Logging, Better to Have It, Before You Need It

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Motivation for Logging

Logging is the one thing you don’t know you need until you need it. I’m sure many of us have all been in the situation in which you wish you knew what your program was doing in a production environment. If only you could set a break point to check all of your variables and figure out why you can’t recreate it on your machine. One of the best solutions to this situation is logging! Good logging can often help you know exactly why that exception occurred. You can write logs as granular as you need. You can even set logging up so that different levels are logged based on a setting, either from a web.config file or a database. Some the reasons I can think of off the top of my head are:

  • Debugging purposes
  • Auditing user access
  • Performance metrics
  • Usability assessment
  • Supplement to commenting your code

I stumbled across another blog by Erik Hazzard in which he goes into more detail about why logging is important. vasir.net/blog/development/how-logging-made-me-a-better-developer

Today I am going to show you my simple logging and audit solution. I know there are many enterprise level logging solutions out there, such as Log4Net, but those are over kill for my needs and writing this takes just as much time as integrating a third party framework. I am using Entity Framework with my ASP.NET MVC project. I am also using Unity for dependency … Continue reading →

John Sonmez’s Create a Blog Course Review

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I, like many software developers, have always toyed with the idea of starting a blog, mainly for the nerdy side of it like setting up a site and having fun with all the stats and plugins and such. However, the introvert in me always held me back, saying things like “I could never have anything useful to contribute”, “I can’t write well enough”, or “Someone else has probably written that before”. Over the past year, I have come to realize that writing code is only a very small subset of being a software developer. A software developer has to have many other skills in order to succeed. Some of these skills are things like organization, good communication skills, the ability to understand complex problems, and communicate those effectively to others and so on. Most of these types of skills are the ones that programmers tend to shy away from because they are difficult and uncomfortable. However, from writing code and learning new concepts and languages, the only way to learn them is by actually doing and putting them into practice. I can watch hours upon hours of how-to videos and read countless blogs on a topic, but until I put them to use I don’t really have those skills. This is why I have started to blog, to help me acquire those, often hard to master, type skills mentioned above.

Create a Blog Email Course

John Sonmez has a very successful blog at http://simpleprogrammer.com that I have been following for some … Continue reading →

Hello, Blog Post!!!

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Introduction

First off let me introduce myself. My name is Scott Kerlagon and I am a Software Developer. Since I graduated with a degree in computer science in 2010 and have been writing software professionally and for fun since then. I mainly work in the .Net stack on the server side of things, but recently have been exploring more of the front end and the world of Angular.

Motivation

I intend to use this blog to help keep me motivated as I continue to learn and grow as a Software Developer. The following quote sums up my main motivation to start blogging:

“There is no better way to learn than to teach.” -Benjamin Whichote

There are many variations of this quote by many different people. However, the idea is the same. The deepest way to know something is to teach that something. It means you have to be able to accurately explain concepts to others. Teaching forces you to consider your audience and the different backgrounds and experiences they bring to understanding the material.

I am sure many are familiar with the “Learning Pyramid” in which different forms of learning are assigned different percentages for retention. Passive forms of learning such as listening to a lecture, reading, and audio visual presentations have relatively poor retention rates. More active forms of learning such as group discussion, actively doing, and teaching have the higher retention rates. There seems to be a lot of debate as to whether these percentages are accurate or not but the point … Continue reading →