If seriously thinking about starting your career as a Frontend Software developer, you’re not going to do a bad turn with any of these Technical skills on the list below.
Especially for those who want to be demographically independent – aka, you’ll be able to find a job anywhere you go to maintain your cash flow…
From my working experience, these are the most resonating ones currently on the market (2021) in sequential order from the most wanted to down:
There are plenty of training materials online to start your journey.
But … I strongly recommend starting with the basics and principles first before jumping on core development. This can save you a lot of time in faulty code investigation and prevent unnecessary initial frustration (learning curve).
Btw., I am more like a person who learns from visual sources and I can give you a few tips on what I use for your start:
Is your system working with price items with values more than 2 decimal points long? Are you using rounding as a part of the calculating formula? Have you generated an invoice from Xero API and later found out that the actual total on it is a few cents off?
If the answers to all of these questions are yes, you are at the right place!
Well, you know this story … you have done all that hard work on building Xero API integration, happy with finishing the project on time and with such a masterpiece level source code, and in the first integration test run you discover that your invoice calculated data summary data are different from what Xero has generated in the invoice (ouch!):
Invoice line items total calculation with one cent off
And yes, something is not looking right, and scratching the head does not seem to be helping much …
Well, the truth is that every system does invoice calculation of subtotal, total, and GST differently. The same applies to the Xero backend service (API) and therefore these two ways are good options to get you out of the trouble.
One way of doing it is to add an adjustment line as a part of the Xero API request payload and put the variation value into it to keep source data in alignment with Xero. Personally, I don’t really like this approach. The reason being is that you are going to end up with a more comprehensive solution for not much-added business value as appose to the time spent on building it.
Another way is to follow the Xero calculation formula. Yep, you heard me right…
And the way I would rather suggest you go with. You may be asking why I would do that?
So let me explain my view on this.
Let’s assume that Xero as a business is on the market for several decades now. You may be getting some sense about the overall knowledge Xero as a company must have gained from such a long time history, of providing comprehensive financial services to customers.
I also know that Xero has gone through several business validation iterations and internal system refactoring processes to build as much accurate tax calculation business logic on the API backend as possible. All these company journeys supported by customer feedback and over time accumulating domain knowledge helped Xero build a great service reputation in the current market worldwide.
And the question is, why wouldn’t I use this knowledge to my advantage? And just btw – I am not participating in any affiliate programs running by Xero!
Do you have another thought about it? – leave me a comment below 😉
Ok, let’s go ahead and talk about the calculation formula…you can start to calculate GST from the prices either GST inclusive or exclusive. These are the types of line items on request payload.
Types of line items to be used in the invoice request payload
1. Line item price with GST exclusive
Round line-item-price to 2 DP (decimal places) Round(line-item-price) => Round2DP(10.5456)
Calculate line-item GST from rounded line-item-price, line-item-quantity, and GST rate, and round the result to 2 DP for each line-item Round(line-item-price * [GST rate] * line-item-quantity) => Round2DP(10.55*(0.155) *5)
Sum up the rounded line-item-price(s) as Subtotal (line-item-price * line-item-quantity)+…N(row)…+(line-item-price * line-item-quantity)
Sum-up the line-item calculated GST (step2) as GST Total (step2)+…N(row)…+(step2)
Add Subtotal and GST Total as invoice Total (step3)+(step4)
Feels difficult? That is ok. For simplicity and quick integration reasons, I have created the NuGet package XeroGSTTaxCalculation (NET 5) for you, free to use.
A short demonstration of how to use the XeroGSTTaxCalculation NuGet package:
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
IXeroTaxCalculationService service = new XeroTaxCalculationService();
var data = new[] {
new LineItem { Code = "code_1", Price = 12m, Quantity = 10 },
new LineItem { Code = "code_2", Price = 8.7998m, Quantity = 8 }
};
var invoiceDetails = service.CalculateGSTFromPriceGSTExclusive(data, 0.25);
Console.WriteLine(invoiceDetails);
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
2. Line item price with GST inclusive
Add 1 to the GST rate 1+[GST rate] => 1 + 0.15
Calculate and Round to 2 DP line-item-price as line-item-price-total Round(line-item-price*line-item-quantity) => Round2DP(10.5456*5)
Divide rounded line-item-price-total by GST rate (for each line-item) and round to 2 DP as line-item-price-lessTax Round(line-item-price-total/[GST rate] )=> Round2DP(52.73/1.15)
Subtract line-item-price-lessTax from line-item-price-total as line-item-gst (line-item-price-total ) – (line-item-price-lessTax)
Sum-up the line-item calculated GST (line-item-gst) as invoice GST total (step4)+…N(row)…+(step4)
Sum-up line-item-price-total as invoice Total (step2)+…N(row)…+(step2)
Subtract GST total from Total to get invoice Subtotal (step6) – (step5)
Feel free to use NuGet package XeroGSTTaxCalculation for this as shown in one code example from above. I bet you’re gonna need this saved time to spend on beer sessions with your mates instead .). Cheers!
