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Azure Logic Apps vs. Microsoft Flow

Which would you choose? Or should you be choosing at all?

Introduction

These days, you can’t go to a Microsoft conference where the question of “What is the difference between Microsoft Flow and Azure Logic Apps?” isn’t asked. For many people, they think the answer is binary; you need to use one or the other. While people have preferences, and perhaps even biases, it is important not to rule the other technology out, as you are likely missing out on opportunities for your organization.

You may also enjoy:  When to Use Logic Apps and Azure Functions

Personas

When Microsoft has answered the Azure Logic Apps vs. Microsoft Flow question in the past, personas generally played a role in deriving an answer. When it comes to “Power users” or even “Citizen Developers,” Microsoft Flow is generally identified as the tool of choice, in part due to it being the targeted audience for why the tool was created.

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Checking the .NET Core Libraries With the PVS-Studio Static Analyzer (Part Three)

See what's inside the .NET Core Libraries

In the third article in our three-part series, we further discuss the results of checking the .NET Core Libraries' source code with the PVS-Studio Static Analyzer. Part one of the series can be found here, part two can be found here. 

You may also like: .NET Core 3.0 Preview Now Available.

Issue 41

Going back to constructors with unused parameters:

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Scrum Guide Decomposition, Part 4

This is the fourth and final part of the Scrum Deconstruction.  You can find part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here. As mentioned previously, I did this as a method to help me understand the Scrum Guide better, and as part of my study for the Scrum.org's PSM I exam that I took back in October 2017. I have made updates based on the newest version of the Scrum Guide, November 2017.

Here I share in the hope that someone finds it useful.

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If Bitcoin Fails, Will Blockchain Technology Ultimately Follow?

A year ago, on December 17, 2017, Bitcoin price reached its all-time maximum — $19,783.21. Since then, it has steadily declined, just like the faith of investors in cryptocurrencies, and today, it is close to just $3,000.

Experts say this downfall is happening due to disheartening discoveries, like the one that nearly 85 percent of ICO’s in 2017 were a scam, or that more than 50 percent of Bitcoin startups stop functioning in four months after their ICOs.

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Pattern of the Month: Peer

In Agile practice, the completion of work is seen as being the responsibility of the team. Although individual team members may action a particular backlog item in whole or in part, it will be the team which owns it. This principle is ingrained to the point that — in the Scrum framework — it shapes the way in which roles are defined. Hence, you will find a role in Scrum called "Development Team," but not one filled by an individual "Developer."

Each Agile team member is considered to be a peer to the others. For this to hold true, there must be a shared sense of commitment to team goals, and an ability for those people to work together. In an efficient team, the various members will "go to where the work is," rather than waiting for work to come to them. This implies that a degree of cross-skilling and cross-training ought to be in evidence, and which is sufficient to overcome the waste that would otherwise be accrued through bottlenecks and skill-silos. Efficient peers will collaborate with regard to who performs certain tasks at certain times. Any scheduling that they agree amongst themselves will thus become orthogonal to the flow of work.

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A Year of Continuous Deployment: Lessons Learned

About a year ago, we started working on the Run Insights feature for CloudBees DevOptics. A small team of engineers (averaging around three to four of us) worked on the Run Insights service over the course of the past year. The Run Insights service gave us the opportunity to develop a greenfield service using continuous deployment from the very start.

One year, and over 343 deployments later, I thought it would be a good idea to share what we have learned from our experience.

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Scrum Guide Decomposition, Part 2

This is the second part of the Scrum Deconstruction.  You can find part 1 here. As mentioned previously, I did this as a method to help me understand the Scrum Guide better, and as part of my study for the Scrum.org’s PSM I exam that I took back in October last year. I have made updates based on the newest version of the Scrum Guide, November 2017.

Here I share in the hope that someone finds it useful.

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Technical Innovation vs. Process Innovation

When it comes to tech startups, we often talk about innovation — “digital innovation” (or “technical innovation”) in particular. It has, unfortunately, become a cliche, and now “innovation” is devoid of meaning. I’ve been trying to do some meaningful analysis of the “innovation landscape,” and to classify what is being called “innovation.”

The broad classification I got to is “technical innovation” vs. “process innovation.” In the majority of cases, tech startups are actually process innovations. They get existing technology and try to optimize a real-world process with it. Some examples of these processes would include “communicating with friends online,” “getting in touch with business contacts online,” “getting a taxi online,” “getting a date online,” “ordering food online,” “sharing photos online,” and so on. There is no inherent technical innovation in any of these — they either introduce new (and better) processes, or they optimize existing ones.