Author: Anthony Carlson

Design System Training

This past week I went through Design System overview. It was facilitated by Nathan Curtis of Eight Shapes. Here are my notes and thoughts.

Design System

·What does Design System mean?

At the core. It is the Interface design, visual language to UI component in a enterprise.  There is a core team that keeps it well documented. The design system uses Design Tokens.

A design system purpose is to serve in making digital Experiences. A Design system. is a living roadmap & backlog, serving a eco system. This is for new and legacy products.

Cohesiveness / Consistency / Efficiency

How can you measure a design system?

  • Other
  • Quality
  • Scale / Reuse
  • Vocabulary
  • Portability
  • Accessibility

Visual Style

A company that has been incorporating a design system is Morningstar. http://designsystem.morningstar.com/

Strategic Approach

The two questions in a strategic approach is:

  • How do you scale in a design system?
  • How do you favor community over control?

Technical Architecture

How does a technical decision happen? Whos is the person or team that makes these decisions. The team that makes the design system serves the rest of the teams that consume it.

A company Design System should have the following:

  • Demo App
  • Output
  • Website
  • Contributions
  • Code: features, fix, optimize
  • Design: components, palettes, icon
  • Downloadable asset: work

Questions to ask about the Lifetime of a design system:

  • What Features will be shared
  • How much will it cost to make or maintain
  • Trigger momentum for a new direction
  • How deeply can you document it?
  • When can you complete the work?

Change means clear process:

A change starts with a  Proposal-clarify-discuss-activate

What is the agreed core?

How do you version at the library level and component? Semantic versioning

A team with constant change has a version that changes with every sprint. The rate of change is lower and managed.

There are some companies where it is daily. It is because overlaying a design systems with open source.

How do you handle outside contribution with open source?

Other Questions and concerns:

  • How does consistency maintain?
  • What is our timeline to have a design system?
  • Where do you start in a Design system?
  • How to distribute a design system?
  • How can we be assured that quality is there?
  • Dependency management
  • Decoupling
  • How sophisticated are things going?
  • Is the system that owns the product the owner?
  • Translations and extensions to the design system.
  • How do you influence the system?
  • Use of system stabilizes at visual language.
  • Re-platforming is a product strategy.
  • Evidence is you converge a design system.
  • Alpha iterations conform to styles
  • Design systems
  • Code Architecture

Blockchain Development Group: Libra

This evening I attended the Blockchain Development Group  hosted by Farm  Credit Services of America.

Started with networking and Pizza.

libra

Libra

Tonight’s talk was on Libra by Kyle tut of pinata.cloud.

Validators

Libra validator nodes are responsible for validating transactions. Experimenting with node validators.

Developed as a smart contract language. Learned from solidity. Integration will be done through modules. The 2/3 majority will need to approve.The main goal of Libra is to be stable. They have not solved problems with Ethereum.

Calibra is own by Facebook. It is a digital wallet. It is also a partner.

Re-seller takes money and puts into the Reserve. Then money in exchange will be put in Libra. Not much different then a global ACH network. The goal is about controlling where the amount is stored.

There will be regulatory considerations. If successful won’t have to deal with regulations as other financial transactions are. Libra is a digital currency not a crypto concurrency.

Google Developer Group Omaha: Intro to Flutter

This evening I attended the Google Developer group hosted by CRI at the Travel and Transport building.

trave and transport

Started with Introductions: Such as I am Anthony Carlson. I am the Lead Application Developer at Farm Credit Services of America with emphasis on the iOS and Android platform.

Intro to Flutter

Tonight’s topic was on Flutter. An intro to Flutter and Getting a Flutter app to production were the topics. Flutter works as a plugin in Android Studio. You can connect to the iOS simulator.

  • Portable UI toolkit
  • Native Mobile or Web
  • State Management
  • Compiles to native file

App built is a Tree structure. Everything is a widget. There is also a process for developing a package and plugins. Scaffolding is very similar to material design. When you develop you are acting in a state. Let flutter manage state. The more complex or nest widgets is when state management.

It was a brief talk, but educational.

2019 Garden

Today, I planted the 2019 Carlson Family Garden.