This Azure service has been here for a while now, but lately got a few improvements that make the integration and use of it even easier and more seamless than before.
Just before going any further, if you haven’t read anything about it, I recommend you to start with this article first https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-what-is-azure-search as I am not going to dive too much into the details today. This reading is going to be about my personal experience of getting a Cognitive Search service provisioned with a bunch of data (of one source) connected to it.
Personally, I like to look at the problems to solve with my business lens. What that means is focusing on building content (business value) rather than building the search engine (feature). I am not saying that compromising (non-business related) system features that are helping users to enhance their User system Experience is a good thing to do. All I am saying is stop re-inventing the wheel!
Hey Devs, don’t give me this wiggle face saying things like: “c’mon, it’s not that hard to do it by yourself!”. Yes, but actually it is hard from the time complexity point of view … To build a great search engine with features your audience is going to like would take many weeks of man/hours to do so. These features include Auto-completion, geospatial search, filtering, and faceting capabilities for a rich UX, OCR (ideally backed by AI), key phrase extraction, image text found results highlighting, and all of that with the ability to scale this service as needed and add as many multiple (and different) data sources as needed.
Can you see my point, now? Did one of your eyebrows just lift up? :)) Anyway .. let’s jump into it and see how long this is going to take me to build in the Azure portal.
Steps how to build a first Cognitive Search as a Service
1) Go to the Azure portal, search for Cognitive Services and add a new one called “Azure Cognitive Search“
Adding Azure Cognitive Search to the Cognitive Service library in the Azure portal
2) As for all services in Azure space, you need to fill up what Subscription and Resource Group this service will belong to. And as the next step, preferred URL, Geographic location of the data center, and pricing Tier. I am choosing the free Tier (which should be enough for this exercise) and the location close to NZ. The next step is to click on Validate, and on Create button afterward.
Filling up the service initials
3) The first step in the wizard is the “Connect to your data” tab. That means that on this page you can connect to multiple data sources. As you can see from the picture below, quite a few options are available to choose from (and most likely going to cover all of the use case scenarios). For this exercise, I am going to take “Samples” and SQL database. You can add as many data sources as you want (with the respect to limitations of the selected service Tier type).
Adding a connection to the data source
4) At the “Add cognitive skills” tab I decided to add a bunch of additional Text Cognitive Skills, even though this step is optional. My reasons are purely investigative and I would like to see how the @search.score field in returning data result sets is going to look like when trying to search my documents by any of these fields from the Enriched data set.
Adding extra source fields for cognitive skills run
5) In the next step “Customize target index” (sometimes referred to as a “pull model“) I am going to leave all pre-populated settings as they are as I am happy with it for now. In this step, you can configure things like the level of data exposure, data field types, filtering, sorting, etc.
Just to give you a better understanding of what the search index is in this context – think about it as in a relational database a search index equates to a table. And also we have documents, which are the items of the index. Think about them as documents that are roughly equivalent to rows in a table.
Also, remember to keep a Key field in Edm.String data type. This is a mandatory prerequisite.
Customizing the target indexes
6) In the “Create an Indexer” tab (the way how to index data in a scheduled manner) I am not allowed to configure how often should be mapping table (index) build. The reason for it is that the Sample SQL database I am using in this exercise does not use any Change tracking policies (for example SQL Integrated Change Tracking Policy). Why is needed? Well, basically Cognitive search needs to know when the data delete change happened to address that. You can read more about it here.
For now, I am going to submit this form and move on.
The service starts provisioning itself (this should not take long to finish) and after a couple of minutes, I should have everything ready for testing.
Create an indexer tab
Testing the Search Service
Now, let’s have a look at “Search explorer” from the service level main top menu and craft some data queries. My first query was the “Bachelor-Wohnung” word, which nicely got populated into the URL query as the value of &search element by itself…
I have to say that building this service did take me about 20 minutes (for someone who has some experience already) from having nothing to an easy-to-configure and scale search engine. Anyone should be able to build the first Cognitive search service by a similar time after reading this post now.
If there are any questions or want to know more about this service, visit this site built by Microsoft at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/. These people did a really great job in documenting all of it. This material should help you to elevate your skills to a more advanced level.
What is the Azure Cognitive Search Tiers pricing
_
FREE
BASIC
STANDARD S1
STANDARD S2
STANDARD S3
STORAGE OPTIMIZED L1
STORAGE OPTIMIZED L2
Storage
50 MB
2 GB
25 GB (max 300 GB per service)
100 GB (max 1 TB per service)
200 GB (max 2 TB per service)
1 TB (max 12 TB per service)
2 TB (max 24 TB per service)
Max indexes per service
3
15
50
200
200 or 1000/partition in high density1 mode
10
10
Scale out limits
N/A
Up to 3 units per service (max 1 partition; max 3 replicas)
Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas)
Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas)
Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas) up to 12 replicas in high density1 mode
Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas)
Up to 36 units per service (max 12 partition; max 12 replicas) up to 12 replicas in high density1 mode
Martin Stanik.com 