0 comments Today I released a new Pluralsight course with my mate Scott Allen. It is my 15th play by play course and I am enormously proud of it and I absolutely think you should go watch it to learn about ASP.NET core, Azure resource templates, containers and docker services. It is the new way to release software for the web. However, that isn’t the main reason I am writing this post.
0 comments For the past two years I have been involved in a lot of aspects of HoloLens development. I have done large presentations at international conferences, user groups talks, taught 1-2 day workshops around the world, written numerous articles and even created the first Pluralsight course on the topic. I have spoken to thousands of developers through various mediums and been part of two startups in this field. Safe to say: I love this space.
Throughout all of these interactions and experiences, the main question I got was “What is HoloLens?” along with “What is Mixed Reality?” It was a completely legit questions, considering how ground-breaking and how new the device and technology is/was. However, the real confusion has been what is the difference between augmented, virtual and mixed reality. What is each used for, how do they apply to my industry, which is the best fit for my project? And these questions came from developers, designers and business people alike. There is a real confusion about the differences. In fact, most people aren’t aware that there is anything beyond virtual reality.
To help the general education and explain my understanding and point of view on the whole space of digital realities, I have created a new Pluralsight course doing just that. It isn’t an in depth course at how to develop a particular feature or skill, but rather it is a big picture understanding of augmented, virtual and mixed reality as it relates to developers, designers, project owners and businesses. It is a short and concise introduction to a very complex space that is moving at an accelerated pace.
You can watch the trailer for free now, and learn all about Digital Realities – The Big Picture.
0 comments It’s a new year and for some reason this spurs a lot of people to create new goals and new “resolutions”. I have always believed that if you aren’t ready to make the change yourself, imposing a goal isn’t going to work. And you shouldn’t have to wait for a date to make change in yourself. When you are ready, then just go for it. Nonetheless, I thought I’d give some pointers on how to deal with the constantly changing world of technology. First published on gooroo.io.
It is one of those questions you constantly struggle with throughout any technical career: Should I learn this latest and greatest technology that is out? Do I need to learn it, do I want to learn it, do I get left behind if I don’t? The truth is that you can’t learn everything so how do you know what to focus on?
The sections below are not mutually exclusive, nor do you have to fulfill all of them. If you can say “yes” to one of them, then you are probably okay to invest time in the technology in question.
0 comments The adoption rate of HTTPS for websites is increasing exponentially and part of the reason is how easy it is to set up. Gone are the days of expert knowledge of root certificates, server versions, IIS mastery and other black magic. Today there are services that let you set it all up in as little as 4 minutes and 38 seconds (I timed it). This article outlines the basic steps I used and was first published on gooroo.io.
Most people are familiar with HTTPS and the concept of secure websites. Securing websites become more and more common, which is a really good thing. Not only do we know that the data sent and received from the website is secure, but we also get a sense of knowing we will be alright. We expect that we get confidentiality, authenticity and integrity from modern websites. After all, we see sites every day with this:
0 comments I have been building software projects for almost 20 years. Initially I was writing specs for the systems to be build and then testing that “I got what I ordered”. I then moved on to building my own websites (in PHP!), before tackling very large systems both in infrastructure and servicing 1000s of requests per second. One of the main focuses in all of these projects, once you got beyond the early prototypes, were reuse. Reuse of code, reuse of modules, reuse of services.
The premise was that by reusing parts of your project in multiple places you would eliminate bugs, reduce maintenance, improve efficiency and reduce overall development time. While all this in theory is true, the real world is always a different beast. In my experience though, the requirements were often slightly different, the features needed weren’t exactly the same, the input data varied or something else just didn’t align. It was never as simple as write once, reuse to infinity. A lot of the time we either ended up with bloated modules that catered to everything or we came up with a too complex architecture, only for the sake of reuse.
Reuse is still a challenge, but if you can get the right balance between common and unique code, it can really be worth it. When my good mate Duncan suggested we do a course on how to share code between Angular and Ionic, I was on board! In case you aren’t familiar with Ionic, it is a framework to create native mobile applications with JavaScript, HTML and CSS, in an architecture pattern familiar to Angular developers.
And here it finally is. We recorded the course back in August while at NDC Sydney, and it is full of great tips, architecture hints and guidance on getting your web code onto your native apps. We build a complete app both for web and mobile, and explain along the way what you should and shouldn’t share between the two platforms, how to share code using an npm package, how to deploy it and much more.
Go watch the trailer right now, and enjoy the full course at your leisure.
