Lazy Loading

And finally...

2018-04-10T13:23:00.000-05:00

I've said to myself multiple times - "this is my last Microsoft exam". But learning new things could be so boring, and I can't resist - throw in some challenge and competition.
Yet another exam and another certification - at least badges became a bit more attractive.


Exam 535: Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions		MCSA: Cloud Platform - Certified 2018

Couple of evil ways to improve your customer skills

2018-02-23T13:03:00.000-05:00

1. If it is difficult to refrain from shouting back at angered customer and escalating the conflict to the seismic proportions - think otherwise. Stay calm, defuse opponent’s anger. After all - you always can work on a more elaborate scheme to get back at the bastard later - revenge is a dish better served cold.
2. Try to treat any customer’s representative as a person who can make a decision to fire you on the spot. Even if it is just some seemingly obscure and downtrodden intern.

Just because he is awesome

2018-02-10T21:14:00.000-05:00

Azure exam 70-532

2018-01-06T13:47:00.000-05:00

OK, it was an interesting roller-coaster. It was a while since I took any Microsoft exams but I felt that I do not have enough exposure to the Azure architecture on a daily basis, so I decided that taking an exam might be the second best thing to the real field experience: the learning forced on you by the circumstances.
This was quite a brutal exam, probably the worst I ever had with the Microsoft, and here are the feelings:
The very good:
- It feels that while studying I did try every single button on the Azure Portal and tried to build, run, scale, monitor and program against almost all component, except selected third-party marketplace offerings (I have no immediate plans for them), AD sync (I did not have local AD to play with) and some preview features, like Cognitive Services or AI (I have special plans for those :) ;
The Good:
- The exam has touched all aspects of the current Azure platform;
- With the history of the latest updates (March, October and December) it kind of shows the Microsoft's feelings towards one or another technology;
The Ugly:
- It was overly detailed, reminding (unpleasantly) the late 90-s VB exams, which tested memorizing of exact sequence of method parameters (kind of excusable for pre-Intellisense and pre-Google era);
The Bad:
- Some exam techniques seem questionable, like asking to memorize whole six screens of the test case before answering some questions from which you cannot return back and consult the requirements. What do you test? The memory?
- It contained bugs and glitches, which can't be new, because the affected questions test some old Azure offering. Does it mean that nobody really tests the testing question thoroughly?

But nevertheless...

Re: Organized

2018-01-01T14:52:00.000-05:00

Meet the Lazy-and-Tedious.
I hope that I am just a relatively light case of OCD. I am far from having my socks neatly sorted in 14 categories by style, season and color (but I still did consider a possible number of the categories). I do not have a daily planner but I envy people who ~~are hopeless enough to~~ keep one updated and followed.
I enjoy things organized, predicted and anticipated - in all aspects of my life and work. My family is working hard to prove that life always smashes plans in every turn but from time to time I manage to have my humble moments of glory when things catch up with the schedule.
Since I was a kid, I dreamed of traveling a lot, and "seeing things" and a bit of "meeting people" seemed to be the reasons. But being grown up I realized that there is more to that - man, wouldn’t it be the best field for giving up to planning and scheduling at scale?! Being thoroughly lazy I bet that 3 hours of a commuter research done in a comfortable chair are worth to be spent if it saves an hour of running back and forth searching for a track from which the train to Florence departs. I can easily spend another 3 hours on web surfing to optimize number of steps I should take from Rafael Gallery to the Sistine Chapel. I will do my homework to minimize phone conversations with hoteliers or travel agents to arrange comfortable yet savvy stay in Hakone.
So in traveling, my passion to align things in the neat spreadsheets is actually justifiable.

Managing secrets for containerized Windows apps

2017-11-25T17:33:00.000-05:00

I am just starting on the containers journey - with all the nice hurdles which could be added by PCI and data privacy, aggravated by a general immaturity of the Windows containers at the moment.
One of the important components of properly containerized application - the Continuous Delivery pipeline, - must comply with regulations as well, hence protecting the secrets, - encryption keys, connections, credentials, signatures, - as the code is being pushed along from development to production.

