Author: KevinAvignon
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Announcing the focused generalist mindset newsletter 🎉
Hello everyone, This post is an announcement post regarding the newsletter that I’m starting ✨✍🏾 I’ll be approaching write new short posts (under 10 minutes of reading per post). I’ll be using the blog for longer pieces especially when describing issues through projects or describing in-depth thoughts on a technical matter. Thank you for being…
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Beware of Dragons: A Distributed Systems Adventure
Welcome to “Beware of Dragons in the Dungeons,” an online book you can access through a GitHub repository. This book is a unique journey that combines the magic of fantasy with the world of computer systems. In this hands-on online book, you’re about to start a journey to discover the secrets of distributed systems and…
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Preparing for a system design interview
Hello readers, It has been a while (2 years!!!) since my last entry. I’ve been busy, and I apologize for not getting back any sooner. I’ve got some news. There were layoffs at my previous company, and I’m now on the market looking for my next opportunity. Being more of a senior candidate, I can…
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Selling your ideas at work, building influence and credibility, and becoming a more efficient communicator
Hi readers, Why should we focus on our soft skills? As you may very well know, we, software developers, tend to spend most, if not, our entire time focused on developing technical skills. While we should not aim to be perfect across the board, we’d be better off reeling it in a bit. It can…
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Tips to ensure success in new software engineering jobs
Hi readers, So big news! Last month, I left my previous employer (Hypertherm) and started a new job this month at Divisions Maintenance Group as a Sr. software engineer. As it is fresh in my memory and that I am still being onboarded, I would like to share what I’ve been doing/planning on doing at…
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The F# Mentorship Schedule Planner
Hi readers, F# advent calendar For those who are not aware, the F# advent calendar has been initiated by Sergey Tihon a couple of years ago. I started participating in it last year and I must say that the F# community is amazing! Everyone always produces great content to share. Honestly, I could not have…
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Guidelines to improve your software design skills with .NET (Part I)
Hi readers, C# advent calendar This year, I decided to participate in the C# advent calendar. You can find other posts for the C# advent calendar here. I had the chance to partake before in the F# advent calendar and was not aware that there was one for C# users. I feel this blog entry…
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Why am I dropping the text-based game?
A few weeks ago, I was interested in the idea of building my own text-based adventure game using React with F#. I was using this project as a way to practice the new React skills I’d be investing in. Upon pondering on the topic, I put aside the idea of the text-based game. It wasn’t…
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Presenting the intelligent fighting game coach
What is an intelligent fight game coach? How could I describe it in a few words? A fascinating and engaging stepping stone into artificial intelligence development from my perspective. Here is a summary description of how things are going to work: Provide your fighting style preference, for example: Zoning: Keep away characters at bay by…
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Why build a text-adventure game?
Welcome back to my online text adventure series. Let’s discuss what is the game about and what makes it interesting for me. First, let’s ponder on why, while the new generation of gaming is upon us, I want to build a text-adventure game. Well, it’s an easy question to answer. I want to build an…
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Introduction to the text adventure
Hi, This marks the beginning of my new passion project. As per usual, many different fields in software engineering pique my interest. I aspire to get to know different fields and continue to grow as a software developer. Beforehand, I thought I’d get to build a web platform and also a game. I decided to…
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Testing your software system with resilient randomized tests
Resiliency against change & avoiding regression The real cost of software isn’t the initial development, but the maintenance over time. In time, the requirements will change, there will be new feature requests and the business might change direction. With all those undeniable changes coming to the code, there’s a real need to make the systems…
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Running for the F# Software Foundation board
Hey everyone, First, for those who don’t know the F# Software foundation, here’s a link 🙂 In a few words, their mission is the following: The F# Software Foundation is a community operated, not-for-profit organization dedicated to our mission. As an organization, we actively encourage a diverse community of F# developers to join us in…
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Be proud of your work and keep on learning everyday
Hi everyone, I think the title of this post says it all mostly. I am not here to judge you, this is me talking about my own journey and sharing my random thoughts on my blog 🙂 The way I see things is that the software field is a very fickle field in fact. We…
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Learning about leading projects and building web projects with F#
Hi, It’s been a few weeks and I apologize. The recent events are tough on everyone and it’s getting a bit harder to find the focus to keep going on personal projects and my blog. So, something newsworthy happened to me in the past few weeks. Initially, I was working on with a design team…
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Handling Missing Info in .NET
Hi everyone, C# 8.0 has brought up a lot of great features and among them there is the ‘Nullable Reference Type’ feature. Probably the most impactful feature of C# 8.0 is Nullable Reference Types (NRTs). It lets you make the flow of nulls explicit in your code, and warns you when you don’t act according…
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The Elmish Book by Zaid Ajaj
Hey everyone! I don’t know who has already seen this but I want to make sure it’s visible everywhere! Zaid has been putting so much energy building awesome tools and documentation around Fable! Now, he has released publicly a book on developing web applications through F# and Elmish! Here’s a snippet of the readme: The…
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Building a production-ready full-stack web application with SAFE – 0
Hi to all, You’re here today to hear about this new application that we’ll be building during the next few months. F# Background I’ve been introduced to F# by my old mentor during an internship back in 2016 and had the chance since then to work on multiple projects with it on projects such as…
