TWIL: July 18, 2021

TWIL

Here is this week’s TWIL (This Week I Learned) post, with some of the things I’ve been up to in the last 7 days. You’ll find a lot of similarities with the topics I shared last week, but there is always something different.
I hope you like it.


Podcasts

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to listen to all the podcasts in my favorite list every week. So, this week, I’ll introduce you to one of my favorite podcast shows, one that wasn’t featured in last week’s post.

Hanselminutes

Weekly talk show about technology, hosted by Scott Hanselman. Scott works for the Web Platform Team at Microsoft and, besides being a great programmer, he is an awesome speaker and a really nice guy.
Really worth your time.

Electronics for Everyone with AdaFruit’s Limor Fried
Really great conversation with Limor Fried about a lot of different stuff, and how feedback loops are so important.

Engineering Servant Leadership with Carbon Health’s Claire Hough
Nice conversation with Claire Hough about engineering management and servant leadership style.

.NET Rocks

Episode 1748: The Mixed Reality Toolkit with Catherine Diaz
Great conversation with Catherine Diaz, a software engineer for Microsoft who is working on the Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK for short). The toolkit is open source and is meant to offer cross-platform deployment of AR/VR applications for a multitude of different devices/headsets.


Work & Life

The Purpose Of Life Is Not Happiness: It’s Usefulness
Darius Foroux writes about how the purpose of life is not happiness, but rather usefulness and that happiness is merely byproduct of being useful.

Beyond the Binary: Solving the Hybrid Work Paradox
Interesting article by Jared Spataro, the leader of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams products, which brings a new perspective on how companies should look to hybrid work in a post pandemic context.

An Emoji For Your Thoughts
Microsoft has refreshed the catalog of 1800+ emojis used in its products and Claire Anderson takes us through that journey, while discussing the benefits of being playful in the workplace. There is even mention to the redesigned version of the paper clip emoji, which now looks like “Clippy”, the “friendly” assistant of older versions of Microsoft Office.


Cool Stuff

Power Apps: Assign values to variables
If you’re new to Power Apps and Power Automate, checkout Manuel Gomes’ website. This article explains in great detail how to assign values to variables in Power Apps, as a response to a reader’s question.

7 Awesome APIs for All Frontend Developers
Short post about 7 useful APIs you can use in your websites. From the movie database API, through NASA APIs and on to the meal database API, some are really cool.

Windows 365 Announced
Last week, Microsoft unveiled a new offering named Windows 365 – the cloud PC. It’s a really compelling value proposition, allowing you to access your Windows PC on any device, anywhere. Sure, the technology that enables this has been around for a long time but, for me, what makes it so interesting is the simplicity of how Microsoft has put it together.


Architecture Articles

The Open Closed Principle
Great description by Robert C. Martin of the Open Closed Principle, a very important principle of software engineering defined in 1988 by Bertrand Meyer. Interesting read.

Putting your events on a diet
Great article by David Boike about Event-Driven Architectures and the importance of keeping the events small.

Introduction to CQRS — In Microservices
Great introduction to the CQRS (Command and Query Responsibility Segregation) pattern and how it applies to Microservices arquitectures.

Object-level Access Control in Applications
Article about how access control at the application level is not enough and, most of the times, an object-level access control framework is important to control how users access and modify data at the object level.


Design Patterns

Following up on the design patterns of last week, here are a few more to keep you up-to-date.

Proxy Pattern

Sidecar pattern

Ambassador pattern


Happy learning!

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash