Reading Notes #551

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Microsoft Cost Management updates—March 2023 (Michael Flanakin) - Because we all need it and or worry about it. Learn the new features that are available for you in the cost management.

• Azure Spring Clean: Compliance for Bicep with Checkov (Sam Cogan) - That's a pretty cool tool to add to our box. I need to get that onto my pipeline...like now!

• Logic Apps Aviators Newsletter - April 2023 (Kent Weare) - One of my friends shared this with me, and I loved it! It's packed with information about new features, and upcoming events...

• This Month in Azure Container Apps: March/April 2023 (Anthony Chu) - I caught the live stream by pure chance and they pass through all the news contained in the post. Very happy to see Azure Container App growing so quickly!

Programming

• Run dotnet core projects without opening visual studio (Karthik Chintala) - Yes, it is possible and even fun! I code in VSCode 80% of the time.

• How to Do an Inner Join in LINQ? (Code Maze) - Nice post to get started about relations between tables type of joints and of course how to do it with LINQ.

• Running .NET Console Apps in Azure Container Instances (Mark Heath) - A neat way to run an application in the cloud. Have a special look at how the secret config is managed to avoid pushing them into the code repository.

Podcast

• Let's Chat About AI (Ep 76) (Community Pulse) - Extremely interesting episode about AI. Should we be worried, what would be the impact? So many great questions asked.
• 54. Cloud native and the Container landscape on Azure - with Daniel Paulus (Betatalks the podcast) - A little bit about the container's history, its present, and potential future.
• Chris Sainty: Blazor in Action - Episode 238 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - I already like Blazor, but I think you will also after listening to this episode.
• Down A Rabbit Hole with Seth Godin (A Bit of Optimism) - Great episode is about many different little things to make life better. You can feel the complicity between Seth and Simon.
• Windows WSL and Containers in 2023 (DevOps and Docker Talk) - WSL what it is and why people say it's so useful. All that and more in this episode.

Miscellaneous

• Technical Writing 101: Working with SMEs - Big Nerd Ranch (Cole Henry) - effectively.

~frank

Reading Notes #547

It is time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

 If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Managing your Azure Cognitive Services Costs (Matt Eland) - Cost management is always a good idea. This post is part of a series of spring cleaning is not an exception.

• Uploading Large Blobs in Parallel with the Azure SDK (Mark Heath) - Wonderful! I tried recently to write a little POC of something like that but it did work as expected. Looking forward to digging into this code as I think I already see my mistake. Great post.

Programming

• Contrasting API Contract Testing and Functional Testing (Kin Lane) - This is an interesting post not about code but more about words, ideas, plans, and more.

• Adding Dependency Injection to a Console App in .Net 7 (Paul Michaels) - Short an simple the perfect answer to a how-to question.

• How to write your own cron Job scheduler in ASP.NET Core (like Quartz, Hangfire, ...) (Steven Giesel) - A really cool post that shows and explains how to build a simple background Service. I love those kind of projects as you learn so much doing them by yourself.

• PSReadLine 2.3.0-beta0 Release - PowerShell Team (Steven Bucher) - I'm a big fan of the Predictor, looking forward to trying this upgrade.

Miscellaneous

• How atomic Git commits dramatically increased my productivity - and will increase yours too (Samuel Faure) - A simple best practice to avoid pain later... I like it!

~ Frank

Reading Notes #537

Good Monday, it's time to share new ReadingNotes. Here is a list of all the articles, podcasts, and blog posts, that catch my interest during the week.

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

The suggestion of the week

• Bye bye Azure Functions, Hello Azure Container Apps: Conclusions (Jonathan George) - Last post of an excellent series. It's a must-read for anyone planning building and API. Azure Container App is not the answer to everything, but it must be considered.

Cloud

• Azure Storage Caching and Compression – The Missing Piece (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - This post shares all the gotchas learned along the way in developing and trying to optimize an application. The result is a faster application, a better experience for the client, and more money that stays in your pocket.

Programming

• Build Containers Without a Dockerfile (Rockford Lhotka) - An interesting thing to be able to create a container without a dockerfile. This post explains why it can be useful and of course how to do it.

• How do I get started in web development? (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Exactly. So true.

• PowerShell IntelliSense completion (Mark Downie) - I noticed that a few days while being active in the prompt to do a bunch of installation and configuration. Super happy that prediction is finally part of the release.

Databases

• The Best C# .NET Web Application Tech Stack: Choosing a Database (Michael Shpilt) - A nice post that goes through all the questions we should ask ourselves when selecting a database and go over many Azure solutions.