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Baby steps with F# and functional programming
For the uninitiated, F# is a general-purpose programming language found in .NET. Contrary to C# who promotes objects as its first-class citizen (can receive and output objects in methods), F# promotes functions at its first citizens. This means that the preferred way of doing this will be through functional programming, but it doesn’t meet that…
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Numbers Everyone Should Know
Originally posted on Everything is Data: When you’re designing a performance-sensitive computer system, it is important to have an intuition for the relative costs of different operations. How much does a network I/O cost, compared to a disk I/O, a load from DRAM, or an L2 cache hit? How much computation does it make sense…
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A few cool courses to do
Hi, So I stumbled into this amazing gem and also this one! Seriously, go check those ASAP 😀 They’ll provide free courses made available by universities and I’ve found so many that I want to do, but I’ll have to restrict myself otherwise I won’t find the time to do them all but here’s a…
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Week 1 F# Mentorship: Full-stack web app + ML experiments
Hi, So we’re one week into the F# mentorship program and I’ve got some progress to share. I’ve had the chance to met with my mentee and that went really great! He has signed up to get an introduction to the language and that’s exactly what we’ve planned to do. We’ve went over some fundamentals…
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Running internal hackathon to spark innovation and collaboration
Hi, So I wanted to talk about the very first project that I’ve shared with my team when I started at Robotmaster. My team initially told me that if there was anything I could bring up that I felt could help them in any way, I was free to do so. I’d really like to…
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Mentoring C# and F# developers on Exercism
Hi, Last year, I started to contribute on Exercism. For those who do not know what is Exercism, in a few words it’s Exercism aims to provide opportunity for people of all backgrounds by helping them develop their programming skills through practice and mentorship. We provide thousands of exercises spread across over 50 language tracks,…
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8th round of F# mentorship program
Hi, Last fall, I’ve entered the 7th round of mentorship with F# community. It’s a great program and it’s also free. I have the chance to meet a great mentor that taught me a lot about F#. For 2020, I’ve also entered the mentorship program of the Winter period as both a mentee and…
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Earning my yellow belt in Python
Hi, So it took some work but today I earned my yellow belt in Python on CodeWars. Now, I’m focused on getting familiar with the internal APIs of Python. When I finally earn my blue belt, that’s when I’ll start focusing on big O from the get-go. I still make sure my code isn’t inefficient,…
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Early steps in performance engineering
Performance engineering has been something I’ve been pushing at my job for the past few months. We’ve had performance issues that needed to be solved and it felt like even if we fixed them, we could still get hit by a regression. So that’s when I started to research online to find a solution to…
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System Design Principles from Jeff Dean
Hi everyone, Presentation made by Jeff Dean, the current leader of the Google AI division Each talk bring excellent points to keep in mind while designing a system that will scale at large We can exclude the information related solely on distributed systems and focus on the common principles for software design Designs, Lessons and…
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Ranking up to 7th kyu with Python
Hi, About a week ago, I started training with my algorithms and data structures skills with Python. Today I had a small victory. I’ve finally ranked up to 7th kyu with Python 🙂 My top language, for now, is C# in which I’m ranked at 5 kyu (yellow belt) almost at 4 kyu (blue belt).…
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Waking at 5 am to get stuff done
Hi, Today I feel extra motivated so I’ve decided to write more posts. So, before the end of 2019, I spent a lot of time thinking on how I wanted to grow during the year and the next ones. One thing that needed to change in my routine before I could start being serious about…
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The F# company list
Hi, Last year, I saw a few functional programming languages had repositories on which you could find companies that use those languages. Because that looked like a fun initiative and I couldn’t find an equivalent for F#, I created one and shared it on a few social networks like Reddit. I’m writing about it now…
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My master class in Machine Learning & Deep Learning with Python
Hi, One of my biggest goals in 2020 is to dive deep in Python and machine learning; two things I haven’t really explored in the time I’ve been in tech. That’s about to change. Even though I have experience with other frameworks and programming languages, I do not consider my self as an “experienced Python…
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Experiments and Adventures in 2019 with F#
Hi readers, This year has been a big one in the field of software engineering for me. My close friends know that F# has always been a technology that I loved and I promised myself I would start doing more F# development than I have ever done before. FSSF I’ve joined the F# FSSF community…
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Promoting F# in a C#-based team
Why does functional programming matter? Functional programming is the new hotness right now, but regardless of the hype, most modern programming languages are introducing FP-friendly features that make a big difference to software quality: Delegates LINQ Read-only properties Pattern matching Readonly value types Tuples As we’re adding features and applying good software engineering practices, we’re…
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Why students in college should participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC)
Hi everyone, Today’s post is targeting students in college. The main idea is to sell you the idea of participating in the Google Summer of Code program that Google host every year since 2005. Oh and by the way, this is just free publicity, the program does not provide any money to me in order…
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3 Tips & tricks for Kickass Developers in 2019
Hi, For those looking for new ways to kick off 2019 with a bang with your .NET skills, keep on reading 🙂 1. Leverage more LINQ in your C# code Lately, functional programming has been a really hot and trending topic. C# is becoming more of a functional programming language to stay on par with…
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Tech Questions #4: Should I use ToArray/ToList in LINQ queries?
