure I would enjoy doing it his way, but it's definitely working.

~frank

Reading Notes #453

Cloud

• Handling Events Inside an Azure Function (Paul Michaels) - Great post that explains, both the bug/ cause and how to fix the problem.

• How to Deploy a Blazor Application in Azure App Service (Sridhar Narasimhan) - Nice post to learn quickly different ways to deploy our apps.

Programming

• Organizing My Reaction GIFs Using Node.js, Sharp, And Angular 11.0.2 (Ben Nadel) - Definitely a cool project. The chance of failure should never block you to try, learn, or have fun.

• Docker V2 Github Action is Now GA - Docker Blog (Ben De St Paer-Gotch) - A really nice update on those actions.Nice

• Getting Started With NuGet 5.8 (Jon Douglas) - A very interesting post about the new features included in NuGet, and since it is the first one supporting .Net 5, some advice for a better experience.

• Understand The .NET 5 Runtime Environment (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - A helpful post that describes the different environment and their characteristics.

Miscellaneous

• Upgrading Blazor Blogs (Version 1.0 to Version 2.0) (null) - Nice little tutorial. It's upgrade time.

Podcasts

• What is a Developer Game Jam? (Coding Blocks) - Interesting episode about Game Jam... I barely know that universe. Yes, I said universe because it is a completely different world or better another dimension. There are tons of events and participants but you may never hear of that. It's very interesting.

• A Blast from the Past and Life's Interesting Journey — Back After 8 Years (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - Inspiring episode about how communities can be built and be interesting.

Reading Notes #452

Cloud

• Announcing Azure Mobile Apps v4.2.0 for .NET | Xamarin Blog (Adrian) - Nice update, more platforms.

Programming

• .Net 5 is PERFECT for DevOps (Davide Benvegnù) - I said it many times but allow me to say it one more time... It a great time to be a .Net developer.

• Azure Functions via GitHub Actions with No Publish Profile (Justin Yoo) - Nice post. We can do so much with those GitHub actions it's so cool.

• Spectre.Console lets you make beautiful console apps with .NET Core (Scott Hanselman) - Looks totally cool and could definitely be useful for some API I have... Could I just add params for pretty results?? Hmmm.

Miscellaneous

• Understanding the difference between null and undefined in Azure Cosmos DB | Azure Cosmos DB Blog (Tim Sander) - Super interesting post that shares a nice tip about how to work with null and undefined values in your NoSQL queries.

• Preventing Developer Burnout in the Age of Rapid Software Delivery (James Brotsos) - This post is definitely interesting as it talks about a real health problem. at the same time there that mix with DevOps and security thing... Could be just me, interesting nevertheless.

Reading Notes #397

Suggestion of the week

• Visual Studio for Nintendo Switch? - FUZE4 Nintendo Switch is an amazing coding app (Scott Hanselman) - Whaaat?! If someone in your entourage or a citizen of your life ( like Scott says) owns a Nintendo switch...you MUST read this post.

Cloud

• SSL certificates management using Lets Encrypt, Azure Automation and Web Apps (Dominique St-Amand ) - Security, of course. Automatically ... I'm in! This post explains how to automate your renewing process.
• Serverless Deployment Best Practices (Fernando Medina Corey) - A nice post that shows some of the best practices for serverless and how AWS implements them.

Programming

• How partners like GitKraken use GitHub Actions (Marc Campbell) - So cool to see what people are doing with the GitHub Actions.
• How to make ASP.NET Core compile modified views (Gunnar Peipman) - Nice update of Asp.net core... Following the best practices
• How to make a pretty prompt in Windows Terminal with Powerline, Nerd Fonts, Cascadia Code, WSL, and oh-my-posh (Scott Hanselman) - It's great to have a step by step on how to install it. Even if the documentation is well done on Github, it could be confusing to set everything up altogether.
• Why jQuery is Obsolete and Time to Stop Using It (Chris Love) - Great post. I was a big user of jQuery, and these days I do less front end stuff, so it is nice to see how things have evolved and to understand the impact jQuery had.
• Getting Started with Git (Sarah Lean) - Great post that explains the basic functionalities of Git.

Miscellaneous

• Video Interview: Between Two Nerds ( Steve Carroll & Scott Hanselman) - Really cool and interesting video interview.

~

Reading Notes #395

Cloud

• Announcing Azure Storage Explorer 1.10.0 | Blog | Microsoft Azure (Catherine Wang) - That new managed disk capability is a really requested feature and embeded azcopy is awesome.

