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October 2020

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One way to spot a lack of professionalism is missing unit tests in a project. It is frightening how many dev teams do not write any tests and rely only on manual testing. In the following paragraphs, I will try to convince you about the importance of writing unit tests. What are unit tests? Unit tests are the smallest tests you can write. They tend to test different parts of your code (mainly single methods). Unit tests should be very fast so that you can run them often. It is important to stress that they do not test how different…

Two reasons provoked this article – my previous article and a recent Twitter post asking, “How do you learn new technologies?”. In the next paragraphs, I will try to explain how I see learning should happen. Please have in mind that what I suggest is not for total beginners currently learning basics as “if statements” and variables. Young developer with great ideas And not that great ones. When you are inexperienced, everything is new to you. Everything is exciting, and you want to try everything. It is a lot easier to jump on the hype train for something new. Always…

Developer’s path is littered with many difficulties, but believe me, tutorial hell is something that really can ruin your progression and even career. Things are not the same as ten years ago. Now we have tutorials, video tutorials, courses, coding bootcamps literally behind any corner. That, of course, is great, but also it is challenging for beginners. It is challenging in a way that an inexperienced developer who does not have a lot of confidence jumps from tutorial to tutorial seeking something that he will never get – real-business case experience. He will always think that he is not ready…

Optimizing SQL queries can be done in many ways, but the current case that I am going to show you is a little bit different. Last week my direct manager asked me to see why a list of data loads very slow. Also, if it was possible, to optimize it. The data set consisted of around 1000 rows. The load time for all rows was about 7 seconds. Even though each row was an elaborate business entity, that did not justify the load time. As every sane developer could see, there was something wrong. We are using Entity Framework, so…