Andrea Angella has been involved in many communities over the course of his career and it has helped him become the developer he is today. In this episode of Adventures in .NET we discuss starting out as a .NET developer, being mentored, mentoring others, .NET meetups and staying up-to-date with .NET. There are myriad benefits to being a part of a developer community so go out and find one that fits you. Whether your community consists of two people or two hundred it will help you grow to be a better developer.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of adventures in dot net. I'm Sean Claiborne, your host. And with me today, your cohost, Wai Lou, a y. John. Hi, John.

Happy Saturday for you. Happy Friday. Yep. Yep. Yep.

And Caleb back from vacation. Hey. Hey. How are you? Hey.

I'm good. Good. It is hot and dry, and I think fire season is almost upon us. So I ordered a bunch of air filters and things like that so we can filter out the smoke once it starts hitting them because I'm I'm east of where the fire start in Washington state, and the the wind, it carries it pretty strong this way. So we quite often get smoked out and get into, dangerous air conditions.

So It's it is so interesting. The different things you worry about based on where you're located in the US. Because fire is not it's the least of our concerns. Yeah. Sure.

And during the summer, our our humidity is usually, like, 10 to 15%. And Ours is pretty much a 100 year round. Yeah. Yeah. We never have that problem.

Above 50, whatever, that's kind of a rare thing. You know, that would be raining outside. Alright. Enough about geography. Right?

I guess. I guess. Let's bring on our guest, Andrea Anjela. Welcome, Andrea. Hello.

Glad to be here. Hey. Thank you for having me. Glad to have you. Yeah.

Definitely. Definitely. So, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into development and, kinda what you do now with and things related to dot net. Yeah. Absolutely.

So, yeah, I've I've started, development when I was about 8 years old. So my my my father gave me a cashier calculator that was programmable, and I've seen the manual. I tried some code from the manual, and, oh my god, I love this. Then then I started building games for my friends, and, you know, I I started to loving it. I was getting the feedback, the positive feedback loop, and I got into development.

And I do my classic I studied computer science at high school, at university, and then I moved to I'm Italian, so I studied in Italy. And then I moved to UK 11 years ago in 2010. First job in UK, actually. So and then since then, I basically worked with c sharp and dot net pretty much for only entire my career so far. So I'm moving from union position to a lead software engineer position that I am I'm having now and loving every every single time, every single step along the way.

And are are you still doing games? Or you Oh, yeah. That that was, I've done games. There's an interesting twist here. I I was doing games till I was a teenager about so then, and I got into university.

I started to I I I did games till university, and I I didn't do much gaming for the the university. I started to work in the business field, and I built a game for Windows Phone. It was extremely popular. It was one of the top arcade game at the time when when Windows Phone was there. But then Nice.

Then everything everything collapsed. You just picked the wrong, format. Yeah. It was, yeah, a bit on XNA. And, yeah, that was the last game I brought.

But, yeah, I would love to get, playing a little bit with it. I'm not I haven't worked in the game development industry, like, professionally. I just mostly games for fun. My my my first calculator was not programmable. About the best thing I could do was spell words upside down, you know, like, 5808.

Yeah. That was fun. Yeah. I I had the luxury of having, like, upgrading the casualty every 2 years, and my father was always giving that as a present. Every 2 years was doubling the RAM, definitely CPU.

I started with 26 variable in the first one, and and I love it. I love it. Was actually quite So was was it, like, Christmas gift or just, just something you gave me. Yeah. I had a yeah.

The first one was, like, a very, very, very, very low spec and then improving the pixel density every Mhmm. Every song. And the yeah. The last one I got was, like, the algebra effects. It was really quite nice.

You could do a lot of stuff in there. Yeah. But, it's good fun. So what do you do now? So at the moment, I'm, I'm working as a lead software engineer in the software.

Been working there for about 7 years now. I've worked with many many products in Regate as a company a software company, mid medium sized company software company. We build a lot of tools for Windows, like monitoring databases, comparing databases. So a lot of I've done a lot of Windows from WPF and the speed on a core stuff. Mostly, let's go to back end of our product desktop products.

So at the moment, right now, I I'm working the SQL prompt. It's basically the the plug in for SQL Server Management Studio that helps you to basically write the SQL more more fluently, help with formatting and all the sort of things. So the IntelliSense, yeah, halt enter, code analysis kind of things. Uh-huh. Yeah.

