Since almost everyone is working remotely nowadays, all our meetings are conducted virtually via Zoom, Google Meet, Slack etc. And I have developed a distaste for being in meetings. Perhaps we have more meetings now compared to what we used to have. This might be because we can’t physically go over to someone’s desk and talk to them to catch up. It has to be a booked slot in the calendar. With the booked slot, we now feel obligated to fill the entire slot with something to discuss.

Hopefully not a lot of people are facing the issue of having to work and maintain an application thats written in .NET Framework. If you are having to, hopefully you’ve got plans to get it migrated and running on one of the latest .NET versions. But, in the mean time, if you are stuck with working on an application written in .NET Framework but don’t want to use Windows for your development environment, I’ve got a couple of options for you to consider.

StructureMap allows you to replace an already registered type mapping by clearing all previous registrations for the type and adding new one.

About 3 years ago, I decided to make it a requirement to read books and also make it mandatory to finish reading those books. I got interested in books even before that. I remember thinking when traveling, it will be a good idea to try to read a book. However, there were only a few books that I managed to finish reading. After reading somewhere that Dumbledore from Harry Potter was based on Merlin, I picked up the book That Hideous Strength to read. Even though Merlin was only briefly included in the 3 part book, it was one of the books that I managed to finish reading fully. However, I have been reading more often now. I keep a list of books on the GoodReads and try to check off from my reading list every chance I get. I buy most of the books from Amazon when I feel like it. And this has made it so that I have books in hand to read when I am finished with one.

I’ve had this blog migrated so many times in the past. I had it running in Jekyll and GitHub pages when I first started blogging. Then I switched to self hosting with Ghost blog engine. I switched out of Ghost in favour of Gatsby while I was doing more ReactJS development. Hosted the blog on Netlify with its free tier. I then switched back to Ghost and self hosting it on Kubernetes.

MassTransit is an open source library that is an abstraction over some of the popular messaging/bus technologies. I have used it for interacting with RabbitMQ bus and have found the experience very pleasant.

Primitive obsession is a code smell. The proposal is to replace strings, and other primitive data types with domain types. For example, user’s id in system can be represented by an integer or Guid (UUID), or string (username). However, there are benefits that come along with creating a type called UserId using that in place of primitive types.

I first came across MiniProfiler when I started a new ruby on rails project. It came built in and I found it very useful to see the time requests spend and a breakdown of it. I think it was only visible on development environment.

I had a colleague recently asked me “how do I improve and work on my technical skills?”. I am in no disillusion that I was asked because of my incredible technical knowledge. I think they were told to ask others in the team and I was included as part. But, surely the question deserved the best answer I could provide them with. When I started writing a response, I realised that others who are starting on the software development path will also have these questions. Perhaps, I should blog it so that perhaps someone else can benefit from my experience.

I am mainly a C# developer and have some experience with JavaScript. Recently, I’ve been playing around with Ruby on Rails. I was impressed by the way tests are set up for you automatically with a new project. From system, integration, to unit tests. It prompted me to think about which type of test should I write? And how much of each type of test should I write?