April 17

Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Scientist Associate

Azure Data Scientist Associate badge

Yessir, you read that right. I acquired the Azure Data Scientist Associate certification the other day. A little later than I was hoping for, but I got it done. If I have to blame anything or anybody, I'll blame the CGI-BJSS acquisition and all the stress and uncertainty that has brought.

In other news, did anybody notice that Microsoft has retired the Azure Data Engineer Associate certification as of March 30, 2025? Bummer. I liked that one. Glad I renewed it back in January of 2025 so I won't put that into the retirement bucket until it is expired next January.

Allright...on to the next thing...

Category: Azure, Certifications | LEAVE A COMMENT
March 26

Seeking Input for My Upcoming Talk on Code Metrics

Howdy!

I'm preparing a talk on code metrics and would love input from the community on what to cover. I'll be presenting this later this year at both the Houston .NET User Group and the North Houston .NET User Group.

Throughout my software engineering career, I’ve encountered many of these metrics, but I’ve rarely seen a single, clear explanation of them all in one place. My goal with this talk is to demystify code metrics—helping software engineers, architects, and engineering managers understand what these metrics are, what insights they provide, and their limitations.

Right now, I’m planning to cover the following metrics:

  • Code Coverage %

  • Cyclomatic Complexity

  • Maintainability Index

  • Lines of Code (LOC)

  • Code Churn

  • Afferent & Efferent Coupling

  • Instability

  • Coupling Between Objects

  • Depth of Inheritance Tree (DIT)

  • Lack of Cohesion in Methods (LCOM)

  • Tight Class Cohesion / Loose Class Cohesion

  • Response for a Class (RFC)

  • Duplication Percentage

  • Defect Density

This is probably more than I can fit into an hour, so I’d love your input:
✅ Which of these metrics should I prioritize?
✅ Are there any important metrics I’ve overlooked?
✅ Have you found specific metrics useful or misleading in your work?

If there’s enough interest, I could explore a deeper dive or a follow-up session on specific metrics. Let me know what you think!

Category: .NET | Comments Off on Seeking Input for My Upcoming Talk on Code Metrics
March 22

Supercharge Your .NET Testing with NCrunch – The Slide Deck

On Thursday, March 20, 2025, I gave a lightning talk at the North Houston .NET User Group meeting in The Woodlands, Texas. If you are interested in the slide deck I put together here's the PowerPoint presentation; Supercharge Your .NET Testing with NCrunch.

The slide deck doesn't really have anything earth shattering. I used it mostly as a guide for what I wanted to cover.

I felt the talk went well. I was hoping for alot of audience participation which I got. Turns out there are a few people who have used NCrunch who were there. It was a good opportunity to compare notes.

TLDR; NCrunch is awesome and you should use it.

If there are any additional questions, let me know and I'll get them answered.

Category: .NET, Tools, unit testing | Comments Off on Supercharge Your .NET Testing with NCrunch – The Slide Deck
March 14

Speaking at the March 2025 North Houston .NET User Group

At the upcoming North Houston .NET User Group meeting (3/20/2025), Tony Cardella, Software Engineer and Software Engineering Capability Lead at BJSS, will be delivering a lightning talk on the topic of NCrunch.

Title: Supercharge Your .NET Testing with NCrunch

Tired of waiting for tests to run? NCrunch is a powerful continuous testing tool for .NET that runs your tests in the background, providing instant feedback, real-time code coverage, and parallel execution to speed up development. In this lightning talk, we’ll explore how NCrunch works, highlight its key features, and see it in action with a quick demo.

More information is available here: https://www.meetup.com/nhdnug/events/305901663/

Hope to see you there!

Category: .NET, BJSS, C#, Tools, unit testing | Comments Off on Speaking at the March 2025 North Houston .NET User Group
January 11

Looking Forward in 2025…

At the tailend of 2024, I was asked to put together an "engineer development plan" for my employer. In that plan I had put down a path of certifications to pursue in 2025. Originally, it was AWS AI Practitioner (optional), AWS Developer Associate, and AWS Solution Architect Associate. All of that between January 2025 and December 2025.

