Patrick McVeety-Mill
Independent Consultant
Austin, Texas, United States
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Patrick is an enthusiastic technologist that values community, empathy, creating, self-understanding, and the earth. He believes technology should be used to improve lives and support the proletariat, and puts that into practice building systems and solving technical problems as an independent consultant and career coach, drawing from over a decade of software development, team leading, and people management at Headspring and Accenture.
If he were a Latin phrase it would be "positivum spiritus, utile iubilo" or "positive spirits, helpful shouting," but he's not, so most people refer to him as "Loud Patrick" or by his trail name "Boogerbear."
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Min-Maxing .NET Minimal APIs
The tiny tutorial for .NET Minimal APIs is really slick, but how do we build an actual-sized application with them? Is that even a good idea?
Recent releases of .NET include an exciting new option for hosting web applications: Minimal APIs, which provide a lightweight request-to-response handling framework in the vein of Express.js or Ruby's Sinatra. The announcement came with lean and mean examples which are exciting, but leave something to be desired when it comes to imagining a real-world application.
In this session, we will pick up where the tutorial drops off to see how an actual application takes shape using this new framework. We'll see what patterns develop as we add more endpoints than fit on one screen, and how to implement necessary components such as security, documentation and API versioning without losing the desired slim profile.
My team selected Minimal APIs for a small-but-growing application last summer. It turned out to be a good fit, but jumping the hurdles and smoothing the rough edges revealed where and how it wouldn't be. I come to you now with tips and tricks to make your experience with the framework better, and to inform you when (and when not) a similar choice is the right move.
The 800-File Gorilla: Lessons from Reviewing a Very Big Pull Request
Code review, like many practices in software development, is best served “right-sized:” not so small it’s annoying, and not so big it’s daunting. You might even limit a pull request’s (PR) scope to a given feature, aligned with some user story. But what if the PR comes from outside your organization, so you couldn’t play a direct hand in how it was broken down? And what if it concerned something cross-cutting, something like a major framework upgrade that impacts an entire application?
In this session, we’ll outline a strategic approach to reviewing large, complex PRs in a manageable way. We’ll look at how to evaluate so many lines of code, effectively track updates, diplomatically provide feedback, and pragmatically select what must, should, or could be done (and by whom).
I’ll draw on my own recent experience reviewing a critical pull request from a community member that clocked in at almost 900 files. It took about a month to review and approve, and another month to address follow-up pieces. While it was a laborious and less-than-ideal process, it had to be done, so I sought the best path—and the one I found might make your life less painful too! We’ll examine what went well, what didn’t, and why we would prefer to go small any time we can.
Exploit Your Brain! Habits at Work and in Life
Distractions are all around us, especially when jobs require us being constantly plugged-in. Couple that with disrupted or changing routines from COVID-19, or the sometimes-perilous freedom of working from home. In this distraction-rife environment, our habits become more impactful than ever, but habits can be challenging to make or break. That’s because most of the time, our brains are total chumps, waiting to be tricked into doing a thing—whether it’s brushing your teeth before bed or doom-scrolling for an hour.
But what if we could use our brains’ own gullibility to our advantage? In this session, we’ll review some of the high-level science behind habit forming, followed by tactics to trick our lizard-brains into doing what we want. We’ll be drawing from popular texts like James Clear's "Atomic Habits" and Marie Kondo's "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up," as well as some personal experience, struggles, and successes.
Our brains are capable of big things, but when it comes to sustaining and scaling our wins, it’s the little ones that matter. Let’s learn how to train our brains into creating habits that make us better, happier humans and developers.
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