So it's like a plug in for SQL Studio, though? SQL Server Management Studio. Yeah. In Yeah. On Windows.

Yeah. It's a plugin for that. So the productivity Redgate has a lot of good tools. I haven't used them in a few years, but in some previous jobs. I I forget the name of it, but it's the one where you could actually do SQL schema changes as part of, like, your your commits in your repository, and you could you could do them locally and then do them against test production.

It definitely simplifies that workflow. Absolutely. I work on that product too. Working on Oh, nice. On the version of basically allows you to version the schema, resource control, and manage your deployments and, your all your CICD pipelines.

Yeah. Uh-huh. So I've always wanted to work on a tool that worked like a lot like that, like, kind of that helps developers code. I would've I started with it it wouldn't start. You know?

That's that's also fascinating. You know? Like Yeah. That's actually quite interesting because I've reflected on my career. Most of the time, I work I work on developer tools or IT admin tools.

So before Regatta used to work in Citrix, and we're building, like, send desktop of visualization technology that used by, you know, companies, IT administrator to visualize their desktops and stuff like that. Yeah. Always the customer always been, like, IT or or devs, most of the time. Mhmm. So, yeah, it's actually quite cool.

Yeah. I I enjoyed it. Alright. Yeah. So, so what do you think about c sharp?

Do you like c sharp? Yeah. Def definitely love c sharp. Tough question. Tough question.

I've been, when at the time when I started, I was developing basic. I was, you know, as a kid in the calculators, then I met CC plus plus. I worked with Java. I worked a lot of other languages. And then I met on net, I think, 1.1.

And, yes, in this, I've played the Visa basic as well. I did some games with the basic on Windows. But that's just a sharp oh my god. This language is awesome. This platform is you know, it feels like it's really well well designed.

They all they all run time. They all base class library. I read the Jeffrey Reacher book, CLR, BSC Sharp. Wow. This is gonna be a solid platform and invest in it.

I'm I'm glad I did because it's still around. So, yeah, I decided to get certified. I was still at uni. I got all the certification on the net 2, the net foundation, the net windows, and and then I found a job as the net developer and work a lot on the community and building on on that. And, yeah, I've been it's been great.

It's definitely my favorite language. It's, it's great. I definitely recommend it. Now you can build pretty much everything you want, web, desktop, mobile, IoT, whatever. So you are very active in the dot net community.

You've got a number of like, you got a a meetup group and you got a YouTube channel and you got a website that has some training. How did you get into to that side of things actually, you know, building content and and tutorials and and helping people become better developers? Yeah. It's it's all started when, I was still at university. And, you know, I've just got the great grip with dot net and c sharp and and liking it.

And then a member of the community in Italy at the time approached me saying there was a kind of Italian dot net community called ug.net, and, I was kinda following the blog there. And this guy reached me and said, you know, there was a they were starting to build, like, regional communities at the time, like, for Italy's, you know, the different regions, like Tuscany, where where I'm from. There was no community other than that. This guy approached me and said, you know, I know you, you know, you you are acting on the block. I saw you commented.

Do you would you like to, you know, have a have a have a dinner, a chat with a dinner, and, maybe build something there? So I didn't know much about the shop. You know, I was fairly fairly new, but, you know, I was welcomed to the community, and it actually welcomed me so so nice. These are other 2 member of the community. I felt like a family immediately.

Right? And then we built a community in Donnet in Italy, and I've been been leading that community for a while until I moved to UK. And then I continue to lead for a couple of years, then I realized that it was too difficult from the UK to help the community, and then I created a community in UK in Cambridge. I see. So you managed the, you managed about the Italian meetup in the UK, is it?

Like, I was telling Yeah. It it was like we are about, I don't remember exactly the number for 4 or 5 or 6 of us, like, at the time managing it. So, new people, you know, we were, like, meeting over Skype every couple of weeks to 11. Yeah. No.

No. It was a it was a physical one, but I was kind of still part of it, managing it from from abroad Yeah. Then sometimes jumping on Italy and doing a workshop there. I built I did actually a full full day workshop on building games for Windows Phone. Yeah.

That's one of the workshop I did, and I did the presentation on link when it when it came out. That was my I have a first presentation on on the net. They actually made me oh my god. It's quite it's quite cool sharing and, you know, teaching teaching. I was so scared about public speaking at the time.

I, you know, I was really I I just really I couldn't speak. I I spent a month to prepare that talk of an hour because I was so scared. I had to learn everything and prepare for every single question. Yeah. Since then, basically, I'm in in Cambridge where I started to work in UK.

I I created a community there as well now. Now it's been around for 5 years or more. Yeah. We're now more than a 1000 developers meeting every month or 2. I think meetups are are so cool.

Like, space for development, because they're also for especially any any topic. You know? Like, I think as an adult, it's actually it's really hard to find friends, I think. Like, after after you become an adult, you can't just go to school and And you have kids. Classes with yeah.

Exactly. That is that is another thing. Think the meetup things is really good because you you automatically go to a bunch of people and they they all you already know what they they enter in. It's the same thing you're into, and I think so. And, yeah, because I I go to a few meetups myself and a lot more before COVID nineteen run.

Some meetups in Canberra. So and it's just like yeah. It's it's just really good to to to go to a place where you can, meet a bunch of people, and they're all, like, they're all, you know, they're all passionate about what they like to do. They actually take time, you know, in their in this in their personal time to actually, to actually go to some event. You know?

So it shows that they're they're actually quite passionate for it. So Yeah. I think, generally, this apply to everything. Right? Just not just the net or any any topic you you are passionate about.

Just. Even if you're not if you just want to discover a little bit more, just go to to a place like that, and you you will meet passionate people, and you will be dragged in. And, you know, it it yeah. It's And their and their passion kinda inspires you to Exactly. Yeah.

To to to be inspired as well. So Yeah. Since since COVID hit, do you do your meetups virtually? Yes. So when we when we before before COVID, we were doing meetups on, in my company, Infricate, in our headquarters there.

So the company was, nice to host the community. And, yeah, now we're doing it over Zoom. Also, it's not the same kind of vibe. It's it's, you know, gonna be different. And there are also some lots of advantages as well.

We are recording the video now, putting on YouTube, so more and more people can engage, you know, from everywhere in the world. We all experience that. So not pro and cons, but it's it's been good, and I've seen engagement still strong and, people people joining. So yeah. And a lot of people love to talk, so it's it's not too difficult as lot of people think to find people speaking.

Right? It's it's also a good opportunity for you to, you know, to brand yourself, and, honestly, I found the position where I am in Regate. I was engaged in a community. I went to a community. It was a software craftsmanship community in Cambridge, and then the head of engineering at Regate approached me.

Are you interested in terms of change? We had a talk. He showed me the company where where the event was hosted. So yeah. So there are opportunities that you might not even know, in problem.

Try to get someone to speak at a meetup. I just I tell them that that I don't actually have to be, like, an expert in whatever they're speaking in. And sometimes the best presentations are just the ones where it's like, you know, I I started learning at this thing, and these were the the pitfalls. So these are the things I learned and things a lot. So totally agree with your way.

That's exactly the principle I set when I started the community. Everyone the so the committee is for everyone. Doesn't matter what level you are at. You share what you know. Everyone has something valuable to share.

So there is a lot of people that never spoke before that present in my community and then later became an, you know, speaker of NDC or stuff like that. So for me, it's amazing because it really enabled them to do that. I I was so scared about public speaking, so I wanted to enable other people to do the same. That's fantastic. And yeah.

So in addition to that, also, I have all the other activities going going on. So one of the things that seems to be your focus, right, is helping people learn c sharp and get into dot net. For people who are just starting out, what do you suggest? Yeah. So my so I I basically, it's it's difficult because of different levels.

So other people that are that are absolute beginners actually never coded, or there are, like, more, developers have used another language that, like, familiar with another language, and they want to move into csharp.net. And then, obviously, then there are people who are more already c sharp developers that want to level up and learn the language more and stay up to date. So I believe for people at the early stage, like the absolute beginners or, like, just started just getting started, I strongly believe mentoring is the best way to to really quickly speed up. And, I've been mentored by the guy that contacted me from the community, So I actually decided to work within, like, on a couple of week every couple of weeks. We did together.

You really teach me a lot. I've learned so much so much faster because of the the mentoring. I even paid at some point in because I I felt, like, guilty of, you know, get getting all of that knowledge, and we built a relationship there. So I believe if you are really starting, few few session few mentoring session are great. Obviously, they might not be affordable.

There's just so much content online, but the fear I have with that is that when you start, you have a lot of doubts. You feel like I can't quote. I know everyone is so smart. If you look at how much you need to learn, you feel completely overwhelmed. There's so much content, and then, you might start to play a bit.

You feel you feel like dumb, and then you stop. But if you have someone close to you that can give you you know, that's that's okay. You don't need to learn everything. Just learn the language, technology, go and go and camera. I've learned a lesson from Windows Phone XNA, whatever I studied in the past that disappeared, and I wasted hours of my life on that.

So I think that's that's key. And then when you when you reach to the point where you are kind of more independent so I also suggest, like, doing competitive programming, like, do a lot of those problem solving, kind of exercise to learn the same task and quickly get up to speed with it. Really good positive feedback loop to to to get motivated. Not just necessary for competing with other developers, just to compete with yourself, increase your rank in there. Found that fairly motivated.

When you get to a point where you know roughly the language, then the the membership I built kinda help you to stay up to date. So that I I basically send every week kind of links to news about dot net, the dot net world, so you don't have to waste all the time. And I strongly believe in practical practical short videos, Because as you said, as you get older, you have family, you have, all the other, you know, time commitments, and you stop having all the time for reading books and reading, you know, a 1,000 pages book and, you know, hours of content. So I strongly believe in short content. So all my videos are 5, 10 minutes long on a specific feature, all in code, no slides, you know, just just showing how to how to learn that particular feature.

So I believe after some point, you can just do 1 video a week. We don't need to build practice, apply that on the job, and then you build from that. It's incredible how much you can build up in a you know, you should have consistent weekly after week. And then, you know, and then you can still do mentoring for more high level things. Like, at at the moment, I I've just been promoted this year to a lead software engineer role where I need to do more kind of lead in, delegating, and, you know, helping others.

And I've been coached to learn more about leadership skills and so on or mentoring. So I'm new to this, and now I need to do the same kind of process, but at a little bit higher level. So the processes but that's what I recommend. Obviously, I I love learning on books. Choose the platform that you like the most.

Some people like watching videos. Some people like reading. Some people like podcasting. If you love podcasting and just just do it, I mean, I personally love it. It's like you can listen to x speed.

You learn twice as as much. Exactly. Yeah. So so how what does a mentoring session look look like? Is it kinda like a pair programming session?

So the all depends by the level. So I so I have some experience in kind of mentoring people that are at the junior level. I wanted to maybe find a position as a senior engineer. So what we do in that case is more like, as you said, like pairing, doing, kata together, like, ping pong to test driven development together, or I can even do a mock interview, like, where I ask the the person to do a kata, and I at the end, I give feedback on, you know, if I if I was your interviewer if I were your interviewer, you know, I would, you know, improve here and there and stuff like that. If you're more more new, I help you may learn the syntax, like, create a console app, play a little bit with that, teaching, like, some of the stuff that all people maybe know how to use, but they don't know how it works.

Like, use link, but you don't know how delegates are related to autonomous method and how the Lambda's at the end, you know, all the connection, helping building the, you know, I'm memorable for each and, you know, at the end of the day, it's just calling calling for each, calling what's next and so on. So kind of helping to to understand the language better. That's more at the beginning. I don't have a lot of experience of absolute beginner learning c sharp. I believe it's it's the it's kind of the same process.

I would love to help more people from 0 experience getting to c sharp. That's something I would like to focus in the future more. How about, how about watching coders that stream, you know, like on Twitch or something like that? Oh, that's, yeah, that's a that's a new trend. I I think it's good.

Yeah. I think it's good for if you are new. I think after if if you if you're more experienced, you need to manage the time. It's very easy to get, you know, spend the half a day on on or, you know, get get lost in the stream. Again, same principle.

You don't have all the time with the world unless the streaming is something or something you really care about. You want to get deep into it. Be be careful with your tag as always. So I tend to prefer Yeah. I tend to prefer honestly pay money on a course very compact and deeper in in content than, you know, spending 10 days on free content.

That that's my opinion, but you need to find the right balance, I think. I I consume a lot of stuff, so both free and paid. So but at this point, I I want to maximize the time. So I need a resource to help me to shortcut. And this the biggest shortcut is don't learn that technology.

That's something I need to learn. Like because before I was, like, so curious, I was learning and jumping on everything. Now I'm not using that technology, and I don't really need to learn it at the job right now, unless you really think about changing job and work on on that. I'm not working with with summary, for example. I mean, I love I love the technology.

A lot you can build, but I haven't played with it much. I I'm doing more desktop web, and so I find I'm I'm see what's what's changing. I don't I don't have to go deep in that. So you can choose. Yeah.

