Guidelines For Software Developers While Working From Home

Now days i am working from Home so decided to write an article for guidelines while working from Home to all Software developers.Many of friends and colleague ,students requesting me to share about be productive while working from Home and how to make WFH more productive and easy with comfort.

 As we know now days whole world are fighting with invisible enemy  COVID-19 (CORONA Virus) and there’s currently no vaccine to prevent corona virus disease (COVID-19).China was first reported to the WHO Country Office in China on 31 December 2019 but started from Oct-2019, As per WHO guidelines we should continue some habits strictly for 1-2 months, So that You can protect yourself and help prevent spreading the virus to others if you:

Do

Wash your hands regularly for 20 seconds, with soap and water or alcohol-based hand rub

Cover your nose and mouth with a disposable tissue or flexed elbow when you cough or sneeze

Avoid close contact (1 meter or 3 feet) with people who are unwell

Stay home and self-isolate from others in the household if you feel unwell

Don't

Touch your eyes, nose, or mouth if your hands are not clean.

In India, PM Narendra Modi requested to all Indians to support Lock down and follow social distancing for 21 days at 24th March-2020, thereafter whole country offices, companies, factories closed only essentials service are still running e.g hospitals,Banks etc.. 

So now i am going to share my experience during WFH, I am sure that will make your work environment/life easy and comfort.

Basic Guidelines while Working From Home

• You need to make a daily To-Do list and try to finish it day by day
• Choose a quiet and distraction-free working space.
• Dedicate their full attention to their job duties during working hours
• Ensure their schedules overlap with those of their team members for as long as is necessary to complete their job duties effectively.
• Keep their equipment password protected.
• Follow all data encryption, protection standards and settings as per your company compliance.
• Refrain from downloading suspicious, unauthorized or illegal software.
• Pretend like you are going into the office
• Structure your day like you would in the office.
• Choose a dedicated work space.
• Self-Commit to doing more.
• Use a fixed slot for breaks and lunch.
• Set your own target for every day/hour.
• Be Transparent, Don’t hesitate to discuss with team members if anything needs to be discussed.
• Take a small mental and physical break after 30 minutes.
• Train your mind to work from home and also need to train your's family member.
• Don't break your daily routine, prepare yourself to get ready to work everyday.
• Don't avoid your daily physical activity e.g. exercise, yoga..
• Don't force yourself to do if you are not comfort to do, take a break, listen music, watch TV whatever you like.
• Don't do anythings with assumptions.
• Use common group chat or email communication for small-small discussion otherwise your manager or client will not able to understand your productivity.

Technical Guidelines while Working From Home

• Don’t use UAT or production DB/APP server for development purposes.
• Don’t forget to share your updates on Skype or Email group chat.
• Don’t commit/push anything via tfs/git without merge into local from remote branch (take latest or first then commit- git pull).
• Don’t commit/push on a remote branch with any conflict or error.
• Don’t forget to rebuild/ test your functionality before the commit.
• Don’t merge any code from one branch to another branch without discussion by the team.
• Don’t forget to save/commit your changes on appropriate locations (local centralize ) time to time.
• Don’t forget to commit .csproj file if you added or removed files/folders from the project.
• Don’t forget to test your functionality after deployment, its individual responsibility.
• Don’t push multiple tasks in a single commit, Do one by one with a proper commit message which your team already decided.
• Don’t access any live server/ RDP without permission. If required, discuss with the team on Skype or email.
• group chat.
• Don’t forget to execute sql query if anyone changed the schema on your local sql express server.
• Don’t change/delete/update any folder/file from anywhere on any server without discussion by the team.
• Don’t forget to save your SQL query/ SSRS reports/ Excel Data update /Documents etc.. in your centralize location.
• Use a proper understandable/reasonable file/folder name wherever you create anything.

Cyber security guidelines while Working From Home

• Avoid public Wi-Fi; if necessary, use personal secure hotshots or some way to encrypt your web connection
• Keep Work Data on Work Computers.
• Encrypt Sensitive Data in Emails and on Your Device.
• Look out for phishing emails and sites
• Lock your device while leaving the workstation.
• Switch off your system on daily basis.
• Don't share anythings related with your project or client data with your family and friends members.
• Avoid to open unnecessary email, URL, app on your office system.

I hope you really understand some of the basic and technical rules/guidelines to make your WFH environment. Also these points will help you to increase productivity while Working From Home.

Please share your feedback and if you have some more points as well.

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Bikesh Srivastava COVID-19, Guidelines, WFH

What Is Microsoft Azure And Why Should We Use It For Enterprise?

Introduction

 

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that offers 600+ cloud services under a single umbrella. Microsoft Azure was formerly known as Window Azure in October 2008. Azure provides services for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through multiple data centers.

