August 2016 – Stephen Haunts { Freelance Trainer and Writer }

I recently released my latest (7th) course over at Pluralsight called RabbitMQ by Example. This course shows you how to make full use of RabbitMQ in your .NET applications. RabbitMQ is a very powerful messaging broker and this course takes a practical look at how to use it by showing you how to build a payments system.

RabbitMQ By Example Course by Stephen Haunts at Pluralsight

Here is the official course description :

In this course, RabbitMQ by Example, you will see how to use RabbitMQ by using practical examples featuring a fictional company and a software development scenario based around taking card payments and purchase order payments. You’ll start with an introduction to RabbitMQ and how it compares to Windows’ default queue technology, MSMQ. As well as looking at RabbitMQ specifically, you will look at message queuing architectures, micro services, and how RabbitMQ can work as a broker for handling asynchronous and synchronous messages in this architecture. You will also get to explore the use of the topics exchange for routing and synchronous remote procedure calls. By the end of this course, you’ll be ready to use RabbitMQ in your .NET applications.

The course is split into 8 modules

Introduction
Introducing RabbitMQ
Introducing RabbitMQ Exchanges
Understanding Queuing Architecture
Implementing Microservices and Message Queueing
Installing and Configuring RabbitMQ
Implementing Queueing Code
Course Summary

The example application built in this course is based around the concept of Microservices, so this is a great use case for modern enterprise application development. The feedback from the course so far has been excellent as it has been getting very good ratings, so I am glad that it is helping people.

Data Security talk at NDC Oslo

August 31, 2016 Stephen Haunts Leave a comment

Back in June I was fortunate enough to be selected to speak at NDC Oslo in Norway. This is a huge developer conference and I was humbled to have been selected to speak. Below is a link to a recording of my talk on .NET Data Security and it is all about cryptography using .NET.

The talk was great fun and the audience seemed really receptive to what I was talking about which reflected in a great speaker score afterwards. This was by far the largest audience I have spoken too as the room was full with people standing at the back. Security is a very hot topic at the moment so this subject resonated with many developers.

As always at an NDC conference there were many great speakers on the bill, a good few I know from my work with Pluralsight, so it is always good to catch up with friends. The highlight of the trip, when not at the conference itself, was a shrimp cruise on the fjords. The weather was fantastic and sunny and we sailed until late in the evening. I had to not drink too much though as my talk was the next day first thing.

I am currently planning next years content so I really hope to make it back to both NDC London and NDC Oslo. They are such an amazing experience to attend as a speaker, and it is great to see other people speak to learn different delivery techniques.

NDC Oslo Work in Progress the Day Before it Started

Another highlight of the conference was being part of a .NET Rocks security show. This was a live panel show with myself, Troy Hunt and Niall Merrigan. The show was recorded as a video, but then edited down into an episode of the PodCast which you can listen too here.

DotNet Rocks live Security Panel Show at NDC Oslo

We had a lot of fun doing this show, but it was hard work as many of us had started coming down with a throat bug which meant we were losing our voices. I had to go to a pharmacy before hand to get enough drugs to see me through the show. Within 2 hours of doing this show for DotNet Rocks I had pretty much lost my voice. By the time I had flown back to London I could not speak at all, which is interesting when trying to check into a hotel. I had no voice the the entire week after too which made things very difficult at work. I was mostly communicating with my team using Slack.

Agile/Conferences

Speaking at DDDNorth

August 31, 2016 Stephen Haunts Leave a comment

I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at this years DDDNorth community conference about Lean Software Development. This is my first DDD event so I am looking forward to it. The conference is a free one day event that is being held at Leeds University on Saturday 1st October. Here is my talk description.

Lean software development (LSD) is a translation of lean manufacturing and lean IT principles and practices to the software development domain. Adapted from the Toyota Production System, a pro-lean subculture is emerging from within the Agile community

In this talk we will look at Lean Software Development and how it is a benefit to modern development.

We will start off quickly looking at Waterfall and Agile, and then look at the history of Lean and its origins at Ford and Toyota. From there we will show how leans applies to software with the following lean principles:

Eliminate Waste

Build Quality In

Create Knowledge

Defer Commitment

Deliver Fast

Respect People

Optimize the Whole

We will then answer the question Agile or Lean and then look at different software practices that will help support your use of lean including Kanban.

The talk would be aimed at software developers who are keen to apply lean to their software projects.

Commentary/Life at a Startup

Life at a Start-up : 3 Months In

August 31, 2016August 31, 2016 Stephen Haunts Leave a comment

It has been over 3 months since I last blogged about my new job at the start-up Buying Butler, but I have deliberately waiting until I have spent more time here. So much has happened in this short space of time and it is all very exciting. As a team we are expanding quite rapidly after a round of investment to build out our 2 main products, Buying Butler and RightIndem.

Buying Butlers new office above Belgos in Nottingham

I will write in more detail in another blog post about what these products are, but at a high level BuyingButler is a concierge buying site, primarily focused on cars, that lets you make that complex purchase with the help of an expert. This system uses some clever AI to help make car recommendations and walks the buyer through the entire buying and tendering process with different dealers.

Our 2nd product, RightIndem, is an insurance claims management system that is initially targeting towards cars but we have plans for other industries too. This system makes the entire claims management process very transparent for both the insurance company and the claimant. This system is generating a lot of interest in the insurance and insurtech field and we are currently running pilots with some major names. There is a synergy between these 2 products but I will cover that in a separate post.

When I started in May I was the only full time developer and I have been focusing mainly on the RightIndem side of the business, but in this short space of time I have been heavily recruiting to build out our core team. At the time of writing this post I have 6 full time developers who have started or are due to start within the next few weeks and we have augmented with 3 contractors. This is quite a lot of grown in a short space of time and I can see this team getting bigger over the next 6 months.

Because of this growth we very quickly outgrew our existing office in Nottingham. With developers, design, testing, marketing and product / project management we are currently up to over 18 people so we have had to move office to central Nottingham. The new office is in a great location in the Lace Market side of town. The office is an old building that has been modernised, so we have a mix of quirky building and modern fits and finishing’s. We have been in the office for just over a month now and the place is really starting to take shape as you can see from some of the photos in this post.

In future posts in this series I want to cover lots of subjects including a more detailed looked at the products we are building, the approach we are taking to software development, our hiring process and many more.