Miscellaneous

• Azure Boards – Organize and Plan All of Your Work (April Edwards) - Amazing post that not only go over a few great features of azure DevOps board but also explains the why.... why should we use them.

• Finally a clean and easy way to add Table of Contents to dev.to articles 🤩 (Lucy Linder) - Anice tools to help us generate a table of content (TOC) while publishing to the platform DevTo.

~Frank

Reading Notes #525

Usually, it's on Monday, I know, but a technical issue prevented me to publish faster this week... 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Cost Management updates—September 2022 (Michael Flanakin) - Nice update about the mobile app and the docs.

Programming

• Continuous Integration with GitHub Actions (By Liam Mooney) - A nice tutorial that helps getting started building your first GitHub actions.

• Improve your pipeline maintainability with test categories in xUnit (Dennis Frühauff) - A nice post that describes two strategies about unit tests in our CI-CD.

• Bring Continuous Integration to Your Laptop With the Drone CI Docker Extension (Ajeet Singh Raina, Kamesh Sampath) - This CI-CD container looks very interesting. I will keep an eye on it but may wait until it shows up in the marketplace, or that I need it.

• How to Use the Alpine Docker Official Image (Tyler Charboneau) - Alpine is a must to know for all dev and DevOps people (and probably many more}. This post is perfect for getting you started.

Podcast

• 40. The future of Azure services & the benefits of being bilingual in Tech - with Frank Boucher (Betatalks the podcast) - Shameless plug for a podcast episode where I was the guest. We talk about why content in other languages than English is important and so much more.

• Mark Miller: The Science of Great UI in Software - Episode 212 (Azure DevOps Podcast) -

• Why the C64 Demoscene matters with Clay Token's Bilgem Çakır (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Scott has been sharing content about the Commodore 64 these days and that make me wanna jump back as it was my first computer... But this time I would understand English without having to search for each word in a dictionary.

Miscellaneous

• Systemd support is now available in WSL! - Windows Command Line (Craig Loewen) - Nice WSL is getting better.

~Frank

Reading Notes #492

Good Monday, 

Already time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• General availability: Azure API Management updates in January 2022 (Azure API Management team) - Nice new update coming up our way.

• Rightsize to maximize your cloud investment with Microsoft Azure (Diana Gao) - A very nice post to help us save money when deploying our resources in Azure.

Programming

• 7 Features of Blazor That Make It an Outstanding Framework for Web Development (Nishani Dissanayake) - I already liked Blazor, but the more I learn about it the more I love it.

• Authentication in ASP .NET Core (Chris Noring) - This is a nice tutorial with code and very clear explanations.

• CRUD operations on PostgreSQL using C# and Npgsql (Davide Bellone) - This post is a very good tutorial about how to make a simple query with all the code and explanation required for a great start.

• How to get the optimal image size for web (Joel Hans) - So many options are possible. This post explains the impacts of different contexts and provides guidance on how we could improve, or what we should look at.

Podcasts

• Ximena Vengoechea On How To Hear What Really Matters (What's Essential) - Very interesting conversation. Ximena is the author of the book Listen Like You Mean It. Well... It's just get added to my to-read list.
• L'intuition... pas juste une affaire d'alimentation! (Grand écart) - It's in French but really interesting. I think now I understand the intuitive idea about nutrition and exercise... Now it makes sense.
• Languishing? Here’s How to Turn it Around (Modern Mentor) - There is a name for feeling "meh"! And there are also things we can do to feel better. Very captivating, and now I want to learn more about it.
• My True Crime Episode with David Mittelman (A Bit of Optimism) - When I saw the title of the episode I was a bit confused... True Crime? WHat's the connection? But it was fascinating, so much passion!
• 139: Cloud Strategy, Tactics, and Leadership with Andrew Wertkin (CloudSkills.fm) - So much information and great ideas about leadership and mentoring, I love it.

Miscellaneous

• Dual-screen gaming on Microsoft Surface Duo - Surface Duo Blog (Nguyen Thanh Tung) - This is an interesting post from an established game developer who shares how they thoughts adapting their games for a dual-screen.
• Microsoft PowerToys 0.55.0 gets three new utilities ( Kunal Chowdhury) - This new release is packed with so many fixes and improvements. And the thing that is even better is that community works!
• Windows Terminal Preview 1.13 Release - Windows Command Line (Kayla Cinnamon) - Amazing post, yes we learn about the new features, but we also read about the learning and experimentation of this team and collaborators involvement. Great work.

~frank

Reading Notes #466

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". 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!

The suggestion of the week

• How do I Navigate GitHub Code? (Brian Lagunas) - Two very simple tricks that make a huge difference when you browse a GitHub repo.Wow.

