Reading Notes #460

Cloud

• Let’s compare the cloud shells offered by AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (Richard Seroter) - It's always interesting to read those comparison posts...

• ARM Template deployment, the what-if option for your Azure Deployments (Olivier Miossec) - The what-if feature is awesome, this post explains why and shows how to use it.

• State of the Azure SDK 2021 (Azure SDK Team) - So much good news! A ton of updates already done (do you know all of them?) And a very promising roadmap.

• Use Postman with the Microsoft Graph API - Microsoft Graph - Very complete docs about how to do your rest query using a dev tool.

Programming

• How to Add a Serverless Database to your React Projects (Michael Bagley) - This is a nice tutorial with all the code snippets to get started and try this type of project.

• If You Code on Windows, You Deserve a Better Windows Terminal (Matthew MacDonald) - Lovely. A nice post about why the new Windows Terminal is awesome.

• The New .NET Multi-platform App UI (David Ortinau) - I'm more and more excited by Maoi. The simple experience that it promises is very appealing.

Podcast

• #188 – Fame, Focus, and Billions of Pageviews with Evan Britton of Famous Birthdays (Indie Hackers) - A nice story where people focus on the users, worked super hard (and continue to do it), and had amazing success.

• How to Stop Being Complacent (Influencer Entrepreneurs with Jenny Melrose) - A nice episode to "kick our butt" and get back on track. Yes, 2020 indeed brought tons of new challenges at all and every level. However. we must try to make this year better.

• Who Owns Open-Source Software? (Coding Blocks) - Great discussion. Most of us, at some point, have to ask ourselves those questions (at least I know I did). It was very interesting listening to this episode and follow their thoughts.

• 631 - How to Explain a Gap in Your Résumé (Modern Mentor) - I have gaps in my resumé and I always been very comfortable about it. When I saw the title of this episode I thought maybe I should be concerned... Happy to know I was right!

Miscellaneous

• Coaching sessions: here’s what I talk about with junior developers (Dominique St-Amand) - An interesting post for all more junior will found answers and more experienced will have ideas about how to help others.

Books

Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic

Author: Adam Shoalts

Nice adventure. I wish I could see all those images, animals, and horizon. I had a good time reading this odyssey. And for the record, as a canoeist/ kayaker I was impressed by the upriver challenge.

~Frank

Reading Notes #417

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

• Making a cleaner and more intentional azure-pipelines.yml for an ASP.NET Core Web App - Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman) - This post provides explanations about the steps of an Azure Pipeline file. If you are new to azure DevOps it helps a lot with the comprehension.

• Azure Free Account? Is it really free? ( Michael Crump) - Ooh yeah! I still remember that moment where I created my first service.... Get started free is free.

• Build apps for free with Azure Cosmos DB Free Tier | Azure Cosmos DB Blog (Deborah) - A free NoSQL database with the specs of Cosmo...thatts really cool. This post gives you an idea of what it means and a few ideas of what you could do with it.

• Cloud migration: 5 common traps and how to avoid them (Rael Winters) - A great post that can really help you to avoid losing time and money...Once you know the traps, it's easier.

• Tip 254 - Use WAF to protect your web applications with Azure Front Door (Michael Crump) - Nice and easy tip to live more secure in the cloud.

• Tips for keeping your Azure Subscriptions Clean (Michael Crump) - Great post that explains how to keep your money in your pocket.

Programming

• Postman: The Easy Way to Work with APIs - Postman Blog (The Postman Team) - A wonderful tool, a most if you work with API.

• Upgrade Your .NET Console App Experience (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - A nice list of cool libraries to help to add color, table, and menus to our apps.

Podcast

• Making a Living on Instagram with J.N. Silva and Dave Krugman (That Creative Life) - Nice episode... Honestly, they got me with their history when they start doing photography.

• 192: Getting Started with Live Streaming (Merge Conflict) - Nice episode about what you need, or in fact what you don't need to start streaming.

Miscellaneous

• Recovering from Burnout and Depression (null) - An important topic. This post was recommended during a talk about remote working. Very interesting.

~

Reading Notes #381

Suggestion of the week

• Running a Minecraft Server in Azure Container Instances (Mark Heath) - A cool real-life story where Azure Container Instance ACI is very useful.

Cloud

• Automating Azure Container Instances with PowerShell Azure Functions (Mark Heath) - Cool schedule Azure functions demo with PowerShell.
• 
  Deploy a scalable API and Backend with Serverless, Express, and Node.js (Bryan Killian) - A nice tutorial that explains how to build efficient APIs using lambda.

Programming

• Docker - from the beginning, Part IV (Chris Noring) - Part 4 of 5 this series is still a great read. This one shows the transition to docker compose.
• 
  Postman 7.1: Manage your APIs within Postman (Nikita) - So many great features are present in the new version. This post is the perfect quick overview.

