In this blog entry, I'm going to take a break from talking about software engineering topics and instead discuss computer hardware. Specifically, I'm going to provide a detailed walkthrough of how I upgraded the RAM and Solid State Drive (SSD) on my LG Gram ultrabook. As I stated at the very beginning, the computer that you use for your software development work matters. I chose to purchase the LG Gram 17" 2019 model because it's a rockin' laptop for software engineers. The original laptop came with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, which I thought was upgradable to 20GB and 512GB, respectively. Little did I know, the laptop supports much more, and there is a popular modification out on the Internet to upgrade the RAM to 40GB and SSD to 1TB using high-quality Samsung components! For a few hundred bucks more and a moderate time investment, it was a deal I couldn't refuse!

If Visual Studio is your samurai sword, then the C# programming language along with patterns and practices of structured software development are your fighting techniques, principles and disciplines. In this post, I'm going to talk about some of the features of C#, versions 6, 7, and 8. I've chosen to focus on these three versions because not only are they the most recent (obviously) but also because the style of language version releases started to change with version 6, focusing on a more frequent tempo and more granular features. Even more importantly, the syntax and feel of the language itself seemed to turn a corner with C# 6, marking what in my opinion is an evolving paradigm shift toward functional programming.

You are a software samurai, and your sword is Visual Studio. The purpose of this blog entry is to give you guidance on some of the new features of Visual Studio 2019, as well as existing features that you may have overlooked, such as hotkeys and snippets, so that you can work more efficiently and effectively as a Microsoft (.NET) stack software developer. As stated in my previous blog post, Visual Studio is your primary tool when working on the Microsoft stack, and the better you understand that tool, the more productive you will be and the more time you will save. The idea is to reduce unnecessary wear-and-tear on your hands and body, and hopefully also prevent the mental burnout that can result from doing repetitive work. The bottom line is this: fewer keystrokes = greater career longevity.