0 comments Yep, I know. The courses on Pluralsight are coming fast and often at the moment. However, this one is on a topic I wasn’t even aware of, until Steve introduced it in this course. Did you know that the Swift programming language known for being the new iOS language for iPhone and iPad, is used server side? Yes, the language is growing up, and with the help of Apple open sourcing it and IBM contributing it is now a fully fledged option for your backend systems.
Swift in itself is a very expressive and fully featured language that has a large following of developers. While there is a lot of focus and attention on the consumer side of the language, the tools and services for the server side have steadily evolved. You can get complete docker images, pre-built middleware, templates and much more. It really is ready for prime time production usage.
In this course Steve teaches me all about the various options, as well as gives a brief introduction to the Swift language itself. It is a really nice introduction to a piece of technology with great potential that few are aware of.
Check out the free trailer and start learning about Swift on the server today.
0 comments In a traditional software development education process you’ll learn about PC architecture, algorithm design, language constructs, mathematics and more programming specific skills. What you don’t learn, is how to ask great questions and creating a resource for future developers. Being able to articulate and explain a problem in its simplest form is a crucial skill in not only getting a resolution to your problem, but also assisting the current community to be even better.
I will be the first to admit that I am not a “forum guy”. I don’t trawl user forums and developer community sites to see where my expertise can be used to solve someones query. I choose to spend my time in other places, such as online courses, user groups, presentations, webinars and many other things. However, like almost any other developer I use the knowledge of Stack Overflow all the time. I am very appreciative of that resource and the system it provides to filter out the best (and worst) questions and answers. And when it comes to Stack Overflow royalty it doesn’t get much higher than Jon skeet. Jon has the highest ranked profile on the site BY A MILE! So it made complete sense to me to team up with Jon to create a course with Pluralsight on how to ask questions in a developer world.
This is an unusual course that focuses on a very technical issue in a very non-technical context. I get to pick Jon’s brain on how to create a great question, right from the worst incarnation of one. We go through the process of doing as much as possible to find the best way to ask a question, including how to word it, how to do your own diagnostics and different ways to ask the same question depending on context. Jon’s enthusiasm and passion for this topic comes through as a flood of positive energy.
This course is a must watch for all software developers. If we could all aim to be at Jon’s level when it comes to creating and answering great questions for the greater good of the community, we would all win.
Check out the Play by Play: Problem Solving in a Developer World today.
0 comments Way back in June I had the privilege of sitting down with Duncan Hunter in Oslo and talk about ngrx for Angular. At the time I had very little knowledge of the topic, but Duncan assured me it was the latest little black dress for Angular. While at NDC Oslo we recorded a Play by Play course for Pluralsight on just this topic.
In short, ngrx is state management for you Angular application, something that is very difficult to handle on the web, which is by definition stateless. However, ngrx is merely a library for Angular so you aren’t learning a whole new framework or setting up projects you aren’t familiar with. The ngrx library gives you a managed store, which is handled by using reducers and effects. The following diagram gives you an idea of the new flow you get with ngrx.
We are immensely proud of this course and in the first week it has gone to number 22 of all courses on Pluralsight in terms of viewers, so we must have done something right! If you want to learn more about ngrx, please do watch this course. It is currently the only one on the topic in the Pluralsight library.
0 comments Knowing what you are good at, and knowing what you can make a living out of, are not always the same thing. In my opinion though, if you don’t do something you love, eventually you become bored or even worse, numb. Most people will have specific interests that excites them and keeps them awake way past their bedtime. These passions and interests are what we should nurture and grow. This article first published on gooroo.io
Finding your true calling in life is not always easy to do, and often gets overshadowed by having to get an education, find a job and then get on with paying bills and living your life. A lot of people will get a degree, certificate, diploma or other evidence of having completed some form of education and hopefully it will be in a field they are interested in. However, a few years on and I very often hear that people are either bored in their current job, realized they aren’t as interested in what they studied as they thought they’d be, or just doing something completely different.
Often, we don’t know exactly what we will be doing for the rest of our working life. I know, I certainly didn’t. I genuinely believe finding your niche and nurturing it will be a possible career path, and below I give 7 tips to doing just that.
0 comments Ever since I have been involved in any kind of web development and web technologies, having a secure website running over HTTPS (which is nowadays actually TLS) was a really difficult task. It required very specific knowledge about web servers, about certificate creation and installation, a very specific sequence of steps and a lot of money to renew the certificate(s) every year.
Having a web site served securely was something for the big sites, and the ones who’s services required it (such as banks). However, the last few years have seen a ton of data leaked and services breached. It has almost become an accepted reality that your online data will be sold, leaked or otherwise distributed around the net. These leaks mean that the data you share on the Internet should ideally be secure from end to end, to at least minimise some of the risk.
