Tag: PluralSight

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Course Review

Creating Maintainable Contexts for Automated Testing – Course Review

I have just finished Creating Maintainable Contexts for Automated Testing by Mel Grubb, on Pluralsight (yes, that title is quite a mouthful!)

I haven't really bothered with reviews of most courses I take – counting this one I watched 43 this year – a bunch on Pluralsight, some MBA courses, and 14 non-fiction books. This one was interesting enough that it was worth mentioning.

It covers ways to make your test code cleaner. What I liked:

  • using a Random library to document what is boilerplate on a test is what is important – name = library.RandomName() is very different from name = “Luiz Marques”, as it shows that it has no particular importance.
  • From the next step, adding Mother objects, which are simple static classes that return ready to go instances – such as .Simple() and .Typical(). If you need to, you can then change anything that is important for the test, and it will be very obvious. As a bonus, any changes to the objects (such as an added property) can be dealt on a single place, instead of having to be fixed on possibly dozens of tests.
  • Converting the mothers to the Builder pattern, which makes thing slightly clearer (but adds a lot of code), improving discoverability and makes it easier to change objects.
  • Using CSX to auto-generate most of the builder objects on each build.

Overall, very interesting, and well worth the time, specially if you already have Pluralsight.

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Course Review

Kanban: Getting Started

Kanban: Getting Started is a new course by Steve Smith on Pluralsight.

Kanban is an interesting methodology that can be used in many places – it became common in manufacturing after Toyota invented and had great success, and it can also be useful in daily life and software development.

Kanban is about maximizing flow in systems, which is usually very useful, reducing waste and helping find bottlenecks.

It is also relatively simple, vs scrum and more complicated methods, and can be used in many different ways.

I particularly like that the course had a separate section for single and team use. Some specific services (such as Trello) are mentioned, but mostly briefly. As also are physical boards.

Overall, I found this course quite useful, and it certainly left me interested in using Kanban in practice.

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Course Review

Reducing Product Risk – Course Review

Reducing Product Risk is a course at PluralSight, by Nenad Laskovic.

It covers ways to minimize risk when creating new products or features. It is pretty short – about an hour.

It has a few different ways of testing various risks for a product, such as:

  • lack of demand
  • inability to complete the project in time or budget
  • not being better than the competition
  • poor UX or performance
  • not solving the actual problem, just what you think it was

Of course, it then covers ways to mitigate those risks, such as using landing pages and ads to test for demands, using prototypes to test the UX, etc.

Overall, useful considering the limited time spent.

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Course Review

WebStorm Fundamentals – Course Review

I have just finished watching WebStorm Fundamentals, a Pluralsight course on the JetBrains IDE.

I have never actually used it – although I have used other IDEs by JetBrains – so there was a lot of interesting things compared to my usual JS/HTML IDE (Notepad++, for minimal touch-ups on my main site).

The course only takes a few hours, and was pretty clear. I viewed most of it at 120% speed, and the instructor was still very clear at this speed.

Overall, recommended if you already have access to PluralSight courses and are interested in WebStorm.

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Course Review

So you want to be an entrepreneur – Course Review

So you want to be an entrepreneur is a course by Dan Appleman in PluralSight.

It covers some interesting elements, including what you will go through as an entrepreneur, looking at goals, coming up with the idea, hiring, accounting, and funding.

I learned quite a bit, as while I've been an entrepreneur for decades – selling software online – it is a solo thing and thus doesn't include a lot of what he talks about.

I was particularly interested in the “lifestyle company” concept, as I had not seen it before – creating a company expecting that it won't grow much – just enough to make a living for you.

Overall, quite interesting, and well worth the 4 hours. Of course, joining Pluralsight for this would be overkill, but if you are already there and interested in the subject, I'd recommend it. The author also has several other interesting courses.

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Product Review

.NET Micro ORMs – Course Review

Just finished .NET Micro ORMs, by Steve Michelotti, on PluralSight.

This course covers a few Micro ORMs for .NET – including Dapper, OrmLite, Massive, PetaPoco and Simple.Data.

It was very interesting to see how easy they are to use, and how fast they are, compared to Entity Framework.

From my very limited experience, the best for me seems to be OrmLite – which is not surprisingly a paid product (although it has a free version for up to 10 tables in a project, which can work in some situations).

All the others seem very interesting, though.