• Building a serverless blog site on Azure (Erik Lieben) - A very cool post that explains how to build a static website generator using serverless. Weel done!

Programming

• GitHub Pull Request Integration with Glo Boards (Jonathan Silva) - Really nice integration and automation with Github PR...Already using and loving it.

• New workflow editor for GitHub Actions (Chris Patterson) - Have you tested the new GitHub action? If yes you will be pleased with this new editor...Ending the research of that missing space somewhere.

• Single Page Applications and ASP.NET Core 3.0 (Shawn Wildermuth) - A very interesting post that explains all the little configurations or twists required to have a great SPA experience with .Net Core.

Miscellaneous

• What You Need for Effective Remote Work (William Gant) - This is a full chapter of an up coming book about remote workers... If you are new to this adventure and even more if you are fulltime remote, this read is a must.

Books

Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives 

Author: Gretchen Rubin 

I really enjoyed this book. I found very interesting the categorization of all those habits and comportment grouping. I like also the habits association to help to break some or creating new ones. It's obvious, but I didn't think about it before.

Reading Notes #391

Suggestion of the week

• How to Use Github Professionally (Aaron Stannard) - This post is great! Tons of information and best practices (with an explanation of why its a best practice).

• Please, everyone, put your entire development environment in Github (Burke Holland) - OMG! It is sooooo simple! I was already using containers to develop, but didn't know VSCode could manage that for me! And make it easily reproducible!

Cloud

• The Azure Cloud Shell Connector in Windows Terminal | Windows Command Line Tools For Developers (Pankaj Bhojwani) - Pure happiness.

Programming

• 5 Things to Try with Docker Desktop WSL 2 Tech Preview - Docker Blog (Ben De St Paer-Gotch) - So cool...
• 10 Git Tricks to Save Your Time and Sanity (Jacob Herrington) - Really useful (and even cool) git commands. Try them you'll see what I mean.
• ASP.NET Core and Blazor updates in .NET Core 3.0 Preview 8 (Sourabh Shirhatti) - Nice update. Be aware of a few breaking changes...but it's all for the best.
• Build Data-Driven Web Apps Blazing Fast with Blazor and OData ( Jeremy Likness) - This post is a great tutorial that explains how to build a complete todo list use that tech. Really cool.
• Developing Docker-Powered Applications on Windows with WSL 2 - Docker Blog (Antonis Kalipetis) - That new Docker desktop version looks very promising
• GitKraken & Glo Boards Now Support GitHub Actions (Lauren Witte Girard) - Great. Now we only just need the GitHub action...
• Investigating Drag and Drop with Blazor (Chris Sainty) - Interesting share of an experiment.

Books

Living with the Monks: What Turning Off My Phone Taught Me about Happiness, Gratitude, and Focus 

Author: Jesse Itzler

I really enjoyed this book. Yes it's light and funny, but don't get fool, there is a deeper message here. I think Jessy wins his challenge by going into a monastery so we don't have to. We all have what it takes to live a more purposeful life, we just need to pause. Showdown, to go faster, do less to do more... Embrace the silence.



~

Reading Notes #366

Cloud

• Using Environment Variables in Azure DevOps Pipelines (K. Scott Allen) - A great little tutorial that explains how to use configure our variables.

Programming

• An open source parser for GitHub Actions (Patrick Reynolds) - Looking forward to try those GitHub Actions.
• Code coverage reports for ASP.NET Core (Gunnar Peipman) - Very interesting post to learn more about how to get a useful report about our tests.
• Dependency injection in .NET Core console applications (Gunnar Peipman) - Fantastic and concise post that introduces a way to do simple dependency injection with .Net Core using Autofact.
• Rust Governance: Scaling Empathy (Manish Goregaokar) - A friend recently introduced me to Rust. This post assumed we all already familiar to it, and talk about the current problems of this new language and potential solutions.

Databases

• Migrating your existing on-prem SQL Server database to Azure SQL DB (Angelos Petropoulos) - Are you planning to migrate your app to Azure? If the database is also part of the migration here three different way to migrate it including one that doesn't require downtime!

Miscellaneous

• Benefits of using Azure API Management with microservices (Mike Budzynski) - Nice post that explains how to structure Azure Functions (microservices) with Apim and explains why it's a good practice.
• Designing for Dark Mode (kirupa) - Interesting topic indeed. As I'm migrating one of my blog the timing is excellent.