With this, some insights are offered by a nice "Managing Secrets in .NET CORE 2.0 Apps" article. It is a nice touch that .NET Core comes with out-of-the-box secret management features. And the tips from the article had at least some risky options removed from consideration. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, as the code arrives to the final destination on the Windows container, the secrets are not kept in the memory, unlike for the Linux-based containers. Azure does provide a lot of ways to relief some of this pain, but what should one with the containers-on-the-premise do? That's the next puzzle to resolve...

Adopting Agile one small bite at a time

2017-07-19T08:54:00.000-05:00

Powerpoint architecture: A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Constructive Criticism

2017-04-01T20:05:00.000-05:00

How bullet-list life style articles are not good for you

2017-01-01T13:57:00.000-05:00

I bet you have seen tons of articles on Internet, titled with a number and capital letters, which contain an ultimate lists of things to unconditionally avoid or adhere to. All these "6 Worst Mistakes On The Road", "7 Best Interview Questions", "8 Ways To Please Your Man" and so on. The commonality between them is it tries to simplify truly difficult problems and trivialize the efforts one needs to put to truly overcome a difficulty or achieve something.

The main problem is that these peremptory advises have the same value as an average patient body temperature as a hospital KPI. Road trip can mean quite different things for rugged biker and baby-boomer family, different companies can have different hiring goals and I can't even comment on a variety of extending long-reaching courtesies.

The latest I've seen is "5 Questions Great Job Candidates Ask" - and none of these make any sense.

What do you expect me to accomplish in the first 60 to 90 days?
A good developer should be expected to become fully productive in 30 days, no less. Only a code monkey can become productive within the first minutes after firing up his/her IDE. Variety of answers is endless as well as their interpretations: at the very best the hiring company will get it right - and you both know that you will be doing exactly what you've done before, just for different money. Good for a great tile installer, not so good for a great software engineer. And in the worst case - you are not on the same page and the hiring guy can simply have no clue or give deceiving answer.

What are the common attributes of your top performers?
I'd be tempted to answer "They come to work dressed", but keep it to myself at least until I save enough money to afford working only for leisure.

What are a few things that really drive results for the company?
If it is "being liked by the manager who gives the performance review", would you expect an honest answer? 99% of time the answer will consist from an unverifiable politically correct corporate motto jargon.

What do employees do in their spare time?
This is easily the top of the line. I worked in bad, good and great companies in different roles. They had one thing in common - I had a very vague idea what people did after leaving their jobs, aside a few closer friends who didn't mind to share. Even if they know - what good the generalization could be? If they street-race their Aston Martins, perform in the marching bands or just sleep the whole time - is this good or bad? Should one reject a Google offer if he is not into massages, bean bag chairs or doorless offices?

How do you plan to deal with...?
... what? Market crash? Tsunami? Alien invasion? I would be afraid of somebody who can give a precise answer.

All that does not mean that the candidate should refrain from the questions. But picking them up from the "Five ways of not sucking but being great instead" is futile. Base it on your experience, watch for the signs, be perceptive - and trust your gut. If you are looking just for any job - any answer will do. If you are in search for the job of your life - you want it to be perfect.

And compare the article above with the ones by Jessica Hagy - she may have the same bulleted points but pictures will make you think :)

How to figure out if your job really sucks

2016-11-24T12:11:00.000-05:00

An obsessive idea to change the job is more often caused by an emotional urge than the real need. Try to fix the situation first. Didn't work? Consider all aspects carefully before jumping to the action. Not just this simple exercise will enable you to make an informative decision but should you conclude that benefits of keeping the job outweigh benefits of leaving, it will help you to stay positive and be happy and productive (or embrace your new position with open arms otherwise).

A lot of people thorough analyze their investments but take change-the-job decision overly lightly, while the latter affects your present and future life at least on the same scale (if not bigger). So be methodical and write down pro's and con's for your job. And: money is always among the important considerations but not the most important one.

For example:

- What is bad about you work now:
1. I do the same stuff ever and ever again, I am bored.
2. I want to work with exciting new people.
3. I am underpaid.