 

Azure lets you add cloud abilities to your current system through its foundation as a help (PaaS) model, or endow Microsoft with the entirety of your processing and system needs with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Either alternative gives secure, solid access to your cloud facilitated information—one based on Microsoft's demonstrated engineering. Azure gives a regularly growing cluster of items and administrations intended to address every one of your issues through one advantageous, simple to oversee stage. The following are only a portion of the abilities Microsoft offers through Azure and tips for deciding whether the Microsoft cloud is the correct decision for your association.

 

Today a lot of organizations still have genuine worries about moving applications to the cloud. Fears about system security, accessibility, and potential vacation whirl through the heads of bosses, some of the time incapacitating associations into sitting tight on existing tech—despite the fact that it's maturing continuously.

 

Enter Microsoft Azure, the industry chief's answer for setting off to an in-part or thoroughly cloud-based design. The following is an itemized look at what Azure is, the intensity of joining forces with Microsoft for a cloud or half and half cloud arrangement, and the most ideal approach to get full and noteworthy perceivability into your accumulated logs and foundation measurements so your association can respond rapidly to circumstances.

 

What can Microsoft Azure do? 

 

Microsoft updates and maintains Azure services day by day to make services more secure and flexible for end-users. Some of the most popular services are listed and explained below,

 

Storage Services

 

Azure Storage is Microsoft's distributed storage answer for the current data storage approach. Azure Storage offers a hugely versatile article store for information questions, a document framework administration for the cloud, an informing store for dependable informing, and a NoSQL store. Azure Storage is: durable and exceptionally accessible.

 

Compute Services 

 

Azure Virtual Machines (VM) is one of a few sorts of on-demand, adaptable registering assets that Azure offers. You pay for extra VMs when you need them and shut them down when you don't. Broadened datacenter – Virtual machines in an Azure virtual system can undoubtedly be associated with your organization's system. Azure provides some of compute options which are given below:

1. Virtual machine (VM)
2. App Service
3. Service Fabric,
4. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS),
5. Azure Container instance
6. Azure Functions
7. Azure Batch
8. Cloud service 

Mobile Services

 

Azure Mobile Services give an adaptable cloud backend to building Windows Store, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications. Store information in the cloud, validate clients and send pop-up messages to your application within minutes. We can get the advantages of Azure mobile services which are given below,

1. Store any type of data on Azure Storage.
2. We can use AD Authentication.
3. We can use the Push notification service.
4. We can use access on-premises resources. 

Database Services

 

Azure SQL Database is one of the options to store relational databases, Microsoft Azure provides as a managed service now. So we can create a high availability based and high performance based database layer for the applications and solutions in Azure. SQL Database can be the right choice for a variety of modern cloud applications because it enables you to process both relational data and non-relational structures, such as graphs, JSON, spatial, and XML. Microsoft Azure has other database options which are given below,

1. Cosmos DB
2.  PostgreSQL
3.  MySQL
4. SQL Data Warehouse
5. Data Lake Store

Messaging and Event Services

 

Microsoft Azure offers four types of messaging and event services in Azure: Service Bus, Storage Queues, Event Hubs, and Event Grid. Of these, two are explicitly for events: Event Hubs and Event Grid, and the other two: Service Bus and Storage lines, are for Azure messaging.

 

Media Services

 

Azure Media Services lets you convey any media, on for all intents and purposes any gadget, to any place on the internet utilizing the cloud. The assortment of features gives encoding, live or on-demand sharing, content security and ordering for video and audio data. We can take advantage of Azure media services which are given below:

1. On-Demand service
2. Live- Broadcasting
3. Digital Marketing
4.  Audio and Video security 

DevOps

 

A type of development (Dev) and operations(Ops), DevOps is the association of individuals, procedures, and innovation to consistently offer some incentive to clients.

What does DevOps mean for groups? DevOps empowers some  siloed jobs—improvement, IT tasks, quality building, and security—to arrange and team up to create better, increasingly dependable items. By receiving a DevOps culture alongside DevOps practices and apparatuses, groups gain the capacity to be more likely to be able to react to client needs, increment trust in the applications they fabricate and accomplish business objectives quicker. In simple words we can say it's a combination of plan, develop, deliver and operate. We can advantage of Azure DevOps services which are given below,

1. Speeding up time to market
2. Easy to adapt to the current market.
3. Maintaining system stability and reliability and scalability.
4. Improving the time to delivery and recovery process.
5. Tracking and reporting of manpower and productivity.

Why are organizations showing trust in Microsoft Azure?

 

They already know about on-premise datacenters which have no future. Why are some of the top companies like 3M, BMW moving their workload to Microsoft Azure? Because of these reasons: 

1. Security
2. Flexibility
3. Scalability
4. Application Cost
5. Disaster recovery
6. Logging capability 
7. Autoscaling
8. Global datacenters
9. High Availability
10. High performance
11. 24*7 Technical Support

Conclusion

 This article explained facts about the Azure Cloud, and why we should use it with enterprise applications.

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Bikesh Srivastava Azure, Azure DevOps

What Is Azure DevOps And Why Should We Use It?

