DEV Community: Ashraf Alam

New StackOverflow Tag for EISK!

Ashraf Alam — Sun, 20 Sep 2020 12:50:48 +0000

EISK provides a solid guideline for building enterprise level projects, by utilizing new asp.net and sql server features, as well as latest best coding practices.

Since its first release, by April 2008, this open source project gained a huge popularity in the developer community and had 250K+ combined downloads.

Good news is EISK has its 'own' tag in StackOverflow now.

Should you have any questions or need any help to implement new cool features, you can ask in StackOverflow community with tag eisk and get prompt response.

Creating a massively big company requires people skill. Top 3 people skills I learned from Steve Jobs

Ashraf Alam — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 02:22:43 +0000

Creating or impacting a massively big company requires people skill. Top 3 people skills I learned from Steve Jobs:

On recruiting: Good people know good people. Get referrals from top talents you know.
On interviewing: It's less important how much technical skill a candidate has, rather observe his body language and expressions if those reflect his excitement and passion on the topic.
On engaging employees at work: it's not smart to hire a smart person and dictating what he should be doing. Instead share your vision and mission and let him do his work. He is the best at what he is doing.

SOLID Microservice?

Ashraf Alam — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 09:45:08 +0000

If a web api can be considered equivalent to an OOP class, a microservice can be considered as a class written maintaining SOLID principles.

Microservice is not a magic, but a well-designed service component serves specific responsibilities with other components.

Like a class maintaining Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) helps on maintainability and extensibility, the modular nature of microservice makes a huge difference in different size of projects.

Your thoughts?

Progressive Web Applications (PWA) Quick Start Sample Project with Vue.js

Ashraf Alam — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 06:59:36 +0000

Progressive Web Applications (PWA) are re-defining web user experience just like native applications, with offline, notification support etc.

Vue.JS is being one of the primary frameworks driving web experience into next level with PWA.

Been experimenting with it recently, and built a simple weather application from scratch.

People who are interested about PWA can check the following github repo to see how easy to build PWA with VueJS.

PWA Weather Application Features

Ability to view hourly and daily weather forecast for given city
Ability to select city based on current location
Ability to save favourite city (with offline capability)
Offline ability to view UI and weather data
Ability to show offline status

Give a Star! ⭐

If you like or are using this project to learn or start your solution, please give it a star. Thanks!

Tools & APIs

Web Frameworks & Plug-ins

Vue.js - The Progressive JavaScript Framework
Vuetify - Material design component framework
Veutify Material Dashboard - Boilerplate code for dashboard based on Vuetify
Vue CLI PWA - PWA Plug-in.
Axios - Promised based http client.

Web API's / SDK's

Open Weather Web Api - Free web api providing weather forecast data in json format.
Cors-anywhere - Global proxy to support CORS.
HERE Maps API - Map api for reverse geo code look-up.
Firebase JavaScript SDK - Software Developer Kit for firebase.

Recommended Tools

Vue CLI - Standard tooling for Vue.js Development
Yarn - Package management
Visual Studio Code - IDE
Chrome DevTools - Browser based developer tools.

Storage

Firebase Database - Realtime database from google cloud enables syncing across devices.
HTML5 Web Storage - Browser local storage to store offline data.

Getting Started

Clone the Repository

Clone the repository from the following location:

https://github.com/AshrafAlam/vue.pwa.weather.app.git

Install

Open command prompt and navigate to the directory where the above source is cloned.

Run the following command to install required packages:

yarn install

Check here to get started with yarn package management.

Run in Local Environment

Run the following command to run the application in local development server

yarn serve

Open the application in browser: http://localhost:8080.

Build Production Output

Run the following command to build production output to be deployed in production server

yarn build

References

Keep Connected!

Will be writing articles providing details of the technologies and architecture. You can watch or mark star the repo for future updates.

https://github.com/AshrafAlam/vue.pwa.weather.app

Enjoy!

Cloud Architecture: Real-World Use Case Scenarios

Ashraf Alam — Fri, 05 Apr 2019 03:43:37 +0000

While building a scalable system is lot more easier with the advent of cloud technologies, identifying the right fit can be challenging. Usually it may take years of solid experience in architectural space.

Here we’ve tried to summarize a list of top technologies that can be used to build scalable systems efficiently with respect to real-world use case scenarios.

Few fundamental or basic considerations, such as programming/scripting languages, operating system choices, additional tooling etc have been intentionally ignored to make the list simple.