- What is good:

1. I know exactly what I am doing, I understand the clockworks very well, people come to me with their questions and I am capable of providing a valuable help.

2. I am accustomed to the team, I understand all the do's and dont's when dealing with my colleagues.
3. My workday is not crammed as I can navigate between my tasks efficiently.

And now you can analyze your claims and weight them out. Can you really sacrifice the comfort of the "Good 1" and is the "Bad 1" really that bad? Most likely you won't get them both satisfied at once - they are balanced.
The money seems to be the trickiest question of all, but ask yourself - do you really familiar with the current market? Could it be that while you stayed at your job for last 2-5-10 years your expertise became less relevant? A lot of companies who put efforts in stuff retention, inadvertently create an over-confidence in their employees, praising their achievements and over-boosting their confidence. It is a good practice (and a "must have" feature of the good workplace) but aside of quite rare super-achievers a lot of well-performing employees are just normal regular Joes who happens to apply their very specific experience to the very specific job - and it is not the fact that it will be sufficient for the new workplace.

WebAPI: default formatting, better dates and KnockoutJS friendliness

2016-01-06T12:21:00.000-05:00

The notorious problem with JavaScript dates reminds me the technical relationship between space shuttle and a horse: once upon a time IT was ruled by Unix people who liked incomprehensible dates (probably they were already programming towards the world domination - ICBM navigation, global stock trading and private jet scheduling).
Scott Hanselman dedicated a post to this problem back in March 2012 and sworn that natural JSON dates will be no more. David Warp seconded. The change seemed to make it in the release available as of August 2012 - awesome, but I wanted to keep playing with the nice formatters mentioned in the said posts. Unfortunately I couldn't even compile them and guessed that by the time I reached for the installer the code behind the package has progressed significantly. Figuring out which assemblies to NuGet into solution or which references to add is a bigger pain (and less fun) than building more code - after all, who would enjoy copying somebody's code instead of doing own research?
The idea was to change the default serialization behavior for null properties to prevent my KnockoutJS from failing. Secondly I wanted to try and change default formatting for HTTP GET implementation, such as when API is called from the browser (not that it is really important with the content negotiation). And third - change the date formats to something more predictable and culture neutral.
The first compilation kind of worked (and it seemed to work faster in the browser):

Note the Unit property in the second address: in XML property is serialized with "nil" attribute, while the JSON implementation is actually missing it altogether - which would blow up the KnockoutJS bindings.

Code readability: avoid negative statements

2015-12-19T14:22:00.000-05:00

Negative statements are more difficult to read and not always the straightforward approach will result in the better code from the first attempt. Let's say the procedure should react on certain condition and ignore all overs. Compare these two snippets:

if (!isGreen)
{
   StopMachine();
   TurnOnAlarm();
   RunForYourLife();
}

vs.

if (isGreen) return;
StopMachine();
TurnOnAlarm();
RunForYourLife();

The second one is more readable but more verbose (so as human language). Also the second one is obviously a separate method while the first one could be an inline code. In this case refactoring to the better readability resulted in more cohesive code.
If you're a tough C# programmer and reading both snippets is no brainer for you - consider this SQL nonsense:

DELETE FROM Cross_Reference_Between_Left_And_Right WHERE xId IN
(SELECT xId FROM Left_Table WHERE xNamePrefix NOT IN ('pro','contra'))

vs.

DELETE FROM Cross_Reference_Between_Left_And_Right WHERE xId NOT IN
(SELECT xId FROM Left_Table WHERE xNamePrefix IN ('pro','contra'))

For me personally, the first one is an eyesore.

