After the success of our last lightning talk event in July - we decided that it was about time for another one - proving that lightning most certainly does strike twice! And like the last one, it was fantastic seeing the variation and community-feel that the lightning talk format brings.

It feels like lately you can't turn around without hearing the term 'serverless'. It seems to have become the latest architectural buzzword. So we were very pleased to have Christos Matskas from Microsoft speaking at .NET Oxford about what this term actually means, and also about the awesome Serverless choices we have in Microsoft's cloud platform - Azure!

I quite often hear experienced Git users say that you should always use the command line for Git, and you should try to avoid using Git GUIs. Whilst I understand the reasons given, I also think it's a huge generalization that unfairly sees Git GUI users as unlikely to really understand Git properly. I certainly know Git very well, and honestly think I'm far faster and more efficient in a Git GUI than I could possibly be on the command line - and I'm certainly not slow in the CLI.

Not realising that it was something called National Coding Week this past week - I started seeing Tweets from Ridgeway (a company I used to work with) where each day a different one of their developers would answer the following three questions...

This is something that's been on my "to blog about" list for quite a while - so I thought it was about time! I've been using the Cake Build system for a few different projects now, and it has quickly become my go-to method of building and deploying my projects.

Reactive Bots? What's that all about? Well the title for this month's .NET Oxford actually refers to two different talks ... 'The fuss about Bots?' with Martin Kearn, and 'An Introduction to Reactive Extensions' with James World ...

This week we had our 5th .NET Oxford, and this time we had Matt Ellis from Jetbrains talking about their new cross platform .NET IDE - Rider!

I'm a heavy user of Workflowy, which is an amazing tool for taking notes. Due to the very hierarchical nature of Workflowy, I had a random idea that this would make a very cool Neo4j visualization! So I made a thing, and put it on GitHub.

On Tuesday it was our fourth .NET Oxford, and this time we had a slightly different format ... In order to give more people the opportunity to get up and talk, we decided to go with a lightning / grok talk event. There was actually quite a lot of interest, and the speaker slots filled up very quickly with a really good line-up ...

I was recently investigating issues in some scheduling and dispatching code, which was actually quite difficult to visualize what was happening over time. So I decided to reach for the ELK Stack to help me see what was going on using time based charts. I've only used this briefly in the past, but given the very simple setup thanks to Docker, and also the power and flexibility of ELK, it made a huge difference in my investigations!