At the time in January 2025, I was toying to get the Azure AI Fundamentals, the AWS AI Practitioner, the AWS Developer Associate, and then the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certifications in that order. I picked up the Azure AI Fundamentals certification. It was easy enough with having to find drivers for the microphone on the laptop I was using and the very loud conference call that kicked off next door. The lesson to be learned here is to do the exams later in the evening when the bulk of people have gone home.

I got the Azure AI Fundamentals certification on January 8th and then my manager mentioned to me that I should plug a "perceived skill gap" between my current skillsets and where my employer is apparently wanting to go. Apparently, there is some work coming in the future around machine learning. Microsoft's certification that covers machine learning is Azure Data Scientist Associate. It's weird that it's not an "Expert" level certification because the exam for that is DP-100. The Cybersecurity Architect Expert is SC-100 and that's an Expert level certification.

I'm going to call an audible and go after the Azure Data Scientist certification and then after that get back on the AWS plan I outlined towards the beginning of this blog. Let's talk timing on when I'll get this certification. I think (given the current conditions at work which are subject to change), that it is reasonable to expect to pick up this certification sometime between February 1, 2025 and February 15, 2025. If I feel that I'm ready for it before then, I won't have a problem taking it earlier. If I get the certification earlier, that'll be lagniappe.

...and here we go!

Category: AWS, Azure, BJSS, Career, Certifications, Certifications | Comments Off on Looking Forward in 2025…
December 1

Advent of Code 2024

It's that time of year again. That's right it's Christmas time and that means...Advent of Code!

Why am I doing Advent of Code this year?

  1. I'm trying to learn Python better. This is the perfect excuse.
  2. My employer, BJSS, is a sponsor again this year.

Language + Tech Stack

In previous years, I've done AoC with .NET/C#, but this year I will be using Python. While an IDE is not needed for Python, I've decided to use JetBrains PyCharm. Check it out if you haven't seen it. I'm still learning the shortcuts, which reminds me to print out the shortcuts. I like using unit testing to help verify that my code works and for that I'll be using pytest. I've been using NCrunch as my .NET continuous test runner but I'll have to use something else for Python; pytest-watch.

Source Control

Git/GitHub is my source control of choice. I added a CI/CD pipeline to validate the code once it's been pushed to the master branch.

Workflow

  1. Setup the code for the puzzle of the day (i.e. add the boilerplate code, but try to keep the amount down)
  2. Read the prompt for part 1.
  3. Start writing code to get the example working for part 1.
  4. Once the code is running with the example, run it against the actual input.
  5. Submit the actual output value.
  6. If the answer is incorrect, rework the code and go to step 4.
  7. If the answer is correct, update the expected value for the part 1 test so that it's green.
  8. Read the prompt for part 2.
  9. Start writing code to the example working for part 2.
  10. Once the code is running with the example, run it against the actual input.
  11. Submit the actual output value.
  12. If the answer is incorrect, rework the code and go to step 10.
  13. If the answer is correct, update the expected value for the part 2 test so that it's green.
  14. Commit the puzzle as is to Git.
  15. Refactor the code til it looks presentable to the public and/or resolve any perf issues.
  16. Commit the refactored code to Git.
  17. Done.

Where can I see your progress?

You can see my progress on my GitHub repo.

Category: .NET, Advent of Code, BJSS, C#, Python | Comments Off on Advent of Code 2024
September 21

gRPC + .NET: Lessons from the Trenches Retrospective

Now that I've had a chance to slow down a bit let's do some creative writing. Let's talk about the "gRPC + .NET: Lessons from the Trenches" talk I gave at the North Houston .NET User Group. As I said previously, the talk was received well and I was really happy about that.

The inspiration or the idea to talk about gRPC came from the work I was doing at a large oil & gas company located in the Energy Corridor in Houston, Texas. My stint on the project lasted about 20 months.

This was actually the 3rd time I've given the talk. The first time was for an internal BJSS event in April of 2024. The second was at the Houston .NET User Group back in June 2024. The neat thing about taking a talk from scratch all the way through several iterations is how the presentation "feels". You should find potholes as you go and make notes to double back to correct and/or add to them.