Hi, Quick word on LINQ So today’s post is going to be focused around LINQ which is an acronym for Language INtegrated Query. For those who are unaware and would be interested in learning more about LINQ, I invite you to go on this page. In a few words, LINQ is the name for a…
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Follow my social media activity
Hi, Quick post, I promise! I update my blog and you can now follow me on the social networks I’m active on 🙂 I created a YouTube channel to share my experience and knowledge, but mostly, to document my experiences as I’m trying to pick up new skills and maintaining acquired skills. On my Instagram…
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Onto finding my dream job
Hi readers, It has been way too long since my last post and I’m truly sorry. I’ve been reflecting on my year of 2018 workwise and some part of it wasn’t so fun and I wanted to share my experience. I have had a total three different employments that year and I went on 35-40…
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2017 successes
Hi, I’m starting the year by taking a look back to last year. A lot of things has happened and right now, I’m looking ahead for things to come. Many things happened to me. I’m trying to sort them out. January – August 2017 Those were my last months as an undergrad student in software…
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Hidden .NET Gems – ReactiveUI
Hi, Today, I’m going to talk about an open source gem in .NET for developing WPF applications for people who are interested in reactive and functional programming. To understand the work behind ReactiveUI, one mst understand Rx, or rather Reactive Extensions for .NET. The goal of the syntax of ReactiveUI for read-write properties is to notify…
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Hidden .NET Gems – Path.Combine
Hi, I’ve learned about the magic of the method Combine from Path a few months ago. Usually, even in production code, we tend to use string concatenation through either directly using ‘+’ or StringBuilder. Thing is, you do not want to directly use string concatenation to build your path. Try to think about using your…
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Hidden .NET Gems – Aliased generics
Hi, I’ve started a job as C# software engineer consultant on the 15th of this month. It’s given me the opportunity to go back over my XAML with WPF and Silverlight and doing some refactoring with C#. Doing so, I’ve been pushing my C# foo & re-discovered some things that I hadn’t use in a…
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SmartSavings: Go full-stack mobile dev – Part 0
Hi, This is my third and probably last post of the day. As you probably know, I’m currently in the process on working on multiple projects and getting out of my comfort zone and I’m going to share my experiences right here with you, readers, so may not have to go through the same challenges.…
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FastOrder: real-time pizza order placement – Part 0
Hi, I’m picking web and mobile development lately as they are super trendy at the moment. But it’s more than that. I’m a firm believer that in this profession, software development, we can’t keep still. We ought to ourselves to move way outside our comfort bubbles and try new things even if it’s a small…
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Tech questions 1-3: Linq
Hey guys, This is a new series I will try to maintain to the best of my capabilities. I’m this awesome blogger who happens to be also a Microsoft MVP called Iris Classon. After her first year of programming, she started to ask and get answers for what she’d call “stupid question”. Why would she…
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A better tomorrow for source code with Roslyn
Hi guys, I’ve spent quite some time in the past using the Roslyn API, in an internship and during the Google Summer of Code 2015. Thought I’d be a great idea to present it here. The .NET Compiler Platform, known by the name of Roslyn, was made available to the public as an extension to…
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Implementing a Stack in F#. Tail Recursion.
Originally posted on Viral F#: Since Push requires stacks to manipulate its data, we need an implementation of this data structure. There is of course a .NET implementation, however, it is not a “functional” data structure, in a sense that it is mutable. It is easy enough to implement our own, purely functional, immutable stack.…
The focused generalist 