Diagram

Table

Type	Purpose	Use Case	Technology
Client Side	Client Framework		ReactJS
-	Type System		TypeScript
-	Design System		Ant
Backend	Server Side API Framework		ASP.NET Core Web API
-	Concurrency Framework		.NET Task API
-	ORM Framework	Manipulating RDMBS data	Entity Framework Core
-	Identity Framework	Managing user identity	.NET Core Identity
-	Cloud Access Framework	Cloud storage access, logging etc	Azure Developer Tools
-	Web Socket	Sending monthly summary report	SignalIR
Services	Web Application & API Deployment	Hosting web applications	Azure App Service
-	Identity Service	Managing user identity	Azure Active Directory
-	Telemetry Event Ingestion	User activity log (receive)	Azure Event Hub
-	Enterprise Search	Product search	Azure Search
-	Prefix-based Search	Product search (with prefix)	Azure Search
-	Recommendation	Product recommendation	Azure ML
-	Server to Client Notification	Sending monthly summary report	Azure Notification Hub
-	Report Processing	Sending monthly summary report	Azure Scheduler
-	Report Processing	Daily operational report	Azure Sql Database with Power BI
-	ALM	Application life cycle management	Azure DevOps
Storage	Analytics	User activity log	Azure CosmosDB: Cassandra as-a-service
-	Reporting	Daily operational report	Azure Sql Database with Power BI
-	Reporting	Monthly summary report	Azure Cassandra as-a-service
-	Binary content	User profile picture, logo	Azure Blob Storage
-	CDN Cache	User profile picture, logo (cached)	Azure CDN
-	In Memory Cache	User session data	Azure Cache for Redis
-	Key Value Pair NoSQL Store	Shopping cart	Azure Table Storage
-	Document NoSQL Store	Product catalog	Azure CosmosDB
-	Graph NoSQL Store	Social network graph	Azure CosmosDB: Gremlin API
-	RDBMS	Financial data - Assets, liabilities, income	Azure Sql Database

Open Source Project on Awesome Cloud Architecture ⭐

EISK is an open source project that is intended providing developer resources to build scalable applications on top of awesome cloud architecture.

Already a web api project has been released to illustrate implementation best practices and more to come.

Stay in touch for updates by bookmarking the project in github.

Enjoy!

EISK - Introducing New ASP.NET Core Starter Template

Ashraf Alam — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 13:25:41 +0000

I've written a new asp.net core starter project that enables creating new data driven web api with seconds. The available code in the project explores latest oop and ddd best practices with modern framework.

This project previously was massively popular and recommended buy Microsoft few times.

Hope You'll enjoy the project.

And if you like the project don't forget to give a star in github.

Eisk Web API

Cheers.

Learn Fast by Contributing to an Open Source Project

Ashraf Alam — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 12:14:32 +0000

Did you know how great developers are enhancing them to learn and contribute to new technologies?

They follow only 5 steps:

explore an open source project at github,
create fork (your own branch),
make changes on the project on whatever you think requires improvement
submit a pull request
If your changes are good, project leaders will incorporate your changes in the original project (for this step you don't have to do anything but ☺).

Even if your pull request is not accepted right away, through the pull request message board, you'll continue learning about how you can enhance your idea and coding skills to fit with a certain standard.

Starting to contribute to a large open source project can be very challenging, as usually these projects involve long effort to understand the code and complex contribution process.

Start contributing to a small open source instead.

For example, you can start experimenting open source contribution with relatively small project like EISK, which is available in github now!

Check cool features available in asp.net core implemented at EISK and feel free to create fork and submit pull request with your suggested updates.

We look forward for your pull requests.

Visit: eisk web api

Happy coding!

I'm a Software Architect, Microsoft MVP, DDD-Cloud Enthusiast, built web applications with 100+ millions users. Ask me anything!

Ashraf Alam — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 12:04:27 +0000

I've been loving, living, eating .net framework since it's inception year 2002.

I'm hugely obsessed writing beautiful code and often publish as open source.

I believe the world is suffering because of duplicate code and millions of people's life can be improved if the evil of duplicate code can be fought right.

Been awarded as Most Valuable Professional by Microsoft for a few times, judge in Microsoft Imagine Cup, mentioned in Microsoft Channel 9, written technical paper in IEEE Computer Society publications.

I've specialization in designing and building high-performance web applications in cloud computing environment. I helped big companies building and scaling their web applications with 100+ millions users.

Besides technical stuffs, I'm a short story and essay writer, try-to-be a good father, son, husband and friend. When alone I simply go from long walk, think about life from a philosophic view.

Would love to answer any question, from technical to literature, philosophy, mindfulness, success, ambition, helping community, making the world a better place.

