FC51: Frugal Cafe First Month Review and Second Month Plan

Frugal Cafe newsletter has been running for a month now, starting from 8/3/2023. Here are the numbers:

50 Posts
567 Subscribers
18,598 impressions
5,548 followers on LinkedIn

Great progress for the 1st month. It took more than four years for Frugal Tips alias to grow to 3,600 members at #microsoft. The world is certainly much larger than a single company.

Now you can see Frugal Cafe newsletter is unique in its discussion of #azure #performance #dotnet #dotnetcore #csharp. We do not talk about the next great feature, another new package, principles, new release, new API. Instead, we talk about practical performance issues found in production, how to analyze them, how to fix them, how to compare before and after, what to learn from them, etc.

Essentially, we talk about how to understand the interplay of code and data at much deeper level, how to make software engineering more like real engineering, how to reduce the carbon footprint of our software/cloud services, how to be enlightened developers proud enough to sign our names on our artworks.

Now proudly suggest #FrugalCafe to your coworkers, to your friends, to professional and aspiring developers.

For the second month of Frugal Cafe, my plan is focusing on tolling.

I've cloned PerfView/ClrMd source code, put into a private repo, able to compile them, run PerfView with private bits, finding performance issues, fix them, and then repeat. I will also add new features to PerfView.

Getting ClrMd to work is little bit tricky, because PerfView is using an older version of it. I had to clone ClrMd release/2.3, which is actually version 2.4. Need to make some small changes in PerfView to make this work because it's causing assembly version conflicts.

Once I'm happy with the results, I will record online course for purchase ($$$), with my enhanced and rebranded PerfView. PerfView/ClrMd are under MIT license, so this is allowed. I will share my ways of doing performance analysis, finding performance issues, making implementation and design changes to improve performance, validate gain. I will be sharing my techniques of using tools like PerfView, windbg, Visual Studio to conduct such investigation. It will be mind-blowing experience for people who has not listened to my performance talks.

When at #microsoft, I offer teams across Microsoft performance brownbag sessions with the condition that they provide me extra performance data in the form of Perfview traces and memory dumps. You will be surprised the number of teams who are too shy to provide me with data. Once data is found to be good, I will be spending a few days studying them to come up with something meaningful to share with the team.

The online courses are intended for people at senior/principal levels at companies like Microsoft. They will give you a distinctive advantage in your career, because you're being trained by the best in #azure #performance #dotnet #csharp #dotnetcore.

Thanks for your trust in me, thanks for your support.