In an agile environment, how teams slice user stories is crucial for delivering value and creating a continuous flow of product increments. This article explores vertical slicing—a technique that focuses on end-to-end feature delivery rather than splitting work by technical layers.
Microservices have gotten attention in the industry since its inception. The idea of having independent deployment, scalable services, and rapid interaction was quickly spread across developers and among decision takers in the software community. Therefore, such advantages took more attention than its counterparts, leading to the microservices hype and later on to the reflection on the learning that the community got. For example, some interesting things happened when a big open source project tried adopting microservices and had to go back to the monolith.
Recently I’ve been working on a side project called “Social publisher”, the goal is to allow developers to schedule posts and then having a tool to publish the scheduled content automatically. Some of the tools already in the market does that, but they require paid subscription whenever a limit of scheduled posts has been reached (talking about hootsuite). The idea with social publisher is to avoid such limitations and offer seamlessly sharing tools.
Before we start, this is a collection on what I went through to get the 204 certification from azure. The process was similar to the one I did for AWS. The idea is to get some structure on how to get started with the subjects needed to pass the exam. Before anything else a bit of context is always welcome, before taking the exam I started to work with azure services for about one year. Also I feel comfortable on how to navigate the integration between terraform and azure (terraform is not related by any means to azure exam).
Consuming Azure services and connecting to them are responsible for 15% - 20% of the exam, based on the mock exams, most of the questions are related to storage queues, service bus, event grid and API management (policies), this section goes over each service that could potentially appear in a real az-204 exam.
Azure offer different services to troubleshoot and monitor applications, it might vary based on the type of application you are building. Nevertheless, application insights could be of help to mitigate issues. In this section we will go through those services to better understand their purpose and what they do as well as tips that could be helpful while studying.
Between 20% and 25% of the az-204 is related to security, knowing what Azure offers regarding security is one of the main goals of the exam. Here, we will go over different services, such as Active Directory (one of the most popular products from Microsoft), ADB2C, encryptions, azure key vault, Authorization, Authentication, App gateway and permissions.
Storage is one of the main concepts to get familiar with for AZ-204 and also other exams. In this section we will go over different aspects of the storage account in microsoft and its services, more specifically, the following services; access keys, azcopy tool, blobs, redundancy and cosmosdb.
Azure offers different compute services such as Azure VMs, Azure containers, Azure functions, Azure Kubernetes and Azure app services. In this section we will go through the compute solutions that Azure offers as well as share references to specific microsoft documentation where more information can be fetched accordingly. The main goal here is to go over all the compute services that are listed in the exam topics, compute solutions is the biggest portion of the exam in total 25 - 30% of the total).
This is a follow up on a series of posts around TDD anti-patterns. The first of this series covered the liar, excessive setup, the giant and slow poke, those four are part of 22 more, the anti-patterns is a list formalized in James Carr post and also discussed in a stackoverflow thread. In this blog post we are going to focus on the last two anti-patterns from those lists and also two new ones - the flash and the jumper. Both of them are focused on the practice of test driving code instead of the pure code itself.
