Category: Software Engineering
The Mechanical Turk (The Love Test for Entrepreneurs)
For the last couple of years, I have spent a significant amount of time talking to innovators both independent (entrepreneurs) and inside of organizations (intrapreneurs?). The conversations generally focus on a variation of these familiar themes: Uber for … Ebay for … Facebook for … Computer vision to … Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning to…
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Whatever Bill Has…The Results
Last week we launched the “Whatever Bill Has” app, which I built as a demonstration of Azure Functions. This app is basically Build-A-Bear, but with Bill Udell. Users had eight possible options: four shirts and two pants. Bill was gracious enough to provide us with some great shirt and pants options. He also chose a…
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Whatever Bill Has
Those of us who are engineers know we aren’t looked up to for our fashion sense. We tend to be t-shirt and jeans people, or sometimes t-shirt and sweatpants people. Now this isn’t a sign of anything wrong, but I often feel engineers are just focusing a little too much on the function. I think…
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Agile Is Not A Silver Bullet, Part 2
In my first post, I wrote about the responsibilities, goals, and struggles that development teams are facing today. In this post, I am covering our experiences and how we must take a bigger picture look at how we’re working in a world of constantly changing requirements. Our Experience So, I seemed to paint a lot…
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Don’t Design the Database First
Build bottom-up right? Start with the database schema, then models, then the UI, then ship it, right? Well, I think the majority of new projects would benefit from not focusing on the database until much later. Why not focus on the database from the start? Managing database changes in the early phases of a project…
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A Website Without Servers – Using Azure Functions: Part 7, Angular Service
If you haven’t been following along in this series, we are building an “Engineer Fashion App” using Azure Functions. I recommend looking back at Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 to see what we’ve done so far. Let’s assume we have an Azure Function that returns some JSON for our wardrobe and that…
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Agile Is Not A Silver Bullet, Part 1
Hopefully this headline got your attention. I considered trying to come up with a hashtag like #NoTDD or #NoEstimates that seem to be popular these days. I opted for a (hopefully) catchy title instead. The purpose of this post is not to bash agile methods or to somehow suggest that we should not be following…
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What We Mean When We Say “Software Engineer”
It’s very easy to throw terms around in our (or any) industry. In our hurried culture, we latch onto words or phrases that may not fully encapsulate their original intent. I’m afraid that is what has happened to the label of “software engineer”. And it has not been without consequences. I believe the real, working…
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A Website Without Servers – Using Azure Functions: Part 6, Some Basic Plumbing
If you haven’t been following along in this series, we are building an “Engineer Fashion App” using Azure Functions. I recommend looking back at Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 to see what we’ve done so far. At this point, we have an Angular site and we have a backend that can communicate with…
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A Website Without Servers – Using Azure Functions: Part 5, Pulling Wardrobe Data
Previously on Using Azure Functions, we set up a very simple Angular website. This week, we are going to set up an Azure Function that pulls some wardrobe data from an Azure Cosmos database. Why not just build the wardrobe into the app? Well I’m hoping to update the wardrobe by season, so having to…
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