Reading Notes #536 (Book edition)

Good first Monday of 2023!

As a way to close the Reading Notes of 2022, I changed a little today's post by sharing the books I read during the year. I didn't include the novel and thriller as I'm not sure they would be relevant in this kind of post.  However, if you are interested, find me at goodreads.com/fboucheros.

Let's make this new year a better one, and as usual, I'm always happy to receive your blog post and recommendations.

Books

Listen Like You Mean It: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection  
Author: Ximena Vengoechea

I like the stories and examples in this book. I mean it's 'easy' to say listen carefully but demonstrating how the opportunity was missed, and how to correct it is way more complex. Nice book.

Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers
Author: Chip Heath, Karla Starr

I really enjoyed reading this book. Data is in the middle of everything, and when communicating that information it's often translated into numbers. To have an impact, the way we communicate those number is crucial. A book to read and probably read again after a while to refresh our memory.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Authors: Chip Heath, Dan Heath

This book oversimplifies a really complex topic, but I believe it was important to make each point clear. Nice read, it will help to be less afraid of making changes.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Author: Cal Newport

A nice book that mixt great advice and more 'easy' ones. Nevertheless, it was interesting to revisit what I already knew and to learn new things. With so many distractions around us, focusing is important.






Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons 

Author:  Ben Riggs

Big fan of D&D and this book is a great read. It is a history of the game and the people behind it. It is an excellent read for anyone who is interested in the game or its history of it. I had no idea of all the "drama", and honestly even I didn't know either what it takes to create those books/games.

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work 

Authors: Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

The important message here where we can achieve a lot more with less. The book shares many examples and breaks them down into simple principles. I recommend it to anyone who is looking to improve their work-life balance.





Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds 

Author: David Goggins

The mind is incredible. Goggins pushed it to not eleven... to twelve! We all encounter difficulties in our lives, and the lesson here is that the real limit is way past what we think. Great book and he just published a new one.

Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping 

Author: Richie Norton

The first time I heard of that book it was in a podcast and it seems very promising. Even though I didn`t fall in love with that book the ideas are interesting and definitely worth the time to learn them.

~Frank

Reading Notes #298

Cloud

• Yo Team, meet Azure Container Instances (Donovan Brown) - Yep now Yo Team support ACL. This post also shares how quickly get your container IP address.
• #LogicApps – Introduction and main differences with Microsoft Flow #MSFlow | El Bruno on WordPress.com (El Bruno) - Great post that gives a very clear view of the differences... Now I have a post to refer to when people are asking me that.
• .NET Rocks! Azure Event Grid with Dan Rosanova (Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell) - I really liked that episode with Dan. It was nice listening to him talking an making reference to Biztalk and Logic App.
• Azure Functions and Lazy Initialization with Couchbase Server (Matthew Groves) - Nice hack, that could potentially save a lot of initialization if the function is called often.
• Azure Tips and Tricks Part 20 - Working with Files in Azure App Service (Michael Crump) - I'm always impressed by how many people don't know Kudu. Well, if it's your case, this post is for you... at least to get started.
• How to import a Postman collection into your Azure API Management – SANDRO PEREIRA BIZTALK BLOG (Sandro Pereira) - Pretty useful tips that import process.

Programming

• OpenAPI is not what I thought (Darrel Miller ) - I hear you my friend, loud and clear. Let's use OpenAPI the way it should be. Very interesting post for an inside man sharing his thoughts about the purpose of the tool.
• Serverless and Auth0 Webtasks, hop on the bullet train (Glenn Block) - Cool tool in the Node.js world.
• What is a Default Parameter in a JavaScript function? | Dhananjay Kumar on WordPress.com (Dhananjay Kumar) - Aaaah Javascript so powerful but at the same time so demanding.
• What would a cross-platform .NET UI Framework look like? Exploring Avalonia (Scott Hanselman) - I didn't know where WPF came from, and it's interesting to see the open-source project inspired other projects and to see that they continue to evolve.

Miscellaneous

• #222: Patrick Lencioni—Getting Hiring Right (EntreLeadership Team) - It was my first episode of this podcast, but definitely not the last one. Very interesting speakers... nice books referenced... loved it.
• Why Your Boss Makes You Punch a Time Clock (Suzanne Lucas Suzanne Lucas is a freelance writer who spent 10 years in corporate human resources, where she hired, fired, managed the numbers, and double-checked with t) - Most of us have to do timesheets... I'm sure that at one point, you asked yourself the reason about it. It's time read an answer, in this post.