Cloud

• Prevent exceeding Azure budget with forecasted cost alerts (Adam Wise) - Clients are worry to spend more than plan. But they could avoid many surprises by using this tool.

Programming

• Highlights from Git 2.31 (Taylor Blau) - There definitely new features that I will use. And some that I didn't even know was possible that become better and faster.

• Implement Unit Testing in ASP.NET Core 5 Application – Getting Started (Sanjay) - An extremely complete article with code simple and architecture example.

• Integrating ASP.NET Identity Password Policies with Password Managers (Scott Brady) - A great tutorial that explains how to take control of the strength of the password in our app.

• Learn to build HTTP APIs with .NET (Jon Galloway) - So many great suggestions for blog posts, videos, and even a brand new learning path!

• Use C# to upload files to a GitHub repository (Dave Brock) - This is awesome no need to create a rest wrapper and all those little things.

Miscellaneous

• How to Be Happier Without Really Trying - Barking Up The Wrong Tree (Eric) - Is it tricking your own mind, or is it just taking back control? Well as much as we can take control ...of course. Nevertheless, these are interesting ideas that I will try.

~Frank

Reading Notes #416

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are 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. Enjoy!

Cloud

• ASP.NET Core Apps Observability (Francisco) - A great post that shares, and explains how to implement logs, traces, and metrics in modern application.

• Azure Cost Management + Billing updates – February 2020 (Michael Flanakin) - Wow, an incredible update on all front. New features, new PowerBi app, new APIs, and so much more.

• Durable Functions Upgrade Strategies (Mark Heath) - A real gold mine of information about best practices when migrating. Of course great when migrating durable functions, but also true for any services.

Programming

• How to set up a tab profile in Windows Terminal to automatically SSH into a Linux box - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - If you've been hacking or just copy-pasting config without understanding to mutch, this post will explain how to do you own version.

• Announcing PowerShell 7.0 (Joey) - That awesome post will explain what's in PowerShell 7 and why we should care... Because yes... we should.

• Docker Desktop for Windows Home is here! - Docker Blog (Ben De St Paer-Gotch) - Fantastic news! And so easy to install. Lovely.

• How to merge a pull request 🔥🔥🔥 (Steve Belovarich) - Interesting post that shares some best practices when merging.

Podcast

• Starting a profitable business in six weeks with Courtland Allen (Software Engineering Unlocked) - A really interesting discussion about success in tech. All the work that it required, but also the timing, and the people you keep around you in the journey.

• #28: Frank Boucher - Live Stream Coding (The Solo Coder Podcast) - Shameless plug... But a good episode nevertheless.

• #361: The Generosity of Scars with Scott Mann (The EntreLeadership Podcast) - First when I eared the guess was a military I thought it will be full of war references... But no! This episode is all about human. Our self, are we feel alone and strangely the fact that we are not. Great episode and I really liked Scott Mann verbs.

• How to Start and Grow A Podcast That Gets Listeners - Twitch Advice (Stream Coach: Twitch Stream Tips) - I like how Ashley treats her topics. She does it in a different way. In my journey to learn about how to provide great streaming content, this episode was a nice complement.

Book

The Infinite Game 

by: Simon Sinek

 I really enjoyed this book. This book gave me vocabulary. It was putting words on ideas, explaining clearly some feelings that I wasn't able to express. Like when you know something is good or bad, but that you can explain why. It's less impressive than Start with Why, but definitely, something to read.

 

Reading Notes #411

Cloud

• Azure CLI Kung-Fu Tips and Tricks (Dan Patrick) - A true story for a real warrior... This post explains how a well done Azure CLI script can save you in hard conditions.

• How to Reduce the Costs of your Azure IaaS VMs (Thomas Maurer) - Amazing post that will help us to migrate and/or optimize our virtual machine usage in the cloud.

Programming

• Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 Preview 1 release now available (Daniel Roth) - Oooooh, it's coming. New version and big update for the .Net Core WebAssembly. Have fun!

• Getting Started with Visual Studio Online – Cloud IDE (Chris Pietschmann) - Announced in May it's already there and so nice to be able to work with VSOnline that is ( this time ;) f a real Visual Studio but in the cloud.

• Trying out Container Tools in Visual Studio 2019 (Scott Hanseleman) - An interesting post that shows us all the great features packed into the new update of the container tool inside VsStudio 2019. So powerful.

Podcast

• Done playing Microsoft's corporate game (Software Engineering Unlocked) - Great episode with the lovely Suz (aka: noopkat) talking about her roles and experience to different enterprises.