I think there is definitely an element of, like, if you don't if you don't need the technology, don't don't spend so much time on it because at some point, the technology changes as well. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. You're never gonna have enough time to learn everything, really.

And I think that's that's the that's when you realize that even the experts don't know everything. Yeah. You know? They spend more of their time. You know, we're we're like professional Googlers most of the time.

Right? So Yeah. No. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Every day. Stack overflow. If you're for beginner Yep. Familiarize yourself with Stack Overflow. Yeah.

That's that's that's the challenge, I think, for new people joining the industry, though, because they they really believe as on on expertise, like, oh, as per know everything. Like, I remember feeling that way when I joined the community or some presenter sharing, oh my god. They know everything. It's not true, but you get that perception. So if you if you don't go beyond that, you you can get demoralized and processing the you know, still even when you're less, but you still have plenty of The reason reason why I think streaming is is probably good is because they can ask questions.

So as they watch somebody a little more advanced coding, they can ask, what what did you do there, and why did you do it, or something like that. It's kinda like going to a Yeah. A conference or a meetup. Because after they're done speaking, then you can go up and ask some questions that you didn't really wanna ask in front of the crowd and and, you know, talk to them out in the hall and things like that. So, hopefully, when this COVID stuff is over, we can really start getting back into the, you know, in person conferences and things like that.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's awesome. So we've we've talked about family a little bit.

How do you balance your your schedule and all the things you're doing for the dot net community and your your family and your your, you know, your off time? Yeah. So it's it's good question. So I so I I I believe I used to, you know, but been extremely worried about, you know, balance and so on. But I I I am I love my job, so balance is is something personal.

You need to find what balance means to you. Right? So if for you balance mean 9 to 5 and then stop doing anything after, that's your balance, and you you manage yourself that way. So you do all the learning at in the job. If you if you instead want to explore some other stuff, you then you allocate some extra hours as well for your learning or for this sort of activities.

So for me so before I, you know, before starting a family, I I kind of really was, like, I I didn't have any sort of balance. I was just learning as much as I could, attending conferences, and so on, past university as well. With with a family office is different. I have a son, and, and, I I try to to to make sure the family time is, you know, is is scheduled. So a lot of peep basically, I like, I can give you some sort of hours.

What I usually spend is about 10 hour a week, roughly, extra work on all of these my my activities. That's basically about an hour and a half a day, extra. So the community takes me a few hours. It's not as as demanding as you might think. You just need to coordinate, you know, the meetups and and so on.

Obviously, in person is even is a little bit more, but online is even easier. The the membership at the moment is what takes me most of my time. But, yeah, roughly, that's that's my my time commitment. And, other than that, you know, just love going out with friends, spend time with my family, traveling to Italy to my to to see my parents and so on and and driving my motorbike and, you know, all these sort of things. I love nature and stay outside and running and so on doing a physical activity.

So, yeah, it's a question that I stop worrying too much now about because for me, that's part that's that's something that's part of my life, and I what I try to do more recently is, living more in the present, to be honest. That's something really, really important. I've been reading a lot more, like, maybe because of the call the the pandemic or whatever. I'm reading more about Seneca and and more stoic and, you know, trying to understand a little bit how to live more fully in the present with my son, for example, is, you know, 6 years old, so this is the time when we're having a lot of adventures together. So It's a very, very important time.

Yeah. But nothing stop you to blend the the things. So it's it's not sometimes I put one of my ear pods in one of my in my ear, and I listen a little bit apart because while I'm in the, you know, doing some chores at at home. Right? This time adapts.

You you won't believe how how much you can learn by just a lot of audiobooks, for example, audiobooks, and I'm really into it. And, you know, you can you can really learn a lot while doing other stuff, while traveling as well. So So your 6 year old son, have you tried teaching your kids how to code? To blend that time together? Yeah.

So that's something to be careful about. But, yes, what we did so far is, you know, is really into Lego at the moment. We built, a Lego is great. The the grandma yeah. A lot of Lego Lego Technic.

We built robots that the grandmother gave him as present. Not me. The grandmother. That was actually very clever because the robot was programmable. So we deal with the block kind of block, block programming.

So do 3 step ahead and turn and and yeah. I I just do a little bit of that with him. It's almost 7. So we we did a little bit of that building together this robot and, and and, and using the block block programming. But if he's interested, I want him to explore as many things as possible and, you know, and then but it's it's hard, you know, to contain my passion, so he's definitely seen my my my my passion for, you know, building stuff and so on.