The intent with the talk was to answer the following questions:

  • What is gRPC?
  • Can you give some evidence that shows that gRPC out-performs REST API?
  • Have you ever used gRPC on a real project?
  • What were some of the issues/problems you encountered and how did you work around them?
  • When should you use gRPC?
  • When should you NOT use gRPC?

I feel like when I got to the 3rd iteration of the talk I was answering all those questions completely and coherently. Including the benchmarks in this version of the talk was a good addition and I'll credit Daniel Wright, Principal Technologist @ BJSS Houston with the idea for that one.

I was surprised that the audience this time around had more experience with gRPC than I was expecting. This lead to alot of good questions and some leading questions that came up right before I answered them on the next slide. The talk started to take on more of a conversation kind of feel than a lecture.

While I did have fun putting this talk together and giving it, I don't think I'm going to hang up my developers hat yet. I'm sure there is still a project out there that needs my help! Now it's time to find another topic to talk about and then probably re-do the circuit next year.

Category: .NET, BJSS, C#, gRPC | Comments Off on gRPC + .NET: Lessons from the Trenches Retrospective
September 20

gRPC + .NET: Lessons from the Trenches Powerpoint Slide Deck

Hey! If you were one of the people who came out to the September 2024 North Houston .NET User Group meeting tonight...thank you! You all were a great audience and I loved the interaction.

As promised, here is a copy of my Powerpoint slide deck (gRPC + .NET: Lessons From the Trenches). Feel free to ask questions if you still have any.

Have a suggestion for another talk I should do? Let me know and if there is enough there I can put one together.

Category: .NET, ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, C#, gRPC | Comments Off on gRPC + .NET: Lessons from the Trenches Powerpoint Slide Deck
September 11

How to Host a gRPC Service With an Azure App Service (as of 9/10/2024 anyway…)

I'm giving a talk on gRPC next week and I wanted to add more content around some gRPC benchmarks. The recent work I was doing for a client with gRPC was hosted in containers and hosted in AWS. This worked well and we had minimal issues once we got it up and running. For the benchmarks I'm looking to run, I just needed to host the gRPC service in an Azure App Service. Now that I found the correct documentation, this is a piece of cake and I'd like to point it out to anybody else who might be looking for this information in the future.

This is the documentation for deploying a gRPC app on an Azure App Service:

I can confirm that this will also work for .NET 8. It was not working for .NET 9 as of 9/11/2024. I'd expect that to get fixed in the near future.

Category: .NET, ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, Azure, C#, gRPC | Comments Off on How to Host a gRPC Service With an Azure App Service (as of 9/10/2024 anyway…)
August 6

H2 2024 Update

Well...we're alittle over 1 month into the second half of 2024. It's been a bizarre July filled with a hurricane, a vacation, and some unexpected twists and turns.

Let's go over the TODO list of the things that I know I need to do.

  • Take and pass the GitHub Foundations exam (holdover from H1 2024)
  • Renew Information Protection and Compliance Administrator Associate (< 9/28/2024) - Completed 8/6/2024
  • Renew Identity and Access Administrator Associate (< 10/9/2024) - Completed 8/7/2024
  • Renew Security Operations Analyst Associate (< 10/28/2024) - Completed 8/8/2024
  • Renew Cybersecurity Architect Expert (< 11/21/2024) - Completed 8/9/2024
  • Give gRPC + .NET: Lessons from the Trenches talk to NHDNUG in September 2024
  • Attend HDNUG meetings
  • Attend NHDNUG meetings
  • Attend HAUG meetings
  • Attend Clear Measure Architect Forums
  • brainstorm ideas for another talk to give in 2025 (maybe with more of a Azure-cloud flavor?)

And then the areas that still need more clarification:

  • Decide on a cert path to go down
    • GitHub - Actions, Advanced Security, Administration
    • Azure AI - AI-900, AI-102
    • AWS - AI Practitioner, Solutions Architect Associate, Developer, DevOps Engineer, Solutions Architect Professional

That's all I've got so far. I still need to have some conversations with people at work to figure out what I need to prioritize with respect to my employer. I'll provide an update when I have one.

Category: .NET, Azure, Career, Certifications | Comments Off on H2 2024 Update