Miscellaneous

• 
  Presentation Tips for Technical Talks (Tanya Janca) - This post is filled with great and simple tips that will for sure improve the experience of your attendees and ours.
• 
  Using The Microsoft Face API to Create Mario Kart “Astrology” (Chloe Condon) - Funny project that leverages the Azure cognitive services and python. How cool is that!

Books

Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong 

Author: Eric Barker

Nice book. There is always a good story to make a correlation with his current point. Then it could go in a different direction with another story. All the stories are complementary and are adding layer by layer to the more complex message that is delivered to us. Easy to read, enjoyable from the beginning until the last word.

Reading Notes #361

Cloud

• Deploying ASP.NET Core App Services using Azure Key Vault and Azure Resource Manager templates (Damien Bowden) - Great tutorial easy to follow. It's the perfect one t get started using keyvault and an ARM template.
• Choose your default view in Azure Portal (Abhijit Jana) - Nice new little tweak for your landing page in the portal.
• Deploying Azure Functions with the Azure CLI (Mark Heath) - This is a nice tutorial that explains all the step to great your setup with Functions.
• Four ways to take your apps further with cloud, data, and AI solutions from Microsoft (Frederico Pravatta Rezende) - A very interesting post that provides an easy checkbox list of actions we can do to improve our solution.
• How to set up a Let's Encrypt SSL Cert for Azure Web App with Linux in 5 steps (Jessica Deen) - Very useful tutorial to switch our webapp to https.

Programming

• Creating Web Pages with Blazor ( Peter Vogel) - This post is definitely a good place to get started with Blazor.
• Load your work items into Azure DevOps Boards with .NET (Jeremy Lindsay) - A project to follow very interesting tutorial that explains how this migration tool was built.
• Continuous Integration (David Posin, Paul Duvall) - This is the chapter 1 of a book. It covers all aspects of a CI, really Really interesting.
• Converting OpenAPI specs to Postman collections (Abhijit Kane) - Oooooh that's awesome... I really need to try this new import feature.
• New year, new GitHub: Announcing unlimited free private repos and unified Enterprise offering (Nat Friedman) - Awesome news! So happy about that!
• VS Code: Now creating pull requests (Meaghan Lewis) - Another must have extension I think...

Miscellaneous

• Relationship Hacks: Playing video games and having hobbies while avoiding resentment (Scott Hanselman) - It's always such a pleasure to read those post full of wisdom. It gives us a windows to see how others are doing and ideas on how to improve.

Books

TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

Author: Chris J. Anderson

Fantastic book that covers a lot of topics related to presenting. It covers the before, during, and even the after very smartly. There are no recipes here and this is exactly what makes this book so great. A must.











~

Reading Notes #336

Cloud

• Azure Tips and Tricks Part 139 - Prevent AzCopy Uploads from maxing out Internet Connection Speed (Michael Crump) - Nice little cool trick.

• Quickly create VSTS Work Items for Application Insights Telemetry from Visual Studio (Abhijit Jana) - Can it be more DevOps than that? I don't think so.

Programming

• 7 best practices for building containers (Google) - This post helps us to improve our skill with containers. It also shares a lot of excellent more detailed references.
• How Postman Can Improve Your API Documentation (Abhinav Asthana) - With openAPI and Postman, our Apis will definitely be easier to consume.
• Using Elasticsearch with ASP.NET Core and Docker (Miroslav Popovic ARCHIVE TAGS) - Interesting post. I like how docker was used in this case.

Miscellaneous

• How to Lead When You’re Feeling Afraid (Peter Bregman) - A really interesting post that will help us, for sure, because we all leave this kind of situation one day or the other.
• Defeating Electron (Felix Rieseberg) - Pretty good is the chance that you are (just like me) using an application builds on top of electron. This post explains a little about what's it happening under the hood.
• Here's Why Your Static Website Needs HTTPS (Troy Hunt) - Definitely a post to read.
• How to Write a Catchy Hook and Title for Your Blog - This post can definitely help us getting inspired.

Reading Notes #303

Suggestion of the week

• Writing tests in Postman (joyce) - With all the connected things and all the API in our system, this post shows a brilliant and simple way to test all those external calls.

Cloud

• Benefits of using the Azure IoT SDKs, and pitfalls to avoid if you don’t (Yi Zhong) - All open sources and packed of good stuff thus post shares all these goodies and some best practices if you decide to go without it.
• Container Orchestration Simplified with Managed Kubernetes in Azure Container Service (AKS) (Scott Hanselman, Rob Caron) - Great video that shows us how simplified our work could be.
• How we set up daily Azure spending alerts and saved $10k (Mike Larah) - Cloudyn is definitely a must in many cases. I need to see how it manages CSP subscriptions and limited access for clients. This post also shared how to integrate it in Slack, pretty cool.
• One-click replication for Azure Virtual Machines with Azure Site Recovery (Sujay Talasila) - Fantastic! It couldn't be more simple.

