Software development articles, book reviews, and career advice from Dustin Ewers.
I feel like half of my social media feed is composed of AI grifters saying software developers are not going to make it. Combine that sentiment with some economic headwinds and it's easy to feel like we're all screwed. I think that's bullshit. The best days of our industry lie ahead.
Makers need long stretches of time so they can concentrate. Managers schedule meetings for most of their day, so they don't care. Leads have to go to additional meetings while also making things. Being a lead can be rough, so here are three strategies to adapt.
Quick password generation one liners.
One of the hills that I’ll die on as a software developer is keeping any solution I make as simple as humanly possible.
With the holidays finished, it's time to get something for yourself. As developers, we spend most of our time sitting in a chair, typing at a keyboard. The pain of sitting in a lousy chair is immediately apparent to anyone over 25. What's less obvious is the pain of a mediocre keyboard. You should upgrade your setup.
If you read the news, it sounds like the AIs are coming for our jobs. While I don’t buy that for a second, we’re undergoing a significant shakeup in developer tools. We’re moving from digital picks and shovels to digital bulldozers and jackhammers. It’s essential to learn how to use these tools.
The Azure AI-900 is the first step in mastering AI Engineering on the Microsoft stack. It's an introduction-level exam, so there's no expectation of previous experience with AI or ML. I recently passed my Microsoft AI-900 exam, and here’s how I did it. Main Topics of Study Exam Details The AI-900 exam is mainly a test of basic AI/ML concepts and the Azure services you can use to use those…
Let's say you want to board the LLM hype train but don't want to shell out $20 a month for the fancy version of ChatGPT. You can learn more and save a few bucks by setting up your notebook environment using the Open AI API and VS Code. In this post, we're going to use several different technologies. Visual Studio Code I use VS Code for nearly everything. For me, VS Code is usually more efficient…
The DevOps movement has been trucking along for over half a decade. We are breaking down silos, automating toil, and making life better for the people who create and operate software. As we continue to "shift left," compliance and security don't always get invited to the party. This is a problem. IT Revolution , the folks behind The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project , has a new book called…
I'm generally not a fan of all the criticisms of "hustle culture," but my developer Spider-sense is triggered whenever I see a company complimenting heroic actions on project teams. Any time I hear phrases like: "The team really had to put in the nights and weekends," "_________ worked all weekend," or anything referencing burning midnight oil, I cringe a little. I'm not against hard work. I…
One thing that drives me crazy in this field is how some folks think it's a weakness to look something up. While you should spend time deepening your knowledge of your chosen tech stack, you aren't going to be able to learn everything. Even if you do, it's going to change. The last time I checked, software development was about solving problems, not feeling smart. Therefore, my "must-have"…
All of your microservices would have their own database in the ideal universe. Unfortunately, enterprise development is not in the ideal universe. When provisioning databases is complicated, you often get stuck with a single database per environment. If you want to work around this constraint and maintain some semblance of data separation, you can use schemas to separate your services. In this…
Have you suffered on a project due to lousy tool choices? ("Tool" can mean many things, but in this context, we're talking about developer tools: utilities, test runners, DevOps tools, libraries, and frameworks.) Did the previous architect on your project evangelize some hipster JavaScript library with no documentation, and now no one cares about it because all the hipsters are using NewThing.js?…
I was recently at a (socially distanced) high school graduation party. Like most graduation parties, the older adults doled out a big helping of partially solicited career advice. We mostly encouraged the poor graduate to enter our fields, which included software development, accounting, science, engineering, and skilled trades. Given all the conflicting advice, she's probably going to end up as a…
During my travels as a developer, I find myself having the following conversations far too often. Have you seen any of these? Timid Developer : "I’d like to do unit tests on my project, but my boss won’t let me. He said we don’t have enough time to do them." Me : "You shouldn’t be asking your boss to do unit tests, just do them." or Beleaguered Developer : "I’d like to adopt modern development…
<small> Image from Web Summit via Wikimedia Commons </small> What can this tiny Japanese lady teach you about technology? This is Marie Kondo. She’s become a cultural phenomenon with her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and her Netflix show Tidying Up . She created the KonMari method, which is a decluttering strategy where you get rid of anything that doesn’t "spark joy". You go through…
If you attended my Get The Boring Stuff Right tech talk, you'll know that I mentioned a ton of different resources to update your skills. Here's a list of those resources. This is some my favorite sites and books that you can use to level up. Go forth and conquer! I did a post about the content of this talk on the That Conference Blog. Get The Boring Stuff Right Slides Mindset Carol Dweck is the…
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Being a developer is committing to a lifetime of learning new skills. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on grokking cloud architecture on Azure. Like many devs on the Microsoft stack, I’ve played around with Azure. I built a few resources and watched some demos, but until recently, I hadn’t taken the time to really invest in the skill set. I never felt like…
