Category: General

Categories
General

This month be thankful for the world wide web

World Wide Web

In the United States, we celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November. Many families take time off from their busy schedule to be with their family and enjoy a nice meal. It is a time to be thankful.

As a software developer,  I’m thankful for the world wide web. I had a revelation back in 1997 when I took my first computer science course in Mountain View Community College. As part of my assignment I had to search for information and google provided the data I needed. It was during that time that I made the following remarks, “the web will have a major impact in the world.” From that point on, I wanted to learn more about the web. Who invented the web? Can I create my own web site? I was determined to learn more about the world wide web. So I took different courses in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. These courses gave me the foundation to start my career as a software developer.

I’m thankful for the web because it created a whole new industry. We can thank the web for the rise and success of ebay, amazon, netflix, apple, and many other companies. It has created many job opportunities. I can be thankful for the web because it created my job. It is hard to imagine the world without the web.

What about you? Are you thankful for the web?

Categories
General

4 things you didn’t know about Visual Studio

I’m a big fan of dotnetrocks and during show 543 Phil Haack shared interesting facts about visual studio. So here are the 4 things you didn’t know about Visual Studio 2010:

1. It is made up of 1.5 million source code files.
2. There are 220 thousand directories.
3. It takes 61 hours to do a fully signed build.
4. 4719 connect bugs were fixed during development.

Categories
ASP.NET Continuous Delivery General

Frustrated Driven Development

Frustrated Driven Development

I want to share a story about FDD or Frustrated Driven Development. A few years back, I worked in a very large asp.Net web site and the deployments were done manually. As you can imagine the chaos and errors caused by manual deployments. Sometimes we forgot to include all required steps to deploy the application. The instructions to our IT department will look like:

1. Create a back up copy of the entire site.
2. Delete all the files except the web.config file.
3. Copy the folder contents from this location d:\deployments\eStoreApp\05-20-2008\production into the production folder.
4. Open up the web.config file from production and update the following app settings:
a. Update emailAddress value from oldEmail@test.com to newEmail@test.com.

These instructions were very difficult to follow by our IT department and many times we encounter issues because one of the steps required to deploy the site was never performed. IT will blame engineers and engineers will blame IT. I guess both IT and engineers were used to this process and the frustration level was low. It was so painful that no one wanted to change or improve this process.

However, we got a new team member in our IT department. At the beginning, Bob followed the deployments instructions but he started questioning this process. Bob was frustrated and started talking with his manager. Bob said, “there must be a better way to deploy asp.net sites”. He gather data and found a product by red gate called deployment manager.

Bob approached me and said, “I don’t want to do manual deployments anymore. Can you help me test this new deployment tool from Red Gate?” I replied, “sure, what do you need from me?”. Bob said, “I just need a nuget package”.

Within a few weeks, we installed deployment manager in our different environments (QA, Staging, and Production) and both teams IT and engineers were happy and using this tool to automate our deployments.

Hopefully this story encourages other teams to use Frustrated Driven Development to identify what is causing pain and frustration in your team and using that energy to solve or improve those processes.

Categories
General Tips

Follow these tips to get your first job as a software developer

During my last two years of studies, I interviewed with many different companies. Most of them required some experience in a programming language: Java, .Net, Php, etc. I had many friends that had part-time jobs working as web developers. For them, it was easier to secure a full-time job after graduation. For me on the other hand, the lack of experience hurt my chances to start my IT career right after graduation.

To help you get your first job as a software developer, I recommend you follow these tips:

  • Gain experience

The sooner you start your professional career, the better chances you have securing your first job as a software developer. Working part-time and going to school at the same, it’s no easy task. I highly recommend finding a part-time job during summer or find an interesting open-source project where you can apply your knowledge. Employers want students that not only have the academic projects on their resume but also can list real life projects on their resume.

  • Keep investing in your education

Information Technology is a fascinating field. It is always changing. With this in mind, you have to keep investing in your education. If you learned .Net or Java during college and you feel that having learned those programming languages is enough, you are wrong. Pick up a new programming language. Right now, Javascript skills are in high demand. Perhaps you want to learn Ruby on Rails, or Python. What about mobile development? Android and IOS developers are also in high demand. I encourage you to buy books or subscribe to online courses to help you learn new languages.

  • Embrace change

The only constant is change. Embrace it. Many years ago, Android and IOS did not existed. However, every year we saw that phones were becoming smaller in size and powerful. Some said that phones are mini-computers. Software developers need to be ready to change. The technology that is popular today may not be popular tomorrow. Software developers need to have an open mind to technology change.

I hope these tips will help you find your first job as a software developer.

Categories
General

Hello World!

When you start learning a new programming language, the first thing you see is a “hello world” tutorial showing you how to get started with that language.

In my case, I’m not going to show you a tutorial at this time. Instead, I’m going to introduce myself to the world. Hello everyone. My name is Raymond Sanchez and currently working for Verizon Terremark as a Senior Software Developer.

I have decided to start blogging my experiences as a software developer and hopefully help others become great software developers.

My goal is to write at least 1 blog post per month. I’ll see you soon.