Give it a name: taming a domain vocabulary

2015-07-15T19:47:00.000-05:00

While comprehending a business problem it is a good idea for a scrupulous technologist to learn the language of locals (a.k.a. Subject Matter Experts or Those Who Do Business). It could be a ubiquitous Esperanto of "KPI ETA TBD ASAP" or more wordy (but not more descriptive) "partial amendment of the retroactive memo transfers". Surprisingly, a mutual exercise of assigning a short one-words names to operations or processes can shorten a requirement gathering and even make it fun: the business expert will be forced to look at daily activities from a new angle. Side effect: presentations (and meetings!) will shorten.
And the examples of what actually did work:
process of capture and input of the initial client data = client onboarding
partial amendment of the retroactive memo transfers = retro-partials

A belated and very theoretical retrospective on raising a child

2015-04-14T08:25:00.000-05:00

1. Whatever you feel while raising your child (which at the moment may seem like suffering) you will sorely miss later. Cherish every single moment.
2. You will always be able to catch that opportunity, movie or even that party - but you will never get back the day when your daughter was 4 years, 2 months and 12 days old.
3. There is never ever enough of video and photo memories of your parenting days. Not even close. So keep taking pictures and shooting videos.
4. Until they are old enough they mean no evil. That priceless vase could as well got shattered on its own. Be patient. You may be still regretting things you've done and said a decades later.

And while you in the trenches:
1. Baby sleeps - you sleep. If and only. So grab every opportunity.
2. You actually can work from home with kids. But only if they are under 1 month or are between 10 and 12 years old. First group is capable of enjoying lengthy sleeps, second - rejects your attention already while still being incapable yet to render a truly major trouble on themselves.

Inspired by LifeHacker's "# 10 Things I Wish I Had Known Before Becoming a Parent"

New day, new company

2014-10-24T08:10:00.000-05:00

Companies present customers with their best foot forward - just look at the iPhone packaging. First impression is everything, as any marketing intern will tell you. For new hires their first day at their new workplace is the most memorable and most defining. Statistically, the decision to stay or leave more often, than not, is made during a short initial period with the new company (sometimes literally in the first day).
Scrupulous, well-designed and meticulously executed hiring process helps to find the best candidates but this approach costs more - in resources and time. Smarter companies invest in the better hiring process but smartest ones extend investment to the new guy's first day also.

On my best first day
1. I came with signed payroll and benefits forms which were couriered personalized to my house a week in advance. The package came in a binder with corporate information, which included various curious and useful information including acronyms vocabulary!
2. My computer was immediately ready, equipped with all connections and passwords I needed.
3. I was invited to a team lunch (and I joined a hockey pool).
4. I've drawn my first design on a whiteboard.

On my worst first day
1. I did not have a computer on my first day (nor did I get it for the entire first week).
2. I've spent an hour writing down my name and address on at least fifteen various forms.
3. I was invited to a two-hour mid-project meeting where I felt very dumb and uncomfortable.
4. I sat through an hour-long movie about generic corporate ethics (apparently showing up for work drunk and sexually harassing somebody is inappropriate, who knew?).

Creating dynamic LINQ queries

2014-03-01T14:11:00.000-05:00

Dynamic LINQ library:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/01/07/dynamic-linq-part-1-using-the-linq-dynamic-query-library.aspx
More object-oriented approach - with all goodies of the modern .NET in one mix: generics, extension methods and LINQ:
http://talentgrouplabs.com/blog/archive/2007/11/26/dynamic-linq-queries--dynamic-where-clause-part-2.aspx
Same stuff with a little different samples from Joseph Albahari:
http://www.albahari.com/nutshell/predicatebuilder.aspx

Job Search Corrida

2014-01-28T14:19:00.000-05:00

Companies obviously put an effort to get good programmers on board. Nobody in the right mind admit in the advertisement that they're looking for any "average Joe". The incumbent must be motivated, devoted, self-starting individual with skills and experience in a range between a simple "strong and sound" to a "kick-ass expert". Next step would be a name tag requirement, and we know such cases (their employer(s) got lucky :).
There is no job posts on Workoplis promising dull non-creative daily routines. Raise your hand, who faces this reality daily? Honestly!
Have you ever seen "We have no interest in the employees professional growth" on Monster? But in the real life, how many managers get cagey when it comes to the training budgets?
Why would you trick a person, promising one thing and giving another? Maintenance, new development, design and quality assurance tasks are different by their nature and require not just specific skill, but different mindsets.
Big companies may just don't know any better but it comes as a surprise that smaller companies are notoriously worse! Those guys just escaped the soullessness and moved on because it sucked there! As entrepreneurs they are obviously smart, but for some reason it seems that they not willing to give the same credit to candidates.
So why not put money where the mouth is - and not just the hard cash but all aspects of the employment, including intangible ones - the real duties, allowed level of creativity, possibilities of training and growth and dozens other things.
Wanna know where the money are? According to the 2006 CIO Magazine study IT stuff turnover rate was 14.5 percent. For an average company of 40 employees this means that 6 people live every year. Let's be very optimistic and assume that it will take 15 days to replace the guy with 50K salary. The calculation voodoo shows that turnover will cost the company 31K. That could be expensive. This could pay for a ten week-long professional training - enough to make all potential defectors change their minds plus improving morale for four (yet) loyal employees. Should it be enough m even without taking into the consideration the improved productivity and output from the employees?
If your new hire is a smart guy - he will figure out the catch quick enough and you will loose him. If he never will - then congratulations, you've got exactly what you were looking for!

