This week has involved a lot of meeting with people outside of the software team. We’ve had a couple of sessions with different departments within the business to get to know what other people are working on and share some of the work we’ve been doing. It’s been good to chat with people and get an insight into other projects and technologies I’m not familiar with, and also pick up some very helpful tips on striking up a conversation with someone at a networking event: the coffee queue is apparently a good place to get chatting with people. Slight problem – I can’t stand coffee. I’ll figure something out – as long as there is tea on offer I’ll be fine.

In more technical news, much of the week has been spent concentrating on upgrading a .NET 6 solution including several Azure function apps to .NET 8 – which has been a steep learning curve as we needed to migrate the functions to isolated functions and handle a couple of issues caused by upgrading nuget package versions. There are a few, er, quirks we’ve had to work through when upgrading the function apps but we got there in the end.

The design pattern of the week has been the Decorator pattern. It took me a while to get my head around it and why we would use it instead of just straightforward inheritance as it was quite difficult to find an example that I could understand – it’s quite an abstract concept and my brain works best if I can apply what I’m learning to a scenario I’m familiar with but talking it through with someone really helped me understand the flexibility it gives and why it’s used.

I had also been set the challenge of doing a DevBits* on the SOLID principles. Now I am not good at public speaking and I get extremely nervous about presenting anything to people I know, especially when they know a lot more than I do about the topic in question, so this was a bit of a stressful thing to do (yes I did lose sleep over it). It went well hough and I got some good feedback so am in the process of writing up a tech post about it and will update this post with a link to it when I’m done.

*DevBits – a bi-weekly drop-in session we have where anyone is welcome to give a short presentation on things they have learned, quirky problems solved, best practices, what not to do etc.