What’s this all about?

In the old days, R&D was about features, marketing was about promoting products to prospective decision makers, sales were about getting big deals, and service was about implementing and fixing things. Today, it’s all about growing end-user consumption and selling microtransactions to consumers.

The risk is on us, and our reward only happens if our end-users are successful.

Success doesn’t magically happen… Product marketing must design for it, development must build for it, services must contribute heavily to consumption research, marketing must translate the findings into offers, offer management technology must deliver it, services must access it during every service transaction…

In short, consumption is everything. If end-users underutilize our software, chances are that at some point the company we code for, won’t be able to pay for our services. We are all responsible for crafting successful software. From developers to sellers, everyone is liable to provide feedback, insights and value to the end-users. This is a team effort and can be supported through practices like DevOps, Business Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence. This requires communication and collaboration. It’s time to forget about silos and to move from a one-time sale to a pay-per-use model.

How do you Update Your Wetware?

I’m passionate about technology, but sometimes I need a wetware update. A reminder that technology needs people to change the world.

Wetware is a term drawn from the computer-related idea of hardware or software, but applied to biological life forms. Here the prefix “wet” is a reference to the water found in living creatures. Wetware is used to describe the elements equivalent to hardware and software found in a person, namely the central nervous system (CNS) and the human mind. The term wetware finds use both in works of fiction and in scholarly publications.

Communicating effectively doesn’t come easily. Surprisingly, the skills required to be heard include paying attention to others. Listening with intent and genuine interest has a greater effect than one can imagine.

As a technology enthusiast, and as a dreamer, it’s important that I remember that I need to communicate to succeed. Ideas grow and mature to fruition through collaboration and care.

Curiosity drives me to update my wetware through various activities. For one, I am an active participant in my local and worldwide community where I learn about technology. By interacting with others, I learn from their experiences and expand my understanding. I listen to podcasts and comment on blog posts. I ask and answer questions on social networks like Stackoverflow and I participate in forums.

Human interaction is at the center of my personal growth and this fact has driven me to two wonderful books. The first book that I had the pleasure of discovering is “Speaking as a Leader“. This book is rich with advice about how to move others with your vision. Using the right approach and the right tools makes a world of difference. The second book is time-tested and has captured the interest of millions. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is a book that conveys principles through stories about people who have left their mark on history.

Both books complement each other really well. And both are rich with a wealth of wisdom that begs for a second read.

How do you update your wetware?

Automate Everything!

These two words immediately caught my attention! This is one of the hardest things for me as a developer. I spend most of my time designing and coding away, but I hardly spend anytime with PowerShell… so I’ll be blunt, as a developer, I must learn PowerShell and I must change my Definition of Done (DoD). I am not done until my feature can be deployed repeatedly and reliably. Automation makes me sleep better at night because my deployments yield predictable results.

This new e-book  is all about taking advantage of what the cloud has to offer. It’s packed with best practices for DevOps, data storage and high availability. Since the authors took a pattern-based approach, each chapter can be read independently.

Download all formats (PDF, Mobi and ePub) as well as link to the companion content hosted by the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

My Reading List for 2014

Every year I hunt for new books to read. 2013 was a wild year where I didn’t really have a plan in place and my reading was all over the place. Wanting to get organized in 2014 is all about not missing out.

Last year I read some great books about SQL Server, Windows Azure and methodology, this year I want to focus on catching up some more on those key books that greatly affected our industry. Are there any books that shouldn’t be on my list? What’s missing from the list?

• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
• Executable Specifications with Scrum: A Practical Guide to Agile Requirements Discovery
• A CQRS Journey
• Exploring CQRS and Event Sourcing (Microsoft patterns & practices)
• Data Access for Highly-Scalable Solutions: Using SQL, NoSQL, and Polyglot Persistence (Microsoft patterns & practices)
• Dependency Injection with Unity (Microsoft patterns & practices)
• Developing Big Data Solutions in the Cloud
• How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome Instead
• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
• Planning Extreme Programming
• Extreme Programming in Practice
• Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams
• Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
• Agile Estimating and Planning
• Managing Agile Projects
• Service Design Patterns: Fundamental Design Solutions for SOAP/WSDL and RESTful Web Services
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
• Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models
• User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development
• Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Enterprise Library, 2nd Edition (Microsoft patterns & practices)
• TypeScript for C# Programmers
• Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

I probably won’t get to read everything on my list, but with your help I can try to pick the best ones to read this year and continue working down the list next year.

2013 was a slow year for reading, because my focus was mostly geared towards sharing what I had learnt about Windows Azure through my blog. This year is going to be different, I will try to balance my efforts between writing and catching up on the past.

Curious About Developing Big Data Solutions on Windows Azure?

Windows Azure HDInsight has been available for a little while now, but I haven’t had a chance to work with it. Tonight as I was browsing the Patterns & Practices Website, I noticed that they were working on a new book for the Cloud Series. It’s an ongoing project about developing Big Data solutions using the Windows Azure HDInsight and related technologies.

The book can be downloaded from the Patterns & Practices Windows Azure Guidance site.

Book – Building Interactive Queries with LINQPad

A few months ago Sébastien Finot was approached to write a book about working with LINQ using LINQPad and I had the honor of being one of the technical reviewers.

If you need to interact with databases, XML, in-memory collections, or remote services, LINQ can make your life simpler. The best way to discover LINQ is with the help of LINQPad, a free IDE whose first goal is to make sure that writing and interacting with your LINQ query is fun and easy. More generally, LINQPad is a C#/VB/F# scratchpad that instantly executes any expression, statement block, or program with rich output formatting and a wealth of features.

With Building Interactive Queries with LINQPad, you will quickly learn everything you need to know to start using LINQ. To accelerate your learning curve, you will discover how to use LINQPad and its features to test your queries interactively and experiment with all the options offered by LINQ.

In all probability, you already know C#, but have you had a chance to try out LINQ? Building Interactive Queries with LINQPad will introduce you to everything LINQ can offer and will let you interact with every example in LINQPad, LINQ’s best companion.

You will learn how to build and experiment with interactive queries with this practical guide illustrated with short and detailed code samples. You will also get acquainted with other cool applications of LINQpad such as testing, code snippet generation, and so on, along with a broad approach to LINQ (to object, to SQL, to XML, and so on).