Yuriy's blog

In the life of every developer there is a time for support and maintenance. So in my life too. I love Jira as an issue tracking tool. Outlook is not a bad corporate email client neither. :) Thus inspired by this article and powerful Jira RESTfull API . I decided to spend few hours of my spare time to do something useful. The idea was to have a button in the Outlook so when you click, it would create a Jira ticket based upon the current email and modify the message by putting there a link to the created ticket. The final result of this you may see below So by using VSTO  and Jira API it was quite easy to achieve it. The article above mentioned is describing all steps required to create a VSTO project in Visual Studio. I'll just focus on the API been used. Basically to create an issue in Jira using API you should have an account and check if it is allowed to use the remote API in your instance of Jira and do the call it-self. In my case I wanted that issue t

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering  by  Frederick P. Brooks Jr . was the book that opened my eyes on software engineering planning when I was asked to manage the team of developers back in the 2007. It's a really deep dive into imperfectness of the man-month approach of planning in the software development that is actually leads us to the idea of an agile development process.

Interesting small book by 37signals about "The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful application". I'm a big fan of such agile principles like DSTCPW and YAGNI and this book underlines different practices of how to achieve it in the development of web applications. Few years ago with my colleague we did a presentation on these practices and on how we used them in our project. You can find the free pdf version here .

One more book I read long time ago. Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg is a very good book about Scrum. It is based on the real life examples. I glanced on my bookshelf recently and browsed through this book to recall things. It was a good thing to discover that in our company we are using a lot of technics described in it. I think this book is the must read for any agile software development team. For my Russian-speaking friends there is a free pdf version in Russian translated by Ukrainian Agile Community .

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft® .NET Framework Application Development Foundation, Second edition by Tony Northrup is a very good book to understand the essentials of the .NET Framework. I used it to pass the the exam few years ago. I would say it does not cover all the exam questions, more work and experience is required to pass it, but as a .NET book it works very well.

Just Spring by Madhusudhan Konda is a nice 80 pages book. Basically a brief introduction to the Spring Framework. The all you have to know to just start using Spring.

Nowadays we have a plenty of services allowing us to have things we had before in the "hard-copy" - online. And honestly I love it. It saves so much space in the apartment. Books - services like Amazon Kindle or Google Books allowing you to have your book, no matter how many pages it has, or even whole your library at your fingertips on any device you own. Musics - no more plastic CD boxes all around, Google Music, iTunes, Deezer or Spotify are here to store and stream you any music in the world. Videos - video streaming and video on-demand services are here to help you get rid of DVDs in your house. But frankly speaking I found my-self missing the look and feel of a book, fancy packaging of CD or DVD or even the "limited edition". I realized that while browsing a multimedia store, I didn't actually wanted to buy something but just to please my sense of sight and touch.