Programming

• Miniblog.Core is a new blog engine built using ASP.NET Core 2.0 (Mads Kristensen) - This post is not only about a sweat new blog engine, but also a call for coders. Everything is available on GitHub.
• Server-side charts with ASP.NET Core, Node services and D3.js | Gunnar Peipman - Programming Blog (Gunnar Peipman) - D3 is an amazing and very popular library, this post shows a very nice project built with it.
• Create a .NET Core 2 application on Linux with Visual Studio Code (Benjamin Perkins) - Nice quick tutorial to quickly get started.
• How to install NuGet Package in Visual Studio Code Linux Ubuntu (Benjamin Perkins) - Quick and easy.

Data

• What is Power BI Embedded? (Guy in a Cube ) - A quick video that explains perfectly the purpose of The embedded offer.

Miscellaneous

• What’s Your Project Problem? (Johanna) - Interesting post of view and many good references about time and resourceful people management.

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 #278

Cloud

• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Lift and Shift vs App Services - When a VM in the Cloud isn't what you want (Scott Hanselman) - This post is about how to transform a lift and shift to a real cloud application. And for what I know it represents 90% of our starts in the cloud.
  
• Serverless like a Superhero with Azure Functions (Shayne Boyer) - Cool tutorial about leveraging Azure function to build an API.
  
• Turn your Postman Collection into a Microsoft integration (Asavari Tayal) - I just love it. How could I've not thought about it myself?

Programming

• Everything You Need to Build A Chatbot (Sage Franch) - Great post to read before starting to code your first bot.
  
• Ruby on Rails on Azure App Service (Web Sites) with Linux (and Ubuntu on Windows 10) (Scott Hanselman) - Interesting post on how to get Ruby to work using today's tooling... on Windows.

Miscellaneous

• Designing a Conversation (Alexandre Brisebois) - Interesting post that digs into the paradox where "us", humans have been communicated since our beginnings but still have trouble doing it, now we want to plan ahead and architect communication with machines.
  
• Introduction to Microsoft To-Do (Gunnar Peipman) - Interesting app Microsoft finally did his ToDo service.

Reading Notes #275

Cloud

• Do more or less with default values in the Azure CLI (Shayne Boyer) - That clever! Great optimization of the CLI.
  
• HTTP-triggered Azure Functions (Gunnar) - Azure functions are such a powerful tool. This post explains how to use them with a Http endpoint.
  
• How to send emails with SendGrid in Azure WebJobs using the SendGrid extension (Vivien Chevallier) - Nice tutorial that explains very clearly how to use SendGrid in our solution. All the code is also available.

Programming

• Microsoft + Docker – Investing in the future of your applications - It's a very exciting time to build an application. This post lists the Microsoft-related talks at the DockerCon.
  
• Testing Azure Functions with Postman and Swagger (Shayne Boyer) - Great update to an already awesome tool.

Miscellaneous

• Shutting down CodePlex ( Brian Harry) - If you have a project sitting at Codeplex, don't panic. This post explains what will happen, and if you would like to migrate, what are your options.
  
• Password managers don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than not having one (Troy Hunt) - Interesting post about password managers. Are you using one? Learn here why you should.

~Frank

Reading Notes #251

Cloud

• Announcing Azure DNS General Availability  - One of the many announcement at Ignite, it will be pretty convenient to have it in Azure portal.
  
• Availability of H-series VMs in Microsoft Azure - New type of high-performance vm, that's welcome.
  
• Azure Functions in practice (Troy Hunt) - Cool post that shows a real-life situation where Function Apps are helpful.
  
• Load Balancing Managed Services in Azure (Daniel Szweda) - Great tutorial that explains very clearly how to configure our balancer.

Programming

• Optimising LINQ - Optimization is a world by itself, this post shares few tips and tools to get better at it.
  
• Using the Postman Chrome App? Implications from the Recent Google Announcement  - Most of us are Postman users, so this news will have an impact... Be prepared.

Miscellaneous

• Being A Developer After 40 (Adrian Kosmaczewski) - Great post, a must whatever you are older or younger than 40.

Reading Notes #225

Cloud

• Reduce Cloud Data Costs and Improve System Performance in Azure (Marc Dugas) - Useful post that shares good tips to save more.
  
• Developer's introduction to Azure IoT (Olivier Bloch) - Great post that explains what is IoT and the strengths o the Azure flavor.
  
• Using PowerShell to manage API Connections (Kevin Lam) - Quick tip to do some clean-up in our connections.

Programming

• Conditional Workflows in Postman (ankit) - First post of a promising series, it sets the table listing the tools required to have a dynamic workflow.
  
• Using Web Deploy in Visual Studio Team Services Release Management (Jakob Ehn) - Nice post that demystifies MSBuild deployment on VSTS.
  
• Almost everyone is doing the API economy wrong (Ed Anuff) - Interesting point of view, if you do API, it's a must.

Databases

• Public preview: JSON in Azure SQL Database - Interesting, we will be able to do json query directly in the Sql Database.
  
• Simple and reliable data movement with Azure Data Factory Copy Wizard (Anand Subbaraj) - Since all cloud projects included data migration, any reliable tool is a good news. I'm looking forward to try this one.