Video: Microservices with Docker, Angular, and ASP.NET Core

I recently had the opportunity to speak to a group in Denver, Colorado about Microservices, Docker, Angular, and ASP.NET Core which was a lot of fun. Briebug sponsored the event at Alamo Drafthouse and we had a great turnout!  Thanks to Briebug for organizing the event (really appreciate Anne, Jesse, and Bill for everything they did) and for everyone that came out to see the talk. Here’s an overview of what the talk was all about: Learn about the role that microservices can play in today’s enterprise environments in this talk by Dan Wahlin. Learn what a microservice is, how […]

Upgrading an Application to Angular 6: Step By Step

Angular 6 is out and it offers some great new functionality in the CLI and overall framework. One of the biggest new features (IMO anyway) is the CLIs support for schematics and the ng new library command to create and publish libraries (a big pain point that is now simplified). But, I digress….this post is about upgrading an application. Click here if you want a quick look at all of the great new features. I have a large project I’m working on that’s still in development so I decided to take the plunge and try out some of the new features to […]

Getting Started with Machine Learning using TensorFlow and Docker

Machine Learning (ML) gets a lot of press now days and for good reason. It can be used to gain insight into areas that were difficult to tap into even a few years ago. Want to know what type of object is shown in a picture? Machine learning can tell you. Need help predicting the next big stock to buy based on historical trends? Machine learning can help out there as well. The sky is the limit! Machine Learning (and more specifically a technique for implementing it called Deep Learning (DL)) can help analyze financial information, filter spam, examine healthcare records, assess […]

My Interview on the IT Career Energizer Podcast: Career Tips and Life Lessons Learned

I had the opportunity to talk with Phil Burgess on the IT Career Energizer podcast recently and really enjoyed the discussion. I’m used to talking about technical topics when I’m invited to a podcast, but this interview was completely different. Instead of getting technical, we focused on career tips, the importance of being willing to learn, life lessons learned, and some of the mental barriers that we can all overcome to advance our career, our life, and our overall happiness. We addressed the following questions (and others) in the podcast: Unique Career Tips Worst Career Moment Career Highlight/Greatest Successes What […]

“Containerizing” Angular with Docker: My ng-conf Talks and Overall Experience

ng-conf 2018 is officially over….too bad it can’t go on forever. It’s such a great conference that you don’t want it to end. In addition to hearing a lot of high-quality talks from the Angular team and other awesome speakers, I had the opportunity to hang out with John Papa a lot (one of my best friends) as well as several other close friends, and made many new friends throughout the week as well (thanks to my buddy Brian Clark for the picture to the right). Here’s a little information about the conference and my overall experience. If you’re only interested in videos […]

Channel 9 Video: Five Things About Docker 2

I had the opportunity to sit down with Simona Cotin (Azure Developer Advocate at Microsoft) at the AngularMix conference to talk about “Five Things About Docker”. The video is one in a series of “Five Things” videos being created and produced by the Azure Developer Advocate team at Microsoft and presents various tech topics in a fun way. This particular video is focused on Docker and a few of the things I really like about it. 

Choosing the “Right” JavaScript Library/Framework for Your Application 2

“What’s the ‘right’ JavaScript library/framework for us to use?”. That’s a question that comes up a lot nowadays given the multitude of choices available and one that doesn’t have a “right” answer of course. I’m fond of saying, “Use the right tool for the right job” when I’m onsite at a company teaching a training class or providing architecture/consulting services. While I certainly have my technology preferences, to force them on someone or on one of the companies I work with would quite honestly be naive and shortsighted. If there’s one thing I’ve learned working in technology over 20 years […]

Angular Playground – Developing and Running Components in a Sandbox! 2

Scenario-Driven Development (SDD) – a term I’d heard little about until my friend Justin Couto encouraged me to check out his team’s Angular Playground tool. SDD didn’t mean much to me when I first heard about it, but I decided to look into Angular Playground more and had one of those “light bulb” moments after I got it up and running. SDD was extremely cool….once I understood what it was all about! Angular Playground is a relatively new tool from the SoCreate team (and former team member Justin Schwartzenberger) that allows you to build and run Angular components in isolation (note […]

Node.js/Express Convention-Based Routes 2

I’ve always been a fan of convention-based routing so I converted a local route generation script I’ve been using with Node.js/Express applications into an npm package called express-convention-routes. The package can be used to automate the creation of Express routes based on a directory structure. What’s a convention-based Express route? It’s a route that is dynamically generated and associated with a “controller” function without having to explicitly code the route yourself (i.e. you don’t write code such as app.use(‘/foo’, router)). express-convention-routes creates routes automatically by parsing a convention-based folder structure such as the one below when the server first starts. […]