Issue: 2018 - March/April

  • Rod Paddock argues that developer malaise stems from stagnation rather than workload, and his breakthrough came only when he returned to what he loves: learning new things. By exploring how his API could be consumed from Swift and expanding into Python and other tools, he rekindled enthusiasm and overcome burnout. He advocates lifelong learning, refreshing the “battery” by adding new skills (and even arts) as a antidote to fatigue, noting that growing in diverse directio...See More
  • At this point, you’re clear that your app has to work on all platforms, especially on smartphones. Paul gets tables to adjust their sizes based on which platform is being used to view it.
  • Sahil Malik’s article demystifies the rise of bots as the next era of human–computer interaction, arguing that bots are simply conversational interfaces built with the Microsoft Bot Framework. He explains core concepts—dialogs, state, channels, and the waterfall pattern—while outlining pragmatic design guidelines (simplicity, usefulness, and non-annoyance), and shows how to develop, test, and deploy bots across platforms (including Microsoft Teams) with practical steps, ...See More
  • John Petersen surveys a spectrum of recent tech-law developments at the intersection of law and technology, from Facebook’s shift of ReactJS to MIT licensing and the lingering questions of opensource licensing, to GDPR’s expanded reach and the right to be forgotten, to the rising business of copyright enforcement letters and the protections independent developers should secure through entity formation and liability insurance, and finally to the Linux Foundation’s new Com...See More
  • Kevin shows us how to solve tangles in SQL Server, and in this article, he looks at some questions that have come up since his last article on ETL practices in Data Warehousing.
  • Rick explores the new features in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core and shows you that the wait was worth it.
  • If your synchronous load drowns in a sea of code, a lifeboat can be found in NodeJS. Chris explains how to use node streams to organize the flow of data.
  • Learning R sets you up for creating machine learning projects. Wei-Meng takes a close look at the language, which can implement a wide variety of statistical techniques, tests, analysis, classification, clustering, and can help you produce publication-quality graphs.
  • Azure has come out with some great new tools. Mike introduces some of them, including Resource Groups, App Service Plans, and SQL Elastic Pools.
  • Ted talks about being a manager, having a manager, and the difference between a good and a bad manager.
  • Daniel takes you on a tour of the new features in the new release of ASP.NET. He thinks you’ll find it exciting, especially regarding its SignalR capabilities.