Let's say you have a table of events. Each event has a beginning and an ending date. How would you get a list of the events that happened within each quarter? Example: A event that begins on 2-1-2017 and ends on 8-1-2017 would have an entries for Q1 2017, Q2 2017, and Q3 2017. If you're dealing with a single value, you can just use DATEPART(quarter, [DateValue]), but if you're looking to figure…
Like fashion, computing works in cycles. Things that were once looked at as passe come back with retro vengeance. For .NET development, the console is back. Consoles combined with lightweight editors like Visual Studio Code are becoming increasingly popular. Call me a hipster, but I'm all for this change. I hate waiting around for my editor and I never have to do that in a console or Visual Studio…
I'm a huge fan of ASP.NET Core. It's a great iteration on the ASP.NET platform and it should be your default choice for any new web development. I'm also a big fan of apps that don't take a week to load. Fortunately, ASP.NET Core doesn't skimp in the speed department. The framework has some great features for building fast applications. Some things that used to be hard are now easy. In this post,…
Ever find yourself in high stakes situations where even the slightest miscommunication can bring everything crashing into the ground? If so, <a href="http://amzn.to/2naMNsb" target="_blank">Crucial Conversations</a> has you covered. Crucial Conversations is a book about how to better navigate high stakes conversations. Unlike most business books, <a href="http://amzn.to/2naMNsb"…
<img class="size-full" src=" /assets/images/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/1024px-Golden_gavel_1.jpg" alt="Golden Hammer" width="1024" height="922" /> Image By walknboston (Flickr: Gavel) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons The technology landscape is exploding with new things to learn. From virtual reality to app enabled refrigerators to the JavaScript…
The technology landscape is exploding. New technologies, platforms, and tools are being creating at an ever-increasing rate. VR, AR, and wearables give us new app stores to target and new experiences to create. Conversational UI (Alexa, Bots, Cortana API) is a totally new way to interact with users, and another dozen different platforms you can target. Even the web space is exploding. It feels…
As technologists, we are the vanguard of innovation. We're at the forefront of technological innovation. Even if you're slagging COBOL in the basement of some bank, you're still dragging your organization into the future. Ever wonder how that process actually happens? What can you do to be more creative? I'm fascinated by this topic, so I put together a talk about it. (<a…
Have you ever built something you're proud of, only to have it torn to shreds when you show it your audience? Get burned in a code review? Rejected after a job interview? I know I have. Today, I'm going to write about some strategies to deal with it. <blockquote>If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever…
<blockquote><img src="https://dustinewers.com/content/images/2015/05/construction-work-carpenter-tools.jpg" alt="What We Need More of is Hubris: A Review of Zero to One" /> We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. Peter Thiel</blockquote> According to Peter Thiel, an amazing future lies ahead. All we have to do is build it. Unfortunately, cultural shifts have steered us away from…
Being an adult is hard. People are constantly vying for chunks of your attention. As you become more successful, you have to weigh lots of options. There are dozens of competing commitments and everyone is so busy trying to fit them all in. It’s maddening. According to Greg McKeown, it doesn’t have to be this way. In his book, <a…
Staying well informed is important to every professional, but how do you navigate the sea of infinite content? How can you filter out useful information from political nonsense, irrelevant junk, and clickbait? As someone who tries to focus the essentials, I don’t want to waste time separating the good from the bad. I want useful information that helps me in my life. To address this need, I've…
<p>Being called the smartest person in the world makes you huge target for trolls. Marilyn vos Savant was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under "Highest IQ". This propelled her into the national spotlight. She then proved that IQ doesn't mean everything by becoming columnist for Parade. The listing also made her a popular target of criticism, especially by academics. There are whole…
There’s nothing like replacing a legacy software system to stoke the fires of self-righteousness. You get to pull some poor users out of the dark ages and save them from a system may have been state of the art last decade, but is junk now. (Ignoring the fact that the old system lasted that long because it did what it what the users wanted it to do.) It’s especially fun when the old system is so…
Last year, I created my first tech talk and delivered it to several venues. I enjoyed the experience, so I decided to produce a new talk this year. This time though, I want to document the process of building the talk while I'm working on it. I think it's important to see things unfold while they happen. Often, you see a polished talk and you don't see the work that has gone into it. This isn’t…
I love to read. I've read over 40 non-fiction books in the past year (and all five <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00957T6X6/thweofdujew-20">Game of Thrones</a> books). One of the problems I ran into is that when you read a lot, it becomes hard to recall what's in specific books. Reading is a waste of time if you can't recall what you've read. To solve the retention problem, I use…
Ever want to give a tech talk to your peers? I recently built and delivered my first tech talk and I'd like to share my experience. <h3 id="motivation">Motivation</h3> There are several factors that have contributed to my desire to to make a tech talk. The first is that one of my career goals is to become more involved with my local developer community. I am fortunate to live in a city that has a…
I used to be a little nervous about doing technical interviews. Even though I spend much of my free time learning about technology, I'm still afraid that I'll be perceived as an idiot. To combat this feeling, I have developed several practices to improve my interviewing skills. <h4 id="1reviewyourresume">1. Review Your Resume</h4> Every interview I've been to asks you for examples from your work…