Hello to C# Advent 2023 readers This post is part of C# Advent 2023 series, there’s loads of great content that’s worth checking out from a wide range of authors Azure Durable Entities have been around for a while, initially there was some good fan fare but it’s probably fair to say that there hasn’t been wide spread adoption of the technology. This could be because the virtual actor concept is unfamiliar to the traditional C# / Dotnet approach to solving software problems, or it could be that we don’t often find problem spaces that are best solved in this particular way.
My first edition of What I’m reading I don’t intend to become another aggregator of content but rather just want to use this a space to sporadically share the articles / blogs / podcasts I’ve found interesting lately.
[article] Generating Mermaid Syntax Diagrams with AI-powered Amazon Bedrock. This was an interesting read that opened up yet another good use of generative AI (ChatGPT et all) in software development activities.
[podcast] Key findings from the 2023 State of DevOps Report (Engineering Enablement Podcast).
Diagrams 🙄 are important pieces of documentation, but (some) are incredibly boring to put together. This is especially true as nowadays diagrams-as-code is the best practice - and I don’t disagree but it does mean having to go through the learn ➡ remember ➡ re-learn (repeat 🔁) loop of your syntax of choice.
Take the sequence diagram, a classic that for some software projects is still a must have on the path to Production - particularly if you work with the NHS and need to complete a SCAL.
Last night on the The Changelog news postcast they mentioned PageFind a nifty library for adding search to static websites. The search provided out of the box from the theme I use for my blog was a bit average so I thought I’d have ago at integrating PageFind - there were a couple of gotchas that I needed to figure out.
Adding the search page into the Hugo site This was the first gotcha I had to figure out, not being particularly well versed in the structure of Hugo, I spent a bit of time trying to figure out whether I needed to add a new layout to the theme I was using, this led me down a bit of a rabbit hole.
My previous post was pickup and shared on Hacker News, there was lots of really good discussion in the comments, and there were a number of points raised which I thought would make a good follow up blog post.
There were a few main themes in the comments:
There was broad consensus that architecture diagrams are helpful/useful for teams There were lots of different tools/methods that people use for architecture diagrams, although a reasonable number have used/use C4 Diagrams are expensive or difficult to maintain Blog post about architecture diagrams, without any diagrams!
Earlier this year myself and a couple others at DrDoctor did some training in C4 Architecture modelling1. The trainer was really good and over a few sessions with him we got the hang of the method. We went onto use what we had learnt, meeting everything Thursday over the course of 3 months. We focused mainly on modelling our existing architecture into Level 1 (Context) and Level 2 (Container) diagrams. This process was enlightening and we all learnt a lot from it - that alone could easily be a couple of posts.
