A Letter To Junior Developers
Dev Leader Weekly 46
TL; DR:
A manager’s role includes helping you succeed
Effective 1:1’s don’t need detailed updates
Successful engineers don’t just code
Check out my live stream (will be recorded) on Monday, June 3rd at 9:30PM PDT!
EXCLUSIVE ARTICLE IS NOW ARCHIVED
This newsletter issue has an EXCLUSIVE article but it’s now archived on my website. You can read it here with a paid subscription:
https://www.devleader.ca/2024/06/01/a-letter-to-junior-developers-dev-leader-weekly-46/
What’s In This Issue
Up-Level Your Software Engineering Mindset! – Interview With Richard Donovan
Direct Feedback is CRITICAL – Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA
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Weekly Recap
Up-Level Your Software Engineering Mindset! – Interview With Richard Donovan
In this video, I was joined by
who shared his interesting career journey and transition to focusing on mindset! One of the key takeaways that I had from this discussion was that it takes a level of self-awareness and reflection to realize that shifting your mindset can drive positive change.Rich shares some of his ups and downs in his career, the different changes he pursued, and the realization that he had to change things about himself in order to grow. Turns out, having the right mindset and focus on mindset allowed him to do just that.
Thanks for the awesome chat, Rich!
Direct Feedback is CRITICAL – Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA
This AMA livestream focused on how direct feedback helps you grow as a software engineer. You can read more about it in this previous newsletter article: https://weekly.devleader.ca/p/feedback-is-deeper-than-you-think
BRACE YOURSELVES! We’re Testing Implementation Details
They said don’t do it. They said it’s the wrong way to write tests. They said never do it this way. But you know me: I don’t believe in “always” and “never”.
The general advice is that testing implementation details is “bad” because if you change the implementation, your tests are brittle to such changes. Instead, you should only test against the API. This seems like great advice on the surface, because after all, who wants to go remake tests when you refactor or rewrite code?
Join me as I walk you through why you may want to consider breaking the “rules” of testing because… testing is just about building confidence in the code we’re delivering.
I Choose THIS Over EF Core – How To Use Dapper in C#
I know that everyone loves using Entity Framework Core… But it’s so far just not been a great fit for me. And I’m not here to tell you that EF Core is bad by any means — quite the opposite! I think that Entity Framework Core is an excellent fit for most C# developers.
But personally, I find I fight against it. But when I use Dapper in C# I feel right at home! I get my SQL queries right in front of me but the ORM aspect of mapping to entities is handled much more streamlined for me.
In this video, I’ll walk you through some of the very basics of using Dapper in C#!
Watch Out For THIS When Downloading Large Files in C#
Downloading files is a common thing that we have to do in applications and we can download files in C# very easily! However, we have to pay special attention when we’re downloading big files because it’s easy to make a common mistake that could cause BIG issues in your application.
The first thing we’ll look at is how to ensure we don’t grab the WHOLE file all at once and jam it into memory. Not a great time to be had by doing that with very big files.
The next thing we’ll look at is just how silly the Stream API is in C#. It’s easy to make mistakes when assuming too much about the streams we have!
As always, thanks so much for your support! I hope you enjoyed this issue, and I’ll see you next week.
Nick “Dev Leader” Cosentino
social@devleader.ca
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