So I can see some some interest there. So, yeah, I I I definitely did definitely did already. But, yeah, exciting stuff. So you have this this productive c sharp website. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah. So, well, at some point, I don't remember when it was, 2017, I think. 2017, I I said I wanted to to get into more, like, video production. I the idea of doing, like, kind of screencast and so on. So I get into a YouTube more in 2017.

I started to build, you know, I had a big impostor syndrome. Right? You know, who I am for teaching C Sharp. There are so many people that are doing that. Why should I should I do that?

But, you know, I I decided to try and give it a go, and, I've seen a lot of traction. And, yeah, about 6 months later, Microsoft awarded me with the Myfan VP title. So I think that's, you know, addition to the community, actually, that was already doing, but I think that was probably the the last piece of the puzzle for me. And when I got that, I start to think, you know, I love to know this content, but also, you know, family is, you know, is more expensive. Like, you know, why don't try to monetize a little bit the efforts also because if I do, I can also help even more.

So I decide to in 2018 to launch the product c membership. So that's is the way I say it's the membership for for c sharp developers where they can get in, learn the language. I try to, you know, be as up to date as possible with every single features Microsoft was releasing. At the time, C Sharp was going on 2 minor releases, so it was even easier to do that because it was like constant new features. Now it's going to yearly releases, so it's a bit less less less frequent.

But I basically, every single new feature of C Sharp is covered in practical short videos. And, yeah, now it's been about 3 years that I that I'm having that. So I have more than 250 members there. It's a it's it's a membership that you pay annually or monthly. The the barriers to entry is is very small, and, it's something I really enjoy loving I enjoy doing.

Like, We do mastermind session on Zoom as well where we get together and talk sort of a kind of c c sharp family. Every week, I I I'm using the feed to collect all the news together and select some of the top news from the community in addition to my videos that I produce regularly. And then members also get, like, free spot licenses to, like, for example, your brains. Every member got a free your brains license. Sometimes you do raffles.

Try to provide as much value to to members as possible. And, also, they can contact me via email to kind of mentor via email if they want. They can do mentoring private as well. Also, the time is limited, so I I need to limit that. But that's kinda what I'm doing, and I'm I'm happy to, to offer a discount for your audience, if you are if you're interested.

So if you go to products. C sharp.com/membership, you can use the, discount code adventures, and you will get 30% discount on the on the price of both annual or or or monthly. So you can check it out. The first the first year, the first month is a little bit even cheaper than the sort of a trial, so you can give it a go and see see if you like it. But, yeah, that's that's basically what I'm doing.

I'm doing these YouTube videos, my blog. I have a podcast as well. Kind of micro pod micro podcast is, like, more like my every week. I'm not as consistent as you guys, but, you know, I'm trying to to provide as much value free and also some extra value on a paid subscription while working full almost full time. I'm working 4 days a week for for the gate.

Oh, nice. Thanks for the thanks for the discount code. I really appreciate it. Passing that along to our our our members. We'll also put it in the show notes so people can, find that in case they're just, browsing on their their podcast.

Yeah. You're welcome. I I will send the link too. Great. Great.

Thanks. So you've started out with dotnet 1.1, and so over that time, you've seen a lot of versions of of c sharp. And it seems like the release schedule is even getting faster and faster now from, like, c 7 c sharp 7 to 8 to 9, and 10 is probably coming, you know, probably tomorrow, but I don't know for sure, but it's pretty close. How do you keep up when things going that fast? So while the while the amazing website I recommend is the Microsoft Docs.

So they I think the team at Microsoft is doing an amazing job. Every time new features of the language are released, they there is also a what's new section that is really covering all the features very well. So and this is applied to all the data ecosystem. So the Microsoft Docs recently has been really reinvigorated a lot. And all the developments now is open source as well.

Right? Everything is in the open for c sharp. If you want, you can see all the meetings. Like, if you're crazy like me, you go into the meetings, weekly, you know, weekly meetings. I think the the c sharp team has Microsoft do.

I don't I don't see all of them, but you can go there in the meeting and see what they discussed or an idea of what what the direction of c sharp is. There is a page on the c sharp rep with all the kind of milestones or the comp the the team is trying to achieve, which which features is in which at what stage of development. So you can see that if a feature is merged into main, into master, me at main, you know that the next preview that Visual Studio will contain it so you can play with it. So I try to stay out of the queue, of course, for helping my members to stay up to date. But at the same time, I'm aware I don't want to do I try not to do videos too early because, you know, I don't want things to change.

