Hello! My name is Alex Norris and I was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. I am an aspiring software engineer currently working as a Technologist for Strategio. I recently graduated from the University of Missouri — Kansas City with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.

Describe yourself in 3 words
- Analytical — I like to fully breakdown problems and think about them
before jumping in.
- Humorous — Always like to throw in a light joke when I can.
- Persevering — Even when I get stuck on a problem and feel like I can’t
do it. I keep pushing past those feelings to try and get the job done.

Why did you join Strategio’s Simulator?
I joined the simulator because it seemed like a great opportunity to
jump start my career into technology. I was struggling in the job
market for a few months and received this offer, and took it, because
Strategio seemed like a great community and opportunity that I can
thrive in.

What were you doing before you joined Strategio?
Before I joined Strategio, I had just finished my Bachelor of Science in
Computer Science and was heavy on the job search.

What are you most excited about this year?
This year, I am excited to hopefully travel more now that school is out
of my way. I am ready to see the world more!

What made you decide to get into tech?
My love for video games in middle school made me want to learn
programming, so I would mess around with different game engines and
such. Now I’m not that big on video games anymore, but the interest
in tech has stuck!

What do you like to do during your spare time?
In my spare time, I like to play my guitar and sing with my band.

What is your favorite cultural value at Strategio?
My favorite cultural value of Strategio is to fail fast and learn. Rather
than break people down when they fail, we use it as a learning tool to
grow and keep moving forward. I feel that is super successful to grow
at the greatest pace.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?
I want to travel to Antarctica and hang out with the penguins.

What’s your favorite restaurant?
My favorite restaurant is Kayo’s Ramen Shop in Portland, Oregon.
Their spice is no joke and its equally delicious.

Feel free to follow or comment!

Meet Strategio’s Technologist: Alex Norris was originally published in Strategio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Take your time with the material

It may be tempting to rush your way through the tutorials and jump straight to the hands-on portions, but the point in the Simulator is to get a strong working knowledge of the material. To be successful with a client, you want to be able to speak on what services you can implement and why. Tutorial rushing will not give that depth of understanding.

2. Make friends with your fellow technologists

Having conversations and joking around with your fellow technologists is key to finding enjoyment and community at Strategio. Especially with the remote format spreading through the industry, it helps to use this opportunity to learn how to build rapport over the internet. Another useful skill in networking!

3. Don’t be afraid to read the same lesson twice or more

To get down to it, it can be a LOT of material to cover and can often be super overwhelming. That’s okay, just take it slow and don’t burn yourself out. If you feel a lot of it didn’t stick. Take a break and go back after. This will help with cementing the material.

4. Develop your growth mindset

Do your best to always look forward as well. What more can you learn about the topics? How can you expand upon a concept to make it better? Always stay in the mindset to be continuously learning!

Conclusion

In conclusion, perseverance will get you through this. Believe in your ability to learn and that you got chosen to be there. That means the team believes in your ability to be successful and do not forget that. Learn hard, reach out if you need help, take it slow, and, most importantly, have fun!

4 Tips For The Strategio Simulator was originally published in Strategio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s say you started working on a project in C# and want to write automated tests to make sure your requirements are met. In this article, I will walk you through how to get started!

Requirements

• Visual Studio: I will be using VS Community 2019
• Existing C# Project: I will be using a simple calculator for an example.

Add MSTest Project To Solution

1. Right-click the solution in the Solution Explorer, select Add, then select New Project.

2. In the resulting window, search MSTest and make sure you select the C# version.

3. Furthermore, ensure you are using the same Target Framework as your existing project.

4. Right-click the new MSTest project, select Add, then select Project Reference.

5. Click the toggle button next to your existing project and click okay.

6. Last, but not least, go to the Preferences of your existing project and set the Output type to Class Library.

Add Tests And Run Them

1. Add the using statement to include your existing project. For me it is “using a calculator;”.

2. Add tests to ensure proper execution of your project’s functions.

3. Click Test at the top of the window, then select Run All Tests.

4. This will open the Test Explorer and you can navigate through your tests to view the results!

Conclusion

Congratulations! Now you can get started writing away at your unit testing! Be sure to hit all of your acceptance criteria with these to make for a solid test-driven development!

Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment with questions and concerns. Also, consider following!

How To Add Unit Tests To Your C# Project Using MSTest & Visual Studio was originally published in Strategio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Congratulations! You made your first ASP.NET web app and you are ready to share it with the world. While there are native Visual Studio tools built-in for deployment to Azure, you decided to publish to AWS instead. No sweat! Here are the steps to finish the job!

Prerequisites:

• Visual Studio 2017 or newer: For this tutorial, I will be using Visual Studio, but the steps remain the same.
• AWS Account: Free tier should be all you need.
• Existing ASP.NET Project: If you are just here to learn, you can just use the default ASP.NET templates in Visual Studio.