Why innovators should not watch "Dragon's Den"

2013-08-01T08:57:00.000-05:00

1. It is generally depressing - at the very best ~~greedy~~ rich and publicity-savvy will take advantage of ~~ignorant~~ naive and desperate.
2. Somebody else's bright (or not so bright) idea will affect your creative process, and maybe not in a good way.

P.S. Why innovators should watch "Dragon's Den":
1. If you weren't aware before - shark-infested waters are out there. Both judge- and contender-type people do exist in the real life - and you will encounter them, more likely than not.
2. Somebody else's bright (or not so bright) idea will affect your creative process, and maybe in a good way.

Why Business Analysts should understand ACID*

2013-05-10T06:43:00.000-05:00

Good programmer should understand business domain. Really good programmer should understand business needs. Even mediocre Business Analyst must be interested in the technology at least at the same scale as being knowledgeable in business. The guy who handles you a 90-page specification saying: "Here is layout of our buttons - make them work" and disappears until Business Acceptance Testing stage - is just a very wrong person for the job.
Unless your project is a reinvention of a door bell, a lot of analysis is required after spec is done. Writing a specification of what a screen should do is a mere interpreter's job - translate language of business (either from customer's words or from general domain knowledge) to language which developers can comprehend. The real analysis should be applied to understand and predict how things will work when instead of humans (slow, inconsistent) or previous programs (outrageously old and poorly written) our new shiny application will take the load.
I struggled the most with this disconnect between BA's and developers while dealing with transactional data flows - be it database or service calls. A sequence of multiple interconnected actions requires a thorough inventory of all possible outcomes and analysis of subsequent scenarios. In 90% cases these decisions are outsourced to developers and if they don't know any better they make decisions which make sense only from the technical point of view.
The strategy of dealing with the outcome of the transactional process is a business decision, not technical. As a developer I always go for proper rollbacks or configurable re-attempts - but it could very well be what business doesn't need or even doesn't want (it may not even be possible - and you are fighting a half-day brain paralysis). This misunderstanding of business need will result either in an outright wrong logic (which is fixable) or in an over-engineering and significant waste (which will linger around for a long-long time).

So, please, please, Business People - don't roll your eyes when your techies will be asking for your preference between asynchronous callbacks and pub-sub patterns. They feel disturbance in a Force, but just having trouble expressing it in a humane way - be patient (and know your stuff).
Update: Starbucks concurs

*ACID - as from technology, not pharmacology.

Uncomfortable during the interview?

2013-04-29T21:44:00.000-05:00

Imagining your interviewer naked may be a bad idea sometimes. No, wrong - it is always bad idea. Try this instead:

You know what to do with it, you just can not do worse.

P.S. Also these would be a great questions to fire in return: Interview Questions for Potential Employers

ASP.NET + No-SQL. Part I - RavenDb

2013-04-28T19:35:00.000-05:00

RavenDb is great native LINQ no-SQL database which is under active development. It has enormous community support and loads of resources which can help you get started (I wish they had this open course at my time).
Below is the code I ended up with after some time of polishing and tweaking and which finally worked for me. For a quick-start convenience I am providing the instructions in sequential steps.