Reading Notes #231

Suggestion of the week

• Introducing docs.microsoft.com - Great post that explains all the nice features of the first glimpse of the new Microsoft documentation. They did a fantastic work, a post to read; a site to remember.

Cloud

• Why Service Fabric? - You heard about the buzz word your tech guys are exited, but you would like to know why service fabric could be good for your business? This post is for you.
  
• Azure Active Directory – Why You Should Care - Nice post. It's all in the title...

Programming

• Simplifying API documentation for a great first user experience (abhinav) - Nice post that touches a very important point... docs.

Data

• The 95th Percentile - Like they say the devil is in the details.
  
• Using The R Visual in Power BI - Interesting usage of two powerful tool.
  
• 10 things to know about DocumentDB Partitioned Collections (Aravind Ramachandran) - Perfect post to stay up to date with the latest DocumentDB features.

Miscellaneous

• How does criticism hit your brain? (Vincent-Philippe Lauzon) - Interesting thoughts, loaded of wisdom.
  
• Here's how I verify data breaches - Interesting post, because even hacks must be validated.

Reading Notes #93

Suggestion of the week

• Announcing the release of Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET (Scott Gu)- Wow! Don't miss this post. It's a big one, but it's filled with a lot of good stuff. Enjoy!
  
• Released: Windows Azure Training Kit – April 2013 (SyntaxC4)- Yeah! New update of the Widows Azure Training Kit (WATK). Learn what updated in this post.
  
• Building a live blog app in Windows Azure - That why the cloud is so fantastic, we can build incredible stuff without big money! Great post!
  
• A Responsible Programmer - Excellent post. These are, in fact, the best practices to be a good programmer/ developer.

 

Cloud

• Help! I Cannot Attach My Azure Data Disk to my Windows Azure Virtual Machine (Stephen W) - Nice catch, the list of available disk and the reasons why some or unavailable could be clearer.
  
• Subscribe to Windows Azure Using Your Organization ID - Nice update, we can now sign-in as an organization to Windows Azure and use our AD credential.
  
• The Windows Azure SDK for Ruby (Larry Franks) - Nice post that details what is available for Ruby developers in Azure.
  
• Setting up software based Site-to-Site VPN for Windows Azure with Windows Server 2012 Routing and Remote Access - Nice tutorial about the new site-to-site feature of Azure.
  
• Just released - Microsoft Enterprise Library 6 (Grigori Melnik) - Nice update. If you don't know Enterprise Library (EntLib) it time to jump in! And for Azure developers check out the integration pack! It's a must.
  
• Episode 106 - Scott Guthrie Discusses Windows Azure SDK 2.0 (Channel 9) (Scott Guthrie) - Excellent presentation of the novelties.
  
• Copy files >2GB to your cloud VM (Paul Lou) - Very useful post that gives a solution to a very annoying problem.

 

Programming

• Script to automatically configuring Remote PowerShell for Windows Azure Virtual Machines on your machine - Useful PowerShell script shared.
  
• NuGet your Enterprise? - Interesting thoughts about NuGet.
  
• Visual Studio Tools for Git Update available (Brian Harry) - This post details the update of the VisualStudio extension. An extension to try.
  
• Utilize Roslyn to create the next level plugin capability (Filip Ekberg) - Nice presentation about this great idea: a compiler as a service! Roslyn
  
• Git Explained: For Beginners - If you don't know Git, or you still not familiar with it? This is definitely the post for you. From vocabulary to code sample this tutorial explains all you need to knows.

 

UX

• April Showers Lead to May Flowers…and an Updated Windows Store App (Jonathan Rozenblit) - Nice update to windows app due to the not so nice weather.

Miscellaneous

• The thoughtLEADERS Blog - Mentoring is gaining in popularity, and I'm happy with that because it really a win-win scenario.
  
• Upgrade Your Blogging Skills (Aaron Aders) - This post summarize an interesting book that easly found is place in my to-read stack.
  
• Swipe launches into beta as a Web app to create and share presentations to anyone on any device) (Ken Yeung) - This application look very promising. I really look forward to see what will come out of that.
  
• 8 Risks When You Ignore Social Media (Hollis Thomases) - Social media for business is an interesting discussion topic, but this article brings something that sure: ignoring is not a good solution.
  
• The “Consumerization” of IT and the Dark Side of the Cloud (Bob Buck Woody) - Interesting thoughts about relation between IT and business.
  
• Moving 4th & Mayor to Windows Azure Web Sites - Interesting story of someone migrating, he's application from AWS to Windows Azure.

~Frank