Introduction

 

Azure DevOps (in the past known as VSTS) is all that you need to assemble your product from start to finish. Azure DevOps is a single platform that helps every software developer team on this planet design ventures utilizing the Agile process, oversee code utilizing Git, test the application, and deploy code using using the CI/CD framework. We can understand in a simple way (Dev+Ops= DevOps), which means a combination of development and operation processes for software development.

 

 

I hope the above image is the best graphical example to understand the complete process about Azure DevOps services.

 

Online vs On-premises

 

Azure DevOps  can be accessible in two different ways: on-premises ("Server") and online ("Services"). The last structure is called Azure DevOps Services (in the past Visual Studio Online before it was renamed to Visual Studio Team Services in 2015). The cloud service belongs to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. It utilizes a similar code as the on-premises rendition of Azure DevOps, minor adjustments, and executes the latest highlights. Azure DevOps requires no extra configuration. A user just needs to sign up from their Microsoft account to set up a domain, create a project, adding a new user.

 

So let me clarify one confusion here, today in this article I am just going to explain about Azure DevOps Service, not the Azure DevOps server.

 

History of Azure DevOps

 

As per Wikipedia details, Microsoft launched the first version of the Team Foundation Server on March 17, 2006. So Microsoft provides all types of support for TFS, Azure DevOps Service, and Azure DevOps server. See the below image which is taken from Wikipedia.

 

Source: Wikipedia 

 

Azure DevOps Keywords

• Organization
  Azure DevOps organization is basically by default an account name/ Domain name but we can change it as well. Ordinarily, you will have one Azure DevOps account and deal with various domains inside, which means we can create multiple organizations with a single Microsoft account. We can configure access control and security for an individual organization as well.
  
• Projects
  We can split Azure DevOps organization into multiple projects and can configure access control, pipeline, build process, board and code for an individual project.
  
• Azure BoardAzure board is basically used for planning, tracking for Work Items, Backlog, and Sprints. Azure Board is also called an ALM (application life cycle management) tool just like other ALM tools JIRA, SpiraTeam, etc. Inside the Azure board, we can create workflows, issue types, epic, and many other components of ALM.
  
• Azure Repos
  Azure Repos is a place where we can create, manage and store versions of our codebase. We can use it for code review and other version control functionality. Azure Repos basically provides us two types of version control systems now GIT (Distributed version control) and TFVC (centralized version control).
  
• Azure Pipeline
  Azure pipeline is one of the automation processes of DevOps which allows us to create a build, release, test, and deploy on the target machine. We can say in simple words Azure pipeline is the combination CI/CD.
  
• Azure ArtifactsAzure Artifacts is one of the extensions of Azure DevOps which helps us to create, host, manage and share packages across the team. Azure Artifacts supports multiple types of packages e.g NPM, Nuget, Maven, Python, etc.. Azure Artifacts are basically a collection/ output of dll, rpm, jar and many other types of files. One of those extension based files may contain metadata.
  
• Azure Test plansAzure test plans support advance test management solutions for customer feedback, UAT, Automation testing, and manual testing.

What can Azure DevOps do?

• PlanningAs discussed above, the Azure board is an ALM tool. So the Azure board helps us to maintain an Agile process which means Azure DevOps helps us to plan, track development history for individual developers and detects issues using a kanban and scrum. 
  
• DevelopTo manage our workspace and code repository multiple types of version control are already integrated with Azure DevOps. Almost all features related DevOps already inbuilt inside.
  
• Integration/Build
  We can use continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) with the help of the Azure pipeline. There are multiple types of job agents, and templates are already available inside. 
  
• Package
  As we know we have already an inbuilt extension available, Azure Artifacts, so we don't need to go anywhere for any type of packages.
  
• TestingAs we know Testing is an important part of the DevOps process. So Azure DevOps provides multiple types of inbuilt testing templates and management tools.
  
• ReleaseAs we know the software release process is a very critical moment of DevOps. So Azure DevOps has already multiple types of inbuilt features to make the process easy and risk-free.
  
• Configure/OperateAs per my experience, it's very easy to configure and operate, because Azure DevOps has a simple process to configure organization, kanban, sprints, etc..
  
• MonitorEach phase of the DevOps life cycle should be monitor because it helps to ensure the health, performance, and reliability of your application.
  
• Reporting
  Azure DevOps has a dashboard where we can see reports, a summary and can generate an analytical report with BI integration. 
  
• Wiki
  Azure DevOps Wiki helps us to distribute information, share knowledge and collaborate across team and stakeholder. A Wiki can be used to explain about the project's user stories, sprints, release notes, etc..

Conclusion

 

Azure DevOps platform is generally utilized in the Software Development process. Along these lines, this platform helps the association which is as of now utilizing Azure and making the SLA simple. In this article, we have talked about the Introduction to Azure DevOps. In our upcoming articles, we will talk about progressively every topic with details and instructional exercises of Azure DevOps. 

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Bikesh Srivastava Azure, Azure DevOps