Content that is all about software development and programming! Find examples of code often written in C# along with tutorials.
You can find part one of this here! Applying for Software Development Jobs How do I stand out on an application? I think this is largely going to depend on where you're applying. Something to consider is that especially with large tech companies, they're getting thousands and thousands of resumes all the time. It can be really competitive to be able to even land an interview so sometimes if the caliber of other applicants is high, it can make it difficult to stand out. That's okay. We don't have control over others, but we do have control over ourselves! We can try a few different things to stand out and help you get started on your software development journey professionally. The following are things I personally would suggest and may not reflect the exact views of my employers (past, present,…
Navigating Post Secondary Education for Software Development Do you have any advice regarding university applications? For university, it's been so long since I've had to go through applications that I'm not sure I have really specific advice. I think it's important to know what schools have for prerequisites and really ensure you nail those down. In terms of which school to pick, that's certainly a personal choice. You'll have so many factors to consider including cost, what programs are offered, relocation, proximity to loved ones, etc... As a hiring manager, personally, I am less concerned with WHERE someone went to school versus what they could showcase about what they have learned. I'd also personally suggest checking out schools that offer internships since it's an excellent way to get real experience! This is something that worked really well for me since…
As I've been trying to get more YouTube content put together more steadily, one of the themes I'm interested in is doing some behind-the-scenes of the role playing game (RPG) I'm making with some friends in Unity3D. I've found that being able to work on an RPG outside of my regular day job is a really awesome way for me to keep up on my technical skills. I love coding, and the further along I move in my career as an engineering manager, the less time I actually spend writing code myself. I pride myself in being a technical engineering manager, so for me working on this RPG is a great outlet for creativity and practice. I mentioned this in my LinkedIn post here: Persisting Game Objects Across Maps In this video, I focus on one of the challenges the…
I love dependency injection frameworks ever since I started using them. Specifically, I'm obsessed with using Autofac and I have a hard time developing applications unless I can use a solid DI framework like Autofac! I've recently been working with Xamarin and found that I wanted to use dependency injection, but some of the framework doesn't support this well out of the box. I' was adamant to get something going though, so I wanted to show you my way to make this work. Disclaimer: In its current state, this is certainly a bit of a hack. I'll explain why I've taken this approach though! In your Android projects for Xamarin, any class that inherits from Activity is responsible for being created by the framework. This means where we'd usually have the luxury of passing in dependencies via a constructor and…
CircleCI is a service that I heard about from a friend that allows you to get continuous integration pipelines built up for your repositories... And it does it quick and easy. Also, free if you're someone like me and you don't have a large demand for getting builds done! I wanted to write about my experience with getting CircleCI wired up with BitBucket, which I like to use for my project hosting, and hopefully it'll help you get started. First thing, signing up is super easy if you have BitBucket because you can oauth right away with it. CircleCI will show you your projects & repositories that you have in BitBucket and you can decide which one you'd like to get started with. You can navigate to the projects in their new UI from the "Add Projects" menu. When you…
Having worked with C# for quite some time now writing desktop applications, I've begun making the transition over to .NET standard. In my professional working experience, it was a much slower transition because of product requirements and time, but in my own personal development there's no reason why I couldn't get started with it. And call me crazy, but I enjoy writing coded tests for the things I make. My favorite testing framework for my C# development is xUnit, and naturally as I started writing some new code with .NET Standard I wanted to make sure I could get my tests to run. xUnit Tests - The Example Here's an example of some C# code I wrote for my unit tests of a simple LRU cache class I was playing around with: [ExcludeFromCodeCoverage] public sealed class LruCachetests { [Fact] public…
What Makes Good Code? It's been a while since I've had a programming oriented post, and I figured this would be a great topic to write about. It's been a topic I've been thinking about more and more over the last year and I've been experimenting with certain patterns and practices to see if certain things actually make code "better". A lot of the information presented in this series will be completely based on my opinion, but I'll try to back up my opinion with as many concrete examples as I can. If you have a differing opinion, I'd love to hear it in the comments. I'd also like to call out that much of what I'll be discussing is in the context of object oriented programming. To be specific, there may be mostly C# examples used. If this isn't something…
Whose Job Is It? I wanted to share my experience that I had working on a recent project. If you've been programming for a while, you've definitely heard of the single responsibility principle. If you're new to programming, maybe this is news. The principle states: That every class should have responsibility over a single part of the functionality provided by the software, and that responsibility should be entirely encapsulated by the class You could extend this concept to apply to not only classes, but methods as well. Should you have that one method that is entirely responsible for creating a database connection, connecting to a web service, downloading data, updating the database, uploading some data, and then doing some user interface rendering? What would you even call that?! The idea is really this: break down your code into separate pieces of functionality.…
Leadership Everyone has their own variation of what leadership means. For me, leadership means empowering others to accomplish their goals and providing assistance when they need it. There were a few articles that came up on LinkedIn this week that I wanted to share with everyone and discuss how they fit into my perspective on leadership. Articles Does Your Team Work With You Or For You?: Kwame Manu-Antwi opens up the article in an interesting fashion. When I read the title of the article, I figured this was going to be the typical leadership vs management debate. However, Kwame goes into describing a scenario where he had a humbling experience from one of his team that made some sacrifices for him. This was truly an example of working for him. The entire second half of the article shares a bunch of…
Movember Wrap-up At the start of December, it's time for a lot of us to shave off our glorious Movember badges from our upper lips. This year, MoMagnets did an absolutely amazing job raising money for Movember. At the time of writing, we're sitting at just under $2400! An incredible effort by Magnet Forensics and all of those that helped with their generous contributions. My 'stache didn't quite get to where I wanted to this year. It was close, but it was another connector-less Movember for me. I was almost able to get some twisting done for some not-so-legitimate connectors. Oh well... Here's what I ended up rocking for most of the month: Matt Chang definitely took the lead for raising the most of all the MoMagnets members at over $700! Mica Sadler is sitting in second at just under…