1. Download and install RavenDB Client nuget package from Hibernating Rhinos.

2. Add "RavenDb" connection string to your web.config file. It is not necessary to use this name but if you'd ever consider AppHarbor hosting with one of the RaveDb add-ons, the deployment script will automatically place correct connection string if it will find "RavenDb" key. And we love automation.

3. The core access class for the Raven API is Document Store. It is expensive to create but it is thread-safe so we can use one singleton instance of it throughout our application life cycle. To achieve that we place the following code in out Global.asax.cs file:

private const string RavenSessionKey = "OpenHouseRaven.Session";
private static DocumentStore documentStore;

public WebApiApplication()
{
BeginRequest += (sender, args) =>
HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] = documentStore.OpenSession();
EndRequest += (sender, args) =>
{
var disposable = HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] as IDisposable;
if (disposable != null) disposable.Dispose();
};
}
protected void InitializaeRavenDbStore()
{
documentStore = new DocumentStore { Url = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["ravenDb"].ConnectionString };
documentStore.Initialize();
}
public static IDocumentSession CurrentRavenSession
{
get { return (IDocumentSession)HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey]; }
}

Add call to InitializaeRavenDbStore() to the end of Application_Start method which should be already there. In this code we initialized DocumentStore class, provided infrastructure to store Raven Document Session and altered WebApiApplication constructor, attaching handlers to BeginRequest and EndRequest events to properly create and dispose the Session object for each request.

4. Next is repository class which will encapsulate all database interaction. Raven is natural with LINQ and generics, so repository can be created to handle specific type.

public class RavenRepository<T>
{
protected IDocumentSession ravenSession;

public RavenRepository(IDocumentSession session)
{
ravenSession = session;
}
public virtual T Find(string id)
{
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(id)) return default(T);
var item = ravenSession.Load<T>(id);
return item;
}
public virtual IEnumerable<T> FindAll(Func<T, bool> predicate)
{
return predicate == null
? ravenSession.Query<T>()
: ravenSession.Query<T>().Where(predicate);
}
public virtual List<T> InsertOrUpdate(List<T> list)
{
foreach (var entity in list)
{
ravenSession.Store(entity);
}
ravenSession.SaveChanges();
return list;
}
public virtual void Delete(string id)
{
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(id)) return;
T entity = Find(id);
ravenSession.Delete(entity);
ravenSession.SaveChanges();
}
}

The Raven Document Session object is being injected into the class for better testability. And we love testability.

5. And now the code which all above was preparing us for - the usage:

var repo = new RavenRepository<Person>(WebApiApplication.CurrentRavenSession, null);
var existing = repo.FindAll(p => p.Name == "Smith").FirstOrDefault();

Pretty simple construction with few small tricks - I hope it will save you some start time.

The story of my life

2013-04-04T09:11:00.001-05:00

New site address

2013-03-26T15:38:00.003-05:00

New domain - www.laboremus.ca

Bookmark it - quite possible the blog can be moved from the Blogger platform.

Moving...

2013-03-15T12:05:00.000-05:00

Considering the most recent Google developments I think it is for the best to move out of the Google-powered platform. It is truthfully disappointing to see the corporation with proclaimed motto "Do not be evil" turning more "Resistance is futile" side.
Weird it may sound but out of big three - Apple, Google and Microsoft, the latter seems to be most adequate in terms of user-respect conduct and a friendly way to do business (maybe had been beaten enough throughout all these years). It was a disappointment to encounter Google customer service (which is kind of half-expected) and even business account management (totally surprising). It fits perfectly the "screw-you-if-your-revenue-is-less-that-10-digits"-type of snooty service provider but not the "Don't be Evil" VP-of-Ethics-powered.
Concerning the quality of the products I have my own opinion, all the same - far not to the Google advantage...

Why I like being in this trade

2013-03-13T08:56:00.002-05:00

It's worth it just for the joy of appreciating the humour and craft of the content of the following page (including the URL):

http://warmcrocconf.net/itsover/thankyou.aspx

NB: I just stumbled upon it - I have never heard about it before, I don't understand (yet) what is it about - but it made me very curious. Your experience may vary.