It’s great how the summer holidays (Memorial Day, Independance Day, Labor Day), play out like a trilogy each year. Memorial Day is the start and sets the tone for what’s to come. Independance Day in the middle acts as a bridge between the start and end of the season. Labor Day is the finish line marking the end of summer and the beginning of fall. With Memorial Day happening this week, it was the perfect week to set some goals for summer 2017. My goal for the summer is to continue to get better. I want to push myself to write my best code, have my best ideas, feel great, and to move forward with everything I can. So bring on summer 2017, make it a great one.

GitHub may get a lot of the press and be the cool kid in town, and deservedly so, it’s an amazing tool and community, but Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers a compelling alternative. In the past, I used Microsoft’s cloud source control solution for personal development but hadn’t worked with it much since I’ve been using mostly GitHub lately. The feature list and quality of VSTS have came a long way in my vacation. This week I got back into using VSTS and it was absolutely great. VSTS has everything I want as a developer: collaboration, work planning tools, git, continuous integration, package management, release management, and testing. The best part is that it offers free private repos. Sometimes code doesn’t need or deserve to be published on GitHub, that’s a perfect opportunity to use VSTS.

I didn’t finish any books this week. I’m still reading Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. The intention is to publish an overview of some of the key ideas contained within the book when I’m done. It’s filled with practical programming techniques that can be applied to any language.

Finished

PluralSight Course(s): ASP.NET Core: The Request Life Cycle

Currents

MOOC(s): Sabermetrics 101: Introduction to Baseball Analytics

PluralSight Course(s): Implementing and Securing an API with ASP.NET Core, Domain-Driven Design Fundamentals

Book(s): Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, On Writing Well

On the Next…

I will continue working through all of my current courses and books. Pluralsight just added a new course called Advanced Redux which will be the next one that I start. My React knowledge is growing every day. The redux course will be a solid next step. I’m looking forward to continuing On Writing Well. The first third of the book is a gem and I’m positive that the rest will be every bit as enlightening.