There are times in life, when you begin doing something without fully understanding it, simply because, at that point, you didn’t have the luxury to dig deeper, go further and be in a position where you could explain to a 5 year old, what it is really like to do what you were doing. I have been in this position several times. A lot of times, software development for me has been a journey of reverse engineering, or figuring things backwards. Do it first, based on snippets read here and there online and then connecting the dots gradually as you spend more time doing similar things. Sounds familiar? Probably, the life of every other software engineer on the planet working on a target deadline. ...

I realised recently that I have always taken application logging for granted. In my previous firm, which was a pretty large company, over a few thousand employees, we had a centralised logging platform and some lovely packages for each language and a team to configure the logging instance for our application and all that luxury. Developers, did just application development. For everything else, there was always somebody you could lean on. So the good thing was, you could spend all your time, polishing your code, applying all sorts of clean-code principles and achieve some coding nirvana and focus on just the business logic and the core problem. ...

How many times have you as a software engineer worked on a large feature, in an isolated branch that only got merged to the mainline branch when it is time to actually release the feature and then struggled for hours and sometimes days with the merge conflicts, simply because many other changes were contributed to the main branch in the meanwhile? If your answer is many times, then you really might benefit from this. ...

I have been working on a simple responsive website that would serve as an online address for my dog-walking/boarding service. This being my first ever official side-hustle as a registered company, it took pretty long to even get here. Registering a private limited company was also an adventure. But I wanted to experience. This isn’t like a full blown venture intended to become the leader in pet services or anything. We just love dogs and would love to do something that would be different from software. Something that would encourage us to get out of the house and teach us empathy and have some fun with dogs. ...

In my previous post, we talked about interacting with related entities using entity framework. Introduction Time to look at some special cases where you would want entity framework to work with views, stored procedures and plain old SQL statements. There is a wide minconception that developers raise, “Oh it is a stored procedure, that can’t be good”. There is nothing inherently wrong with using stored procedures. It is nice to have all business logic in one place. However, sometimes complex business needs might result in complex SQL queries, and you are better-off writing such queries with the help of someone who is familiar with SQL instead of doing it in EntityFramework. Which is probably why you have applications which has a few references to some well written stored procedures. ...

In my previous post, we talked about data access and updates in entity framework. Updating Related Data A naive way to update related data, especially when the context isn’t tracking your object, as in, you send data about an existing entity in the database, from the UI, and EF has to figure out what part of the updated record has changed and needs an update in the database. If you ever encounter a situation where you are to update only one related object of a primary entity, then you might be in for a surprise. I am going to use an example that I followed to understand this from Julie Lerman’s Pluralsight course on EFCore 3. I have never had to do this personally in the round-about way that the example states. However, I am pretty sure I might end up with tricky situations as I spend more time with EF. ...

In my previous post, we talked looked at an introduction into entity framework core 3. Read and Write Data As I mentioned in the earlier one, I don’t really like writing posts that take longer than 10 minutes to read. It is just too much information. So let us continue with the next part. To learn more about entity framework mappings always refer to this amazing course on Pluralsight titled: Entity Framework Core 2: Mappings, by Julie Lerman ...

What is this about? This post is one of many in a series of posts on Entity Framework Core. I have attempted to summarise what I learned while working with Entity Framework Core, from stackoverflow answers, to entity framework official docs to courses on pluralsight. In this journey, I found, the pluralsight course, Entity Framework Core: Getting Started by @julielerman most useful. As someone who spent the past few years primarily on managing people, I missed out a lot on the tech side of things. So these days, I have been playing catchup. And guess what? There is a lot to catchup! But as with any learning, it isn’t a sprint, it is a marathon and a pretty long one. ...

Background In the last 3 years or so, a lot of blog posts, youtube videos and tutorials came out about containerising applications. I had completely ignored this topic as there was no immediate use of containers that I could apply to my work. Those new to the software industry might not even have heard of containers. When I ask about it to those who brag about it, comparisons are made to Virtual machines but I never really got the details out from anyone, or you can say, I was not satisfied with explanations. ...

In my previous post we went through branching in git and commands that can be used to get changes from one branch to another. Oops! Let us explore some commands that will prove useful when we end up in tricky situations with Git. Reset Reset helps you undo a commit. You know those times when you commit too soon. Git offers you the following levels of control to when you attempt a reset. ...