Azure Functions
Azure Functions has now gone into General Availability. I've written before how I'm a fan of the platform. I've got some additional work to do with this over the coming months so it will be interesting to see how much the product has evolved.
There are also now CLI Tools available from npm. This reports to:
The Azure Functions CLI provides a local development experience for creating, developing, testing, running, and debugging Azure Functions.
I've not had a chance to play with these yet. One for the backlog (probably when I do the above mentioned work).
DocumentDB emulator
Linked to the above, I intend on including more DocumentDB in that work - so good to see that a DocumentDB emulator has been release.
This should avoid the need to do so much testing on Azure (and by doing so incurring costs). Again another one to go on my backlog.
More can be found about it in this Microsoft Docs page
Troy Hunt Podcast
I'm quite a fan of Troy Hunt's work. I've talked about his https://haveibeenpwned.com/ site previously.
I find that he takes a common sense approach to security and privacy.
He has recently started to provide a weekly podcast (available via iTunes, Google Play, etc). This is another one to add to my standard commute playlist.
Security Focus
Sticking with Security, I've decided to dedicate some time to bring my security knowledge up to speed.
Security awareness it gathering increasing importance - this is not only a key growth area, it is highly under priorities in IT budgets and projects.
As with most things, education is key. Thus I've decided to undertake the Pluralsight Ethical Hacking Path. It consists of 21 courses spanning around 75 hours, so there is a mammoth amount of content to work through.
The course is intended as prep for CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) exam, but I've no plans at this stage to take that.
I think rather, the knowledge is another great to differentiate myself in the market as being more than a code monkey.
So far, I'm 4% through the path.
Shameless self-promotion
Last week I published ROI of Productivity. The article takes a look at what productivity is (and more importantly isn't) in software development.