Review
A week after finishing the Hacker News Feed project, I had found another book to work through: Christian Horsdal’s Microservices in .NET, Second Edition (2021). I was (and still am) interested in learning more about both microservices and the .NET stack, so this book couldn’t have come at a better time. The difficulty seemed reasonable, it had some projects I could take a look at, and it even covered deploying to Azure, which I did manage to get working. Overall, the book covered mostly what it said it would, but it felt like it could have done so in a much shorter page count. This book does not cover everything very deeply, and in hindsight, I really should have seen this coming and heeded my advice from before.
I don’t have as many written notes as the Software Engineering with Golang book. The main value add for me was the code examples rather than the written content. Honestly, if you just read and understand the README and code from the repository that I made, then you’ll probably absorb like 70% of the book. But this is the notes section of the blog, so here are my main takeaways:
- Some example Dockerfiles for building .NET applications.
- Some Kubernetes manifests to consider reusing.
- The idea of using an event feed for publishing microservice actions seems useful.
- Working with unit and service tests.
- I didn’t understand most of it, but I did get my Azure Kubernetes Service cluster working without too many issues. I did notice it ate up almost $20 of credit only being deployed for a couple of days, so some optimizations may be needed.
Reflection/Future Work
In total, it took me ~33 hours spread over 18 (consecutive) days to work through this book cover-to-cover (300 pages) and get most of the code working. This actually represents a faster pace than usual, but that may be because I was already familiar with most of the concepts discussed in the book. If I’m being honest with myself, I think I definitely could have spent these 33 hours in a much more efficient manner.
The words “tutorial hell” spring to mind when I think back on this experience. For the past ~2 years, my learning strategy has more or less revolved around finding a book to read that ideally includes some sort of project that gets built as you go along. I’d take notes and add comments to the code so that I could look back and reference it later if I need to. This strategy has worked well back when I didn’t exactly know what I was doing and needed the hand-holding. I’ve grown a lot since then and have made several projects on my own, yet this need for hand-holding still persists. I recognize that there are times when books like this are useful, but I may have been long past that point for a while. I can’t expect my beginner strategy to work anywhere past the beginner stage.
Looking forward, I’ll try to come up with more of my own projects rather than follow along with a textbook. If I really need a project to reference, there’s a million .NET repositories on GitHub if I need them. If I need something to read, I’ll stick to the more popular recommendations like Building Microservices and DDIA, or a reference book if I really need it.