I want my video to be long lasting. I'm trying to avoid doing videos on stuff that might change too too soon. So the language is very solid. Microsoft is is making everything backward compatible. So it's if you do a video on a feature, stay there.

Right? It's very unlikely that it will it will become obsolete. So so that's why my focus is basically covering the entire language, helping people learn the foundation of of c sharp technology, as you said, going going camp. So Have you looked at what's coming in c sharp 10? Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. There's a quite a lot of good stuff coming. There is, like, the global using global using, well, actually, you don't have to do, like, using using the space. You can just create a file with all the using the space that you always have, like, using system using system generics, system collection generics, and and those automatically are, you know, important in all the files. There is, yeah, quite quite other stuff.

Like, what's what they do like this, struct records, records for classes direct for classes. For for struct. Sorry. It is already record for the support to generate classes. Yeah.

Definitely definitely stay in touch. That is like the what's the lambda improvements on type inference that the the the team is doing, like the creating web API using very minimal minimal amount of code. You can just do create a web server that gets request that returns this using Lambdas so that they made some changes in their Lambdas syntax to to to enable to do that in a more syntax syntactic, you know, better compact way. I think probably one of the things a lot about more of Office Shop is they keep having stuff to make the language even more easy to to understand, to remove, like, boilerplate and and, like, records for me has been an amazing feature. Like, it's I always wanted that.

That was for me. It was one of the missing things. Like, come on. I always stress, like, that's the you know, web records will come out. You know?

Just wait. We need to get it right. But, yeah, records, that's quite nice. But, yeah, there's some good stuff coming up. There's a lot of also, like, niche features that you might not need to worry too much about.

It's mostly using side, you know, the libraries to make the performance of the framework better, but every developers benefit from that. Right? Yeah. So but, yeah, stay tuned. We'll definitely share more about that.

Usually, do, like, a webinar every year on on the latest version of c sharp, free webinar on that so people can join and and learn. Alright. Anything else to add to, what we've talked about for c sharp before we, move on to, picks and wrap up the show? Think about that. I think, yeah, I think that the main the main advice is basically what I said.

Like, try to master in the fundamentals is very important. I have I I met so many developers that, like, don't have very strong understanding of the language. You know? I just try the code, but I don't fully understand it, and sometimes it's, it it doesn't it doesn't help. So I think learning learning the fundamentals, the, you know, the language problem solving, you know, data structures and, you know, kind of design principles, all of that stuff really, really benefits you in the future rather than learning the latest XNA framework and, or stuff like that, unless you're really passionate about that.

So kinda do both, but value fundamentals more. Alright. Very cool. Very cool. Alright, guys.

Let's move on to PIX now. Caleb, you were out last week, so let's have you go first. What do you got? Yeah. So you guys know I have been trying to meditate on a daily basis, you know, do mindfulness stuff.

And yeah. Exactly. Sean Sean's doing the the the own thing where you hold your fingers. Anyway, so, I listened to an audible original on the way to visit my parents last weekend for vacation. And it's like an hour and a half.

It's really pretty short, but it's got some good intro stuff on how to start a meditation practice and some of the basics and kind of some of the pitfalls and things not to worry about. So it was really good. It's called, how to train your mind. So yeah. Just new how to walk.

The kids at all? Like, I'm just any anytime the kids, it's always just frozen songs of time. Like, Well, here's the thing. And maybe I shouldn't do this right, but I've gotten to the habit where if we're going for a long road trip, like, 2 or 3 hours or more, I'm typically the one driving. And so I put in earbuds and listen to a Comcast or an audiobook while my wife sits in the back with our son.

And so if he's not watching videos on his Kindle Fire or whatever, she's playing with him, entertaining him. So Oh. I get to drive and listen to stuff. Hopefully, there's no Louisiana police officers listening to this show. Well, you know, the my earbuds are really small, so, you know, it's hard for you to see them.

Anyway, yeah, that's my pick. Alright. Alright. Why? What's your pick?

So my pick today is, is a show on, Netflix again. It's a show called, Narcos. It's actually been around for a while, but it's I think they've recently released another season. So it's about well, it's actually really bloody, by the way. I probably wouldn't watch it with with any kids around.

