Thoughts

Magento 2 is the leading Open Source Software for e-commerce, with a vibrant community and proper product documentation.

Last summer a good friend of mine challenged me to help him move his Magento webshop from an on-premises server to the cloud. Also, to upgrade the webshop to the newest version (Magento 2).

As a developer, I’m a big fan of automation. I can’t create software where I need to push buttons and run manual scripts, to test & deploy it. To help me automate my software development tasks, I use Cake, "a cross platform build automation system with a C# DSL".

he first conference that I attend since we arrived in The Netherlands was the TechDays NL 2017. The conference is sponsored by Microsoft, and it’s one of the most significant tech events in the Benelux area. However, even being sponsored by Microsoft, other streams of the industry were present, showing that Microsoft is no longer "the evil".

Last week we had our annual Hackathon, my first at Coolblue. Here we are taken to a remote location for 3 days to hack away. I joined a team who wants to build an application to measure the happiness in Coolblue. Wait, measure happiness? How?

Here at Coolblue, we can choose our tools from a range of technologies. A while ago, our team started moving from Microsoft MSTest to xUnit.

During my career, I learned on the hardest way how a poor codebase can be harmful to the business. I witness behaviours in teams such as:

AppVeyor is one of the Continuous Integration Services in the cloud, ready to use, with minimal configuration. It provides a Windows Server image with tooling to build, test and deploy ours .NET applications. Among the baseline software is .NET Core, however, the version is 1.0.4 (at the time of writing this post).

Docker is one of the disruptive technologies within virtualization, allowing the different containers to run on the same machine, sharing resources, reducing the overhead. The technology allows DevOps teams to have another tool to develop, build and ship software. One use case for containers is the Microservices Architecture Pattern.