Ask me anything!

10x Programmers: Myth Or Reality?

Ashraf Alam — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 07:20:26 +0000

10x programmers are a hot topic to discuss in the software industry nowadays, so thought it'd be a good idea to share my view point in this regard.

Honestly I don’t know the exact definition of a 10x programmer, but I assume it refers to hyper productive programmers (which may not map to exactly 10 times productivity, but to a significant level near or more than 10 times).

Based on few successes I had while delivering ultra-big pieces of software for startups and corporations, and working experience with a few top-notch developers, I can share some insights about this topic.

The 10x Programmer Then

Software developed 20–30 years ago was much simpler compared to modern software, with respect to functionality, security, performance, and scalability. On the other hand, only a handful of libraries or frameworks were available at that time to implement any functionalities.

Thus, software written 20–30 years ago involved a significant amount of effort in programming.

Defining a 10x programmer in that context is comparatively easy. The difference between the amount of core programming effort given to implement the same set of functionalities by 10x and regular programmers.

The 10x Engineer Now

Before going into additional details, lets make one thing clear: software development is a complex process, and programming is just one of the areas to contribute to modern software.

Because of increased usage of software, especially over the Internet, by both consumers and organizations, software is very complex, and it might be an insane decision to build something from scratch. Honestly, unless it's a completely a new platform or operating system, the core programming required to develop modern software is less intense compare to older efforts.

While programming knowledge and effort is still very important, the amount of effort that is required to build great software (bug free, secure, and salable) is in engineering.

So on today’s context, a 10x programmer may not bring much value in the industry, but a 10x engineer creates a very wide impact in the development process.

I’d like to add my 3 cents here.

1. They Make the Best Usage of Tooling

Software development is a complex process, which involves a lot of different kinds of effort. Besides coding, it involves efforts from documenting process, to formatting data, from reading log data, to sending reports, from automatically testing, to manually testing, from complex debugging, to manually investigating issues, and so on and so forth.

A huge effort can be made extremely efficient by using the right set of tools and platforms (that are appropriate to a client's budget and other constraints).

Editors

Writing software involves one or more editors, some of which also referred as IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Modern IDEs, such as Visual Studio or Eclipse, offer a great amount of functionality to make developers productive, but a significant amount of these features are not known by most developers.

Popular IDE’s also have commercial and free plugins (such as Resharper), which enable even more developer productivity.

Besides IDE’s, other editors such as NotePad++, MarkdownPad, etc. are also very useful in a relevant context.

Utilities and Online Services

Utilities and online services such as reading or searching large log files, http debuggers like Fiddler, build and deployment tools, etc.

Own Tools

10x engineers also make their own sets of tools to perform repetitive actions for which the appropriate software may not be available externally.

In lots of cases, business owners in a software development house don’t seem to be interested in investing much on tooling for developers, but using the right set of tooling will enable a surprising amount of productivity.

For software developers, who are some of the most expensive people to hire, spending money on right tooling for them is worth doing.

As a .net developer team lead, developing a ASP.NET Core & Visual Studio starter template following latest .net coding practices helped my team boosting up overall productivity three times.

2. They Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

The software industry has become very mature in the last three decades. Almost every problem that developers are trying to solve by coding has been solved and are available as APIs (either as binary or web services), some of which are commercial, while others are free.

Besides, open source frameworks also provide great flexibility to understand underlying API behavior or customization as needed by the users.

Before jumping into programming, 10x engineers actually make sure this problem has not been solved fully (or partially) before or, if so, they are not available to be used.

3. They (Continuously) Write Beautifully Engineered Code

Writing great software requires defining a good architecture that not only follows good design patterns and principles, but also takes advantage of modern infrastructures. Producing well-engineered code not only enables writing new functionalities faster, but also reduces bugs significantly.

But, beautiful engineering requires continuous improvement.

I’ve seen a surprising amount of low quality code in different software projects in my professional career, which continuously adds technical debt. A simple project that started 5 years ago is full of non-engineered ugly code and requires 20+ people to handle the development cycle (where they are spending 80% of their time actually fixing bugs).

One of the main reasons behind this awful situation, I found, is “fear”.

Organizations, especially enterprise entities, mostly fear change.

Software development is an incredibly fast-changing discipline in terms of tooling, frameworks, and engineering, and requires continuous change to get to the right place.

Change is frightening, but it's not as dangerous as it sounds, especially in the software industry (with the right sets of tooling and people). But if it is not done as expected, it will not take much time for the project to be abandoned entirely some day.