Installing the AWS Toolkit

1. Select Extensions then click on Manage Extensions.
2. Search for AWS in the top-right search bar of the new window and download the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2017 and 2019.

3. To complete the installation: close all windows of Visual Studio and follow the Installer.

Publishing to AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Now that you’ve installed the toolkit, you are ready to publish through Visual Studio!

1. Right-click your ASP.NET project in the Solution Explorer.
2. Click Publish to AWS Elastic Beanstalk in the pop-up menu.

3. From here, select the proper credentials, region and make sure that Create a new application environment is selected before clicking Next.

4. Choose names for your application, environment, and URL. In this step, I used the default names and the dev option for my environment.

5. This toolkit is super useful in that it automatically populates the options needed for your web app. Feel free to take a look and change settings as you see fit. For this tutorial: I will stick with the defaults and move on to the review page.

6. Now that your settings are all in place, review them and then hit deploy!

Note: This will automatically create an Elastic Beanstalk App, S3 storage Bucket, and EC2 instances and you can review these in the AWS Management Console.

7. Review the deployment in the resulting status window!

Conclusion

Congratulations, again! You have now successfully deployed your ASP.NET project to AWS using Visual Studio! Now get out there and share your project with the world!

Consider following me and leaving a comment below with any questions and concerns.

How To Publish An ASP.NET Web App To AWS Using Visual Studio was originally published in Strategio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Getting ready for the PCEP seemed like a daunting task at first. I was not exactly adept with Python, as C# has been my language of choice for quite some time. However, thanks to the Python Essentials courses courtesy of the Python Institute, it was easy to take a day-by-day approach to properly prepare.

One thing that caught me off-guard throughout the process, was learning about how putting a negative index into a Python list essentially reverses the list. Learning this made parts of the exam easier to understand, although there are a few tricks to understanding how it worked in depth. So if you are preparing for the exam, definitely take a closer look into how that works.

Further advice I have to give is to find a good source for practice exams. Courtesy of our Enterprise Simulation Leader at Strategio (Nicole Ann Hargrove), I was provided with a great resource on Udemy. Created by Emil Frlez, this collection of practice tests gave me a resource to repeat over and over to help instill what I learned from the Python Essentials courses and feel more confident for the PCEP exam. When it comes to taking exams, practice tests always help give me that extra edge.

In the end, I successfully passed the exam and earned my certification. To fellow exam takers: remember to do your research, study hard, and utilize your resources.

Consider following me and comment below with questions or concerns!

What I Learned Preparing for the PCEP Certification was originally published in Strategio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Be prepared to explain why you did something: In many situations, I have had issues putting my decisions into words or even explaining why it was a good idea. Spending the time, to explain how and why my decisions were a good idea, however, will help me learn from mistakes or successes and can help me provide utility within my career.
2. Curiosity is important: In many occasions, you may not have the answers to a plethora of problems that present themselves to you. This is okay and happens to everyone on a daily basis. No one has all the answers. Be ready to ask questions and continuously study to get past these downfalls.
3. Show humility: Never be a know-it-all. There will be times where you won’t have the answer. Pretending to know the way in these situations will only hurt you in your journey to learn more and become adept within your career. Instead, adopt a learn-it-all mindset and always be open to learning more.

This guest presentation had a lot of eye opening points on how to be successful in the industry. I look forward to applying these lessons and becoming better and more skilled everyday.

Comment with and questions, concerns, or interesting points related. Consider following me for more!

Lessons From A Leader In Tech was originally published in Strategio on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

DevOps could benefit your organization further with reducing complexity, quicker bug resolution, and better quality products. Complexity is reduced by focusing on immediate customer requirements rather than trying to make one giant application from the start, which can lead to the addition of a bunch of pointless features. Quicker bug resolution can be attributed to the speed at which iterations can be pushed out due to the model. Better quality products comes from quickly coming back to the testing and planning phases to confirm and reconsider the customer requirements while having a direct line of communication between development and operations teams.

Furthermore, given the fluidity of DevOps, it is easier to consider information security throughout each iteration as well, in the form of DevSecOps. DevSecOps is similar to DevOps, but with the addition of security into the lifecycle. This version can be observed in companies like Auth0, who started considering security team collaboration continuously in the DevOps lifecycle to adapt to securing cloud applications. Considering how big the sector for cybersecurity has become in recent years, you may be seeing more of this framework being integrated in the industry.

While Agile methodologies focus on bridging between the customer and development team, DevOps bridges between the development and operations teams. DevOps makes it possible to quickly output end-to-end solutions with further benefits drawn by increased collaboration between operations and development. All considered, do you believe DevOps is the right fit for your organization?

Consider following me and please comment with any questions or concerns.