I've been looking at attending meet ups for a while now - but generally find that I'm spending so much time commuting that I'm simply struggling to get them. Plus I don't seem to be able to find any in my home of Stoke-On-Trent.
Finally though I've found DotNetNorth - an established meet up in Manchester. Attended a great presentation of DDD (Design-DrivenDevelopment) - titled the God that failed last Tuesday. The talk was given by Gary McClean Hall.
In the talk Gary discussed some of the concrete interpretations of DDD and problems he'd seen. In summary for me I took away the message that DDD is like any tool - it needs to be used at the right time for the right thing.
And in general I'd agree. I'm probably more of a fan of DDD than an implementer. In practice I'm more likely to take techniques from it than us it fully.
There is no God-pattern.
My current client has asked me to pick up a third party developed website which has enabled me to flex some long unused skills.
Website is Ubuntu based and make up of three sub-projects using a combination of Node, Python and a smattering of Ruby.
It's nice to get back into the *nix platform. So much of my work for probably the last 10-15 years has been windows focused. But in my history I've worked almost exclusively on Unix - AIX for many years and SCO before that (I think I may have worked on a HP variant at one point). I even went on a SCO Admin training course in about the 1st or 2nd year of my working life (I wonder if I can find the certificate).
During the 2000's I did less and less on Unix - probably stopping circa 2005 (due to role changes). Since then I can't remember really doing much with *nix (must of done some simple Linux stuff - but can't remember what).
Yet seconds in, those vi commands are flooding back (~ to convert case of a character). Vi still feels natural to me - but, before you ask, I have no desire to use under windows - just seems wrong (cheating on the O/S?).
Python and Ruby are new to me - but easy enough to pick up the parts I needed for this project.
Just goes to show that experience really does matter when dealing with the oddity projects.
This week should see the continuation of my ROI series of articles on LinkedIn.
After 3 months gap, it's good to get back to it. I left the series talking about Agile. I will return looking at Scrum over the course of probably 4 articles. As with all the ROI series articles, the intended audience will be decision makers and those that sign the cheques rather than the tech community.
I hope to get into the regular habit of weekly ROI article. I may make them a little smaller than historically to allow my time to produce them - but we'll see how I get on.
Following on from the last few weeks, I've still got some work to do on my Azure Functions experimentation. I've still got work to do on the visualisation of the web crawl activities, a bit of tidy up and then an article to wrap it up. Maybe a couple of weeks off dependant on priorities.
In the meanwhile, I've released two short articles (more tips) on working with Azure Functions. I've found the documentation for Azure Functions fairly sparse, so wanted to get my thoughts out earlier than the main article. The articles are: