RFC Weekly - 23rd May 2016

Azure DNS

Azure DNS has recently only gone into preview. This fell well for a little project I wanted to try (see below). I've had my domain with 1&1 for many years, but their DNS servers have always been fairly lacking in features.

Moving over to the Azure DNS was smooth and easy and so far everything is working fine.

12 Extremely Useful Hacks for JavaScipt

The title pretty tells you what is going on. Something every JavaScript developer should have read.

.Net Core RC2 release

While I've yet to finish the shift of my website to .Net Core RC1, they have released RC2.

Microsoft say there are improvements over RC1 in terms of performance and reliability (not that I've noticed any problems in RC1). Also seems to include Docker support which maybe interesting to play with.

At the time of the announcement, Azure wasn't RC2 ready so I'm unlikely to adopt it quite yet. I may finish my mini-series on converting to RC1 first (although I am constantly distracting myself).

A debugging thought process

A nice little article describing the steps taken to debug a slow loading website. Great to see the steps taken and the mind-set behind them. Would really recommend a read to anyone new to debugging a slow page load.

Rise of the Bootcamp developer

This article tackles the question of if you really need to understand programming to be a programmer.

In short the author believes you do if you want to get beyond a certain point – and in this I would certainly agree. I also agree with authors analysis of the growing abundance of Bootcamp developers who are being thrown into the industry after 6-8 weeks training.

Yes they know the basics. Yes they can build a program.

But they have severe limitations because they do not have the wide foundation that comes with proper study. That of course can be built up over time, but involves the commitment of the developer and the organisation.

Really quite thought provoking in terms of where our industry is going and how it will need to adapt into the future.

Shameless self-promotion

Within my ROI series on LinkedIn, I've taken a look at the Software Development maturity model. It’s a method of building towards a well-oiled IT.

My mini-series on upgrading my website to .Net Core has taken a bit of a back seat at the moment. It was easy enough to implement an Angular Application over a MVC Core WebApi. I just need the time to put some Karma testing in place (even if only a place holder for further testing) and then write it up a little.

I have however distracted myself with a side-project involving Azure DNS, Azure Cloud App Worker Role and SignalR. At some point I'm likely to push the code out to github and write it up, but I doubt that will be in the near future.

On top of all of that, I have yet another project that I want to have a go at. I’ll not talk about it at this stage, but it is very likely to include a considerable number of bleeding edge technologies (it shall henceforth be known as Project Technology Keyword Bingo). More hopefully in the coming weeks.

About the author:

Mark Taylor is an experience IT Consultant passionate about helping his clients get better ROI from their Software Development.

He has over 20 years Software Development experience - over 15 of those leading teams. He has experience in a wide variety of technologies and holds certification in Microsoft Development and Scrum.

He operates through Red Folder Consultancy Ltd.