If you're working on a complex software project, having good architecture diagrams really helps. And in this guide Alex explains what the C4 model is & how it works. You'll go through each level - context, containers, components, & code - in detail.https://lnkd.in/ef34fiwF

260

5 Comments

Do what most developers don't:• Learn TDD• Exercise daily• Master soft skills• Buy a standing desk• Have an online presence• Study something new every day• Help as many developers as you can• Be obsessed with customer happinessIt is not hard to stand out in a world that normalized mediocrity.

795

148 Comments

🔥 reminder - anyone that says “never use an ORM” is not to be trusted with serious software design.Abstractions should be used as appropriate and intended for efficiency and increased correctness.#meatbasedengineer

100

109 Comments

✨ First open source PR in years. First blog post ever. First time adding Cassandra support to Testcontainers-dotnet?Yep, Gavin de Kock just did all three. And it was smooth sailing. 🚢 From spotting a missing module to contributing it with ease, Gavin shares how friendly the Testcontainers OSS community is—and how simple it is to spin up Apache Cassandra for .NET integration testing using Docker.A fun read and a great reminder that open source is open for everyone. 🙌 Check out the post and try it yourself: http://spklr.io/6048APQn#Docker #Testcontainers #OpenSource #DotNet #ApacheCassandra #IntegrationTesting #DeveloperExperience

40

2 Comments

I can’t stress this enough:To become a Senior engineer you don’t need to complicate things. What you need is to focus your efforts on being pragmatic, business-oriented, and solution-oriented.I’ve seen too many talented mid-level devs shooting themselves in the foot by:👉🏻Adding unnecessary abstraction layers “for future flexibility” 🤦‍♂️👉🏻Implementing design patterns that solve problems that don’t exist👉🏻Building “elegant” solutions that take 3x longer to ship.Meanwhile, senior devs are out there asking the right questions:👉🏻”Whats the simplest solution that works?”👉🏻”What are we actually optimizing for?”👉🏻”Will this help the business or just my ego?”Your promotion isn’t blocked by lack of complexity, actually it’s blocked by too much of it.Save your creative energy for problems that actually need complex solutions.

680

46 Comments

TDD has an unfortunate reputation as being a religion or a superstition. Advocates of TDD are seen as irrational zealots.TDD's dubious reputation is partly because, to be frank, the testing practices of most engineering organizations are a complete joke.TDD is about 1) deciding the specifications for what you want to build, 2) encoding those specifications in automated tests, and finally 3) implementing the behavior to fulfill those explanations.Most orgs I've seen are unprepared to adopt TDD because they don't even practice step 1, deciding, to an appropriate level of detail, the specifications for what they want to build.(And by the way, spikes and experimentation aren't incompatible with determining specifications up front. Spikes etc. are HOW you determine your specifications.)Most people who dislike TDD don't actually dislike TDD itself, they dislike the crappy imposter that's been presented to them as TDD. In my experience, once people experience the smart version of TDD, they can't imagine how they could ever code any other way.

303

155 Comments

𝗨𝗻𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁𝘀 𝘃𝘀 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁𝘀Both are important. But how you use them depends on your project.Unit tests check small pieces of code in isolation. They’re fast and easy to write.Integration tests check how components work together. Slower, but critical. Especially when using real services.My rule of thumb:- Unit test your domain logic- Integration test your use casesThe best setup I’ve used? Integration tests with Testcontainers.If you can run your services in Docker, you can spin up test environments fast — even in CI.Want to set up integration testing from scratch?Start here: https://lnkd.in/epxutaTkWhat’s your testing setup?

599

37 Comments

Blogged: Packaging self-contained and native AOT .NET tools for NuGet - Exploring the .NET 10 preview - Part 7https://lnkd.in/eebDwVqEIn this post we look at the new support for platform-specific .NET tools, so that you can pack your tools as self-contained or Native AOT packages#dotnet

46

1 Comment

If you don't use TDD, are you even a real developer? 🤔I'm joking, of course. TDD is absolutely rubbish, don't ever use it 🤮Both of the above camps are quite vocal on LinkedIn. And both are wrong, at least on two accounts.First, there is no absolutely right way to write software, no matter what these experts may say. Great software was developed with TDD practices and great software was developed without it.Second, forcing your dogmatic views down somebody's throat is not going to get you their sympathy. Insisting that your way is the only way makes you sound fanatic and will only turn people away.Based on my experience, I can only say this: I've tried TDD. While I didn't enjoy it enough to make it my default way of working, it changed the way I approach code. I now write code with tests in mind, even when I don't write the tests first. So my advice to you is this: consider giving it a try. If you don't, it's totally understandable. The tech world is far too wide to cover everything: hardware, programming languages, libraries, security, privacy, performance, architectures, design patterns and methodologies are only a few of the broad concepts to explore. It's very likely that you will never touch on everything. So, at the end of the day, it's down to priority. If you're curious enough, TDD is worth a shot. Fiodar Sazanavets 🇺🇦 writes a lot about this topic and I really enjoy reading his thoughts, so my final recommendation to you is that you follow him 🙂#TestDrivenDevelopment #TDD #SoftwareDevelopment #BestPractices #Testing

79

42 Comments

Fun call with a vendor, yesterday. Vendor: "It does TDD, just like your developers would!"Me: "Can you explain how it does that, exactly?"Vendor: "It generates tests for all the code it writes."Me: "That's not TDD, nor why it's of value."Them: <Some irrelevant mumbling>Me: I would be careful who you use that term with.This isn't commentary on the actual practice of TDD* (I'm 95% sure your developers aren't doing it, even if they claim they are), but complete ignorance of the topic by sales engineersNow, this followed a poor explanation of why they can only integrate with ADO and GitHub, but not bitbucket. My "but they are all git", comment was lost on them. These are the people companies are throwing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars away on. For those of you that aren't software engineers who are reading this, the TLDR is - stop giving open checkbooks to these companies that are promising magic and don't understand some pretty fundamental aspects of software development or system design.This is in contrast to another vendor offering the same type of capability who plainly stated: "it's like having a bunch of junior engineers." While the honesty is refreshing, I don't want an army of junior engineers, thanks.It also goes to my continual point of Gen AI tools in their current state - the consumer of the tools has to be qualified to judge their output and they are not for everyone at every skill level. When even the authors of the tools aren't even qualified in a domain they are purportedly familiar with, that's problematic, if I'm being generous. Still not there yet, Skynet. Still not there.*  [I'm more a proponent of test *supported* development (creating tests proximal to the code, but not necessarily before), but that also comes with decades of experience. If it's something that's novel or requires a bit of thought, then TDD will kick in for me.]#tdd #genai #softwareengineering #tldr #ai

133

30 Comments

Even though I am understandably heavily biased towards using RestAssured .Net for my C# API testing needs, a lot of companies use RestSharp for that purpose.That's why I keep maintaining the open source RestSharp workshop I created a few years ago (before I even started working on RestAssured .Net), and I just published another update:* I updated examples and exercises around retrieving and verifying response header values* The workshop materials now also run on .NET 9* All dependencies are bumped to their latest versionsYou can find a link to the workshop materials (code examples, exercises and answers and a full slide deck) via the link in the comments.

23

1 Comment