• John Sonmez - Becoming a Finisher, Part 2 (The Solo Coder Podcast) - Second part of the interview with the very prolific John. Once more the episode is very interesting.

Reading Notes #403

Every week, I publish my reading notes. Those are the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I was looking for.

The suggestion of the week

• Azure Cost Management updates – November 2019 | Blog | Microsoft Azure (Michael Flanakin) - This is great news. Finally also available for CSPs learn more about it in this post and there also a link to the Ignite recorded session video.

Cloud

• Deploying Containerized Azure Functions with Terraform (Jason) - Nice quick tutorial to avoid deploying a "zip file".

• Tip 236 - Deploy your web app in Windows Containers on Azure App Service | Azure Tips and Tricks (Michael Crump) - Great and easy way to get started with containers using Visual Studio

• Using Azure File Storage as Container Volume Mounts in App Services | (Michael Jolley) - A nice piece of information and so useful! Every one needs volumes...

Programming

• ASP.NET Core updates in .NET Core 3.1 (Sourabh Shirhatti) - I'm very excited about this 3.1 version.I'm not sure why maybe it's because it is the long-time support (LTS). Nevertheless, I will update all my projects.

• Working with Linux and Windows Containers simultaneously on Docker Desktop (Mark Heath) - A very and I mean VERY interesting post that proof that it is possible to run containers with mix OS from Win10 without any fancy or preview features.

Miscellaneous

• Use Google Sheets to translate faster (Robin Kretzschmar) - Woo! That's pretty cool. Automatic translation is never the best but this is very convenient.

• 7 Dangers of Micromanagement ( Jack Wallen) - Nice post to help you give the best version of yourself. (Note it's now 6, but it was 7 when I read it)

• Defragmenting your Calendar and your Outlook (Scott Hanselman) - Time management is hard...Timeboxing, Pomodoro, no meeting, short meetings... What's your thoughts?

Books

Build Your Dream Stream

Ashley

Great book with many very interesting ideas.Not the same things that we ear elsewhere, or if it is, it's in very different words.

~

Reading Notes #365

Cloud

• Azure Cost Management now general availability for enterprise agreements and more! (Raphael Chacko) - Great news for the PAYG and enterprise subscriptions.
• Configure resource group control for your Azure DevTest Lab (Tanmayee Kamath) - This is a fantastic news. The DevTestLabs were real little resources groups generator, so now we will be able to keep it cleaner.
• Make the most of your monthly Azure Credits (Angelos Petropoulos) - Yes, that true you can run a lot of things for free!
• Step-By-Step: Getting Started with Azure Machine Learning (Anthony Bartolo) - This is a fantastic post to get started with machine learning.
• Remove a directory from your Azure account (Dominique St-Amand) - Awesome quick tips. It's time to clean up these accounts!

Miscellaneous

• How Satya Nadella Uses Learn-It-All to Beat Know-It-All (Terence Mauri) - Interesting thoughts, it totally makes sense.
• Microsoft Build 2019 Developer Conference May 6-8 Seattle, WA (build) - Great! Registration starts end of February .
• Why you don't have time to advance your career - A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller) - An excellent post as I was reading it I couldn't stop thinking yep so true!

Books

I Hope I Screw This Up: How Falling In Love with Your Fears Can Change the World (Kyle Cease)

I was definitely not expecting that, when I picked up this book, but I am happy I did.

This "self-help" book is filled with a ton of comedy and I appreciated it. I felt like my best friend was talking about a serious topic but because he was in a crazy good mood was just having a good time telling me his story. Simple and real. It leaves you with a lot to think about.

Reading Notes #316

Suggestion of the week

• Why should I care about Kubernetes, Docker, and Container Orchestration? (Scott Hanselman) - I really like how this post brings why containers are great.

Cloud

• Azure ARM Template Deployment with Duo Authentication (Eric Leonard) - Nice quick tutorial using the best practices with Azure resources manager.
• Gain better control over your Microsoft Azure costs and governance using Overcast (Stephane Lapointe) - This new product definitely looks interesting.

Programming

• 3 key insights that make D3.js easy to learn - A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller) - I love Power Bi and since I start using it, I would like to try to do some custom visuals. If you think the same thing, then this post is a got pre-learning reading.

Miscellaneous

• How to Coach: A Programmers Cheat Sheet (Lou Bichard) - Very interesting post that shares really good advices, and even suggests a book to go deeper.
• The POC Problem (William Vorhies) - Very interning thoughts about a frequent scenario in our business.
• Why You Must Have an Online Presence as a Programmer NOW (Antonio Cucciniello) - An inspiring post about how to start/ continue/ improve our career as developers/ data scientist/ devops/ architect...