Green Peppers, Tomatoes, Orange Peppers, Cherry Tomatoes

Sweet Corn

Pumpkins

Strawberries (Front) Onions (Back) , Zucchini, Carrots (Front) Radishes (cherry Belle) (Back)

Broccoli, Bean Garden Kentucky Blue (pole) , spinach

Azure May Meeting

I attended my first Azure meeting at the Microsoft building in Aksarben.

The group meets last Wednesday of the month at 3:00 p.m.

The topic was on Microsoft’s Azure Service Fabric is the PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering for service-oriented systems. By leveraging the same platform Microsoft uses to build their own services (such as Azure SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB), developers have access to a wide range of tools to improve scalability, reliability, and management of their microservices systems.

In this talk, Sr. Software Architect Andy Unterseher will explain what Service Fabric is, how it is hosted in Azure, which types of applications are best suited for it, and some situations where it may not be appropriate. Using a live application, Andy will demonstrate how to develop with Service Fabric and show how to deploy it from Azure DevOps. He will compare Service Fabric to other platforms (like Kubernetes) and talk about the still-in-preview Azure Service Fabric Mesh.

Presentation

Hosting Services in Azure

I heard the term of iDesign which was talked at a topic at another meetup.
Function Apps
API Management
Kubernetes
Can deploy asp.net core and api’s into the service fabric.

State Management

Development Strategy
Two Solution
• Locally
• Azure

Should your solution know about Service Fabric?

Updates create a package of differential when updating.

Azure Devops
Template vs Yml file.

What does Service Fabric do?
Allows to host legacy code and docker. Recommendation is not to.

What is the different in Mesh?
Mesh is container based?

Pro’s
Fully Managed
Deploy across availability zones

AIM IT Leadership Academy: Graduation

 

About 4:00 p.m. after the AIM IT Leadership Academy: Reality Based Leadership Session every was escorted to the atrium where we will meet any guests that will be coming. My accountability buddy along with other teammates from Farm Credit Services of America were down there waiting.  There were free drinks and light appetizers from Upstream Brewery served.

At about 4:20 p.m. everyone was ushered into the auditorium for a graduation ceremony.

Each member of the graduation class was called up one at time to say a few words. I was given a triangle plaque with my name and graduation class.

I spoke about being thankful for the opportunity to be in the program. I also mentioned how the interacting with different members in the capstone cup was eye opening to how other companies work.

 

 

AIM IT Leadership Academy: Reality Based Leadership Session

On Friday May 3rd the last AIM IT Leadership session was held at Omaha Public Power District located at in downtown Omaha  at the Energy Plaza at 444 So. 16th Street.

This session was on Reality-Based Leadership.  This is based on research and book by Cy Wakeman. This is a local speaker who wrote a book on the topic.

The principles of Reality-Based Leadership include:

  • Refusing to argue with reality
  • Valuing action over opinion
  • Leading first, managing second
  • Bulletproofing employees so that they can succeed, regardless of the circumstances
  • Working to be happy rather than to be right

Agenda

The speaker for the day taking us through the course was Alex Dorr.

 

He started off with saying “I want to Thank you for being here and the opportunity to speak”

Here is a link to my notes along with the power point.

I can say this was my favorite speaker and session.

These were my three actions I took from the course today.

  1. Work on my personal happiness.
  2. Help others be accountable.
  3. Finding what great looks like at work.

2019 Spring UNO MIS Capstone Dinner

On Monday, April 29th, I attend final presentation dinner for the University of Nebraska-Omaha Management of Information Systems Capstone Team EmpowerU students.

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I was first contacted by a UNO Student who saw a class room presentation and attended Technology Works Here 2018 about fundraising.

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After back and forth emails. I donated $100.00 to the presentation dinner.

I then meet at the 2019 Spring Career Fair who had the empoweru project on their resume.  This was a good conversation piece for the students.

Event

The event began at 5:30pm in PKI room 158. There was a buffet style dinner.

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The table I sat with was for professors who sponsored the project.  Dr. Royce who I have built a good relationship was one of those professors. The tables had a program on it which contained the FCSAmerica logo along with other sponsors.

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Presentation

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The presentation kicked off about 6:00 p.m. with a presentation of the Team and project.

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As individuals and a group they told their story of working on their capstone project. Their deliverable was great, but how they got there was even better. The students showed how as a team transparency, accountability, and teamwork makes great software.  I know, I walked away knowing this was money well spent and a stronger relationship with the university.

A few days later I got a thank you card in the mail.

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