5 hobbies of a real developer

We know that besides coding, debugging, compiling, customizing software, learning AI and other wonderful things you do at work / study, each of you has a hobby. Therefore, a few days ago, we asked members of the Microsoft Developer community and Microsoft technology evangelists about their hobbies in their spare time, and in honor of February 23, we prepared for you a selection of useful materials on the 5 most popular ones.



In this article you will find a selection of the most interesting Microsoft Virtual Academy courses, Channel 9 videos and just useful material for each of the 5 hobbies. At the end of the article we added a poll. It will be interesting to find out what hobbies are popular among habrovchan.

1. I love game dev

The most popular hobby was game development. The first video games appeared in the early 50s, and to date this direction has grown into one of the most profitable in the entertainment industry. Today we will talk about courses and videos that will help you start the path of the game developer and deepen your knowledge.
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Free courses on game development

The most popular Microsoft Virtual Academy courses on game development for programmers with different levels of training.

1. Introduction to game development (Beginner) .
2. Developing games for Windows 10 with Construct 2 (Intermediate) .
3. Application development augmented and virtual reality on Windows (Intermediate) .

Video on how to start making games

A series of videos in Russian for novice developers on how to create games on Unity 5.

1. An introductory video of the course in which you will learn about where to download and how to install Unity on your computer.

2. In this episode, you will learn about the creation of the first 2D character, as well as about the sprites, polygons and colliders.

3. Video on what is physical material in Unity, how to adjust gravity and teach boxes to fall when they really need it.

4. The episode describes how to add to the game of enemies, the revival of the character after losing health and organize a collection of stars.

5. In this series, you will learn how to add several levels to your game and switch between them under different conditions. In addition, the video tells how to make the main menu with a choice of levels.

6. The last video of the course tells you how to build a game on Unity under UWP.

2. Coding only and nothing else coding.

In the second place among the popular hobbies was programming. One can not help recalling the statement: “Choose a job you like, and you will not have to work a single day in your life.” In this section, we have compiled popular Microsoft Virtual Academy courses of different levels of complexity and in different areas of development.

Windows 10

1. GitHub for Windows Developers (Beginner) .
2. Getting started with Template 10 (a set of Visual Studio project templates) (Intermediate) .
3. Development of universal applications with XAML and C # (Intermediate) .

Web development

1. Introduction to ASP.NET Core 1.0 (Beginner) .
2. Immersion in ASP.NET Core 1.0 (Intermediate) .
3. ASP.NET Core 1.0 Application Development for Mac and Linux (Advanced) .

C # / XAML Development

1. Basics of C # (Beginner) .
2. XAML for Windows 10: Layout Layout (Intermediate) .
3. Working with JSON in C # (Advanced) .

Cloud development

1. Deploy a web application to Azure App Service (Beginner) .
2. Create the first Azure Service Fabric application (Intermediate) .
3. Immersion in Mastering Azure App Service in 4 parts (Advanced) .

Mobile development

1. Introduction to Xamarin (Beginner) .
2. Top 10 cheat sheets and tools for managing mobile devices (Intermediate) .
3. Introduction to Xamarin.Forms (Advanced) .

3. IoT: smart home, weather stations, robots, etc.

The honorable third place was taken by the IoT hobby. It is believed that the concept of IoT originated in 1999, when there was an understanding of the possibilities of the widespread use of radio frequency identification tools for the interaction of physical objects among themselves and with the external environment. Here you can find an interesting graph of how IoT has grown in popularity over the past decade.

Free IoT courses

Top free Microsoft Virtual Academy courses of varying complexity for IoT specialists.

1. Application Development for the Internet of Things (Beginner) .
2. In-depth development for the Internet of Things (Intermediate) .

Interesting IoT-projects (practice)

We chose the 3 most interesting projects from hackster.io, which you can repeat at home.

1. Creating a home weather station with Windows 10 (Beginner) .
2. Automate your smart home with Raspberry Pi 2 and Windows 10 IoT (Intermediate) .
3. Drone on Windows 10: C # .NET Quadcopter .

4. I am fond of AI, ML, DL, if you understand what I mean

In fourth place was the passion, adherents of which are called the beautiful expression Data Scientist. It is believed that the science of data originated at the time of the founding of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology in 1966.

Free courses for Data Scientist

We share the most popular courses on working with data on the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

1. Basics of working with Azure Machine Learning (Beginner) .
2. Azure Data Analytics for developers (Intermediate) .
3. Immersion in Azure Machine Learning (Advanced) .

Useful materials from Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research is a research division of Microsoft, established in 1991. There are 1.1 thousand scientists from different countries. Microsoft Research is a lot like a university, in particular - with its device. Employees make experiments, make prototypes, test them, and then present the results at scientific conferences.

1. Simulator for training and testing drones and other flying devices in open source .
2. A tool for biologists to model the interaction of cells .
3. English, French, and German language corpus, used when teaching Microsoft Translator .
4. A set of data from 100 thousand questions and answers for training computers .

5. The sysadmin on fan

The profession of system administrators appeared at the time of the popularization of PCs in the early to mid-70s. Over time, it has acquired, probably, the largest number of "bearded" jokes about repairing microwaves and other equipment.

Free courses for IT Pro

In this subsection we want to share useful material for IT Pro in different directions and different levels of complexity.

Windows 10

1. Toolkit in Windows 10 for IT-specialists (Beginner) .
2. Transition to Windows Server 2016 (Intermediate) .
3. Security with Windows 10 Device Guard (Advanced) .

Virtualization

1. Deploying virtual machines in the cloud (Beginner) .
2. Immersion in Windows Server 2016 (Intermediate) .
3. Server virtualization with Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center (Advanced) .

Devops

1. Application Lifecycle Management (Beginner) .
2. DevOps with Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server (Intermediate) .
3. The subtleties of professional work in DevOps (Advanced) .

Other hobbies

In addition to these hobbies, programmers and IT-specialists devote their free time to completely different hobbies: development of bots, mining, construction, flying on drones, sports, books, dancing, playing music, and even whining. It would be interesting to know what hobbies you have, answer the questions in the survey, write your answers in the comments, who knows how many like-minded people are among us.

We thank the Microsoft technology evangelist, Stas Pavlov , for his active participation in the creation of the material.