I'd watch it when the kids are asleep. But it's about the, I guess it starts off being about the Colombian drug trade, and then it kind of has a new series about the Mexican drug trade, and, so many people get killed. So much stuff happens. So, but, yes, I I find I find it really fascinating, all the stuff that's happening down there. Alright.

Very cool. Very cool. Alright. My pick this week is actually gonna be AMC stock. I I recently started, you know, doing some stock trading and things like that.

I would not recommend getting into AMC right now because it is very down the past couple of days. So it's been in its peak, but I've been learning a lot about, you know, trading stocks and things like that. So I I have made some money over over the past month or so. So, it's not life changing money, but I'm learning and hopefully I'll Why are you supposed to buy stock when it's down? Yeah.

Well, yeah, you're supposed to buy but but it's going down. And it because this might be better when when I keep going. Yeah. You never know you never know when it's gonna turn around. So so that's the difficult thing about, you know, trading stocks.

But, at least there's a lot of different places now that you don't get charged for for buying and selling stocks. So it's it's a lot easier to to to try it and see. And I would just start out with small amounts of money and see if, I would say, learn a lot before you actually get into trying to make big money, because most people lose money. So I'm not a financial adviser, but but, that's been my experience in the past month. So you have up days, you have down days, and it's hard to keep a lot more up days than down days.

So be use Robinhood? I don't use Robinhood. I actually use Fidelity. Okay. So, yeah, I like it.

I was gonna say right. I think Robinhood did their IPO, and people were like, are you actually gonna make money because of the way this is set up? And the lag between when you buy a stock, you actually own a stock and all that stuff. Yeah. I think they're working on their IPO.

I don't know if they actually have gone gone public yet, but, yeah, they're gonna work on on that. But one thing that AMC did is, to their stockholders. If you're a stockholder, you can go to one of their websites, and I'll put this as the link for my pick. And you get, like, a free large popcorn and other discounts and things like that for being a stockholder. So they've really they've actually made a lot of money off the stockholders because while the price has gone up and up and up, they've they've sold more shares, which brought in money for them to help with with some of their debts and things like that that that they have.

So the the CEO is really appreciative of that, so he's throwing little crumbs to us for some popcorn. So so that'll be my my link in there. Alright. Andrea, what's your pick? Yeah.

I I I probably hinted to that during the during the chat. The what I've been doing more lately is basically learning more about, let's talk philosophy, Seneca, and understanding a bit more how how to live more in the present. It's something that I've been guilty of not doing sometimes, like, mostly, you know, think about the future. I always think about, oh, what do I do next? While in the in especially in the past year, I've been a lot more present, and I've done some meditation as well.

Been, been more present, enjoyed the time with my with my son, with my family, like, really feeling the the the moment, try to turn off my phone and so on. Yeah. I don't have to check news all the time. But I definitely recommend you. I have a lot of free content on that.

Like, it's a daily stoic podcast, and other other podcast is books like I read recently the on the shortness of life from Seneca. It really made me think as well. So and the other I mean, the key principle is be be yourself 100%. That's something I'm trying to do, every day and be be aware of that. You can always change what you're doing.

Like, I am a Donut guy. I love. If I want, tomorrow, I can change my job and do something completely different. You have one life. You need to decide what to do in the in the life.

So I think that's, for me, something I strongly recommend to to look into. I mean, I really, really enjoy listening more about stoic philosophy. Alright. Great. Exactly.

So if people wanna reach out to you and get in touch, is it best way through your website or your Twitter? Or Yeah. I mean, that you can, you can go to my website. You can go to LinkedIn. Connect to me.

You should write my name in Google. I should be there on, on LinkedIn. You can you can just, write me an email if you want, andreya.angel@product.com Awesome. Or Twitter. Email on Twitter if you want.

Great. Alright. Thanks for coming on the show today. That was that was good. I really appreciate it, you inviting me, and it's been it's been good.

Thank you for for inviting me. Great. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

If our listeners wanna reach out to the the show and get in touch with us, they can find me on Twitter. We'd love to hear your feedback. I am at.netsuperhero. Alright. Dun dun dun.

And Caleb Wells is? Caleb Wells coats. Alright. I'm still Thanks. You're still there.

I think. I think. Just not today. You you're checked out. Alright.

Alright, guys. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Alright.

We'll catch everybody else on the next episode of adventures in dotnet. Bye, y'all. Bye. Bye.