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my Studio feature set for 2024

Here, in my Studio, a “technical Blog” is simply a series of posts about a set of interests not explicitly related to politics. Traditionally this set of interests is coherent but oftentimes too broad. I recall sending an email to Carl Franklin last century (before the invention of “social media”) where I confidently and calmly proclaimed my intent to ‘master’ the .NET Framework. I am sure Carl knew that the .NET Framework is too big for a single person to master—and, had I been explicitly confronted, I would have agreed.

In this century, after several decades, I now understand what I really meant about this quest for mastery. I now understand that I need to make a commitment to a finite set of interests that is explicitly stated and tracked year over year. This very similar to having a watch-list of stocks because the value of these interests should be analyzed in a (job) market. Also, since stock picks can be grouped into larger sectors, I should similarly start with a handful of bullet points—let’s call it a shortlist—that is grouping the full set. Every year going forward I should publish a report of these breakdowns, yielding a set of features that should be appealing to a market of buyers. The challenge is to remain true to myself while selling these features to the market.

Effectively, I have been behaving this way for about 28 years. Now is the time to make this behavior explicit.

the feature set shortlist

I am not going to memorize my full feature set. What I can do is try to group my full set into some top-level categories. Today these are:

  1. data-driven declarative (and semantic) UI development 🍱 defined by UX documentation and maintained by automated testing 🔬
  2. cloud-based REST 🌩️ API development with transparent resource scaling 🌩️🌩️ (optionally serverless) maintained by automated testing 🔬
  3. cloud-based distributed event/command publishing and subscribing 🌩️📧
  4. domain data development and management from small-scale static JSON to large-scale cloud-based relational and/or document-hierarchical systems maintained by automated testing 🔬

My “full stack” developer career began with items 1 and 4. Years of work with ‘personal’ practice in my Studio led to item 2 (before it could be sold in the marketplace). Item 3 is ‘under development’ as it is relatively new. These are the tech buzzwords used above (in order of appearance):

  • declarative UI
  • UX
  • automated testing
  • cloud-based
  • REST
  • domain data
  • JSON

Most these buzzwords are out of current fashion. I have to write the previous sentence to remind a reader of my awareness of this.

In “The 3 budgets,” Swizec Teller lists the three places where the money comes from to pay people like me:

The 3 budgets are:

  • sales/marketing
  • research and development
  • maintenance

It follows that the challenge laid before me is to use buzzwords in my feature list that should appeal to people from all three places listed above. I will likely not be immediately successful in this endeavor because my bias toward “research and development” people has historically been very, very high. Nevertheless, the market must be respected and each new year should provide me with room for improvement!

the full feature set

  1. Service-provider-based app design with IHost (in Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting 📦) 🔨✨
  2. Automated unit testing with xUnit 🔬 and YAML-based CI/CD pipelines
  3. Declarative UI with semantic HTML, Sass, SVG and/or Razor and Typescript 🔨🍱🐎
  4. Declarative UI with Bolero over WebAssembly and Typescript 🔨🍱🐎✨
  5. Declarative UI with Avalonia over XAML🔨🍱🐎🚧
  6. Data-driven declarative UI layout with Sass and CSS custom properties 📇💄
  7. RESTful Web API with ASP.NET or Azure Functions 🌩✨
  8. Distributed user session management with StackExchange.Redis 📇🕸✨
  9. Domain-data reading/validating and writing with Entity Framework and/or Dapper and FluentValidation 📇✅
  10. Structured logging and monitoring 🖋🚧
  11. Secrets management with Azure Key Vault 🌩🔐🚧
  12. Code-first migrations with Entity Framework and Microsoft SQL Server or SQLite 📇🚀🚧
  13. Recursive traversal of hierarchical data structures with CTEs in Microsoft SQL Server 🔨✨
  14. JSON-based projections and relations with Microsoft SQL Server 🔨✨
  15. Integration testing with xUnit fixtures, exposing the SUT service provider 🔬✨
  16. Ordered integration testing to capture domain-data snapshots and copy test samples from the production environment✋🔬✨
  17. Architectural layer packaging and reuse with NuGet and npm 📦🚀
  18. Ordered integration testing ✋🔬 to check for regression with domain-data snapshots 🚧
  19. Automated unit testing (with English-language hooks into product stories) 🚧
  20. Automated ordered integration testing (with English-language hooks into product stories) 🚧
  21. Intra-domain event/command publishing and subscribing ❓
  22. Distributed event/command publishing and subscribing ❓
  23. Product-owner-audience-focused and QA-focused documentation written in markdown and/or Jupyter notebooks 🖊️ to be published in desired formats

The use of the 🚧 emoticon indicates that this feature is under development while the use of ❓ indicates I have not even started building 😐

These 23 ‘features’ can serve as a table of contents for this technical Blog. The number 23 might imply that I would have to publish at least two articles per month to mark progress with all 23 items every year. I would be very surprised to see my level of ‘mastery’ have me so effective with time management!

https://github.com/BryanWilhite/