It can be rough to ask your development team to estimate work based on abstract story point values, especially when they are new to it or to each other. I know this and have experienced this in full.
So in this blog, I am going to share an exercise with you that will give every member of your team the same frame of reference for estimating the size of their work. I call this exercise Story Point Benchmarking.
I have always been interested in maps and GIS data. Whether I am planning a hike or a backpacking outing for scouts or helping the Ozark Trail Association with their website, trail building, and maintenance or needing directions from one place to another, a good map and mapping tools are a necessity.
ArcGIS has always been the gold standard for anything related to maps and GIS data. So, in this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the mapping options that are available with an ArcGIS Developer account and their Mapping APIs.
Client: A national insurance regulatory association Industry: Insurance and Government Regulatory Technology Services: Legacy Application Modernization, Software Architecture, Microservices Consulting, Custom Software Development Outcome: A near decade-long modernization partnership that rebuilt legacy C++ and Java securities systems on a test-first foundation, then carried that discipline into a build-system overhaul, migrating more than 200 mission-critical applications from Ant to Maven ahead …
No matter what your opinion is on comments, one thing is universally true: developers should create code that the next developer can understand.
Sometimes, comments are a safe, simple way to leave the code better than how you found it. Sometimes, extracting sections of code into a well-named method can be an alternative way of doing this, with the added benefit that (a) you can test this method individually and (b) it may help you to spot smells in your code or see places for further refactoring or simplification.
Each situation you encounter will require different treatment, but I hope this post has given you a starting place for creating clean, readable code in your own life!
Recently, while working for a large healthcare client in New York, I ran into an interesting problem that had slim literature on how to solve it.
Our application is primarily on-prem, but it does leverage Azure for a few functions that are easier to solve in a cloud-native environment. We wanted to be able to monitor those functions using the same Elastic Stack that we use to monitor our on-prem application.
I was tasked with building a bridge between where our functionality logs to in Azure (App Insights), and getting that securely back into our Elasticsearch instance that powers our Elastic Stack.
This blog post will detail the solution I landed on. I hope it will be useful to others that need to solve a similar problem!