Posts
Feed Favorites January 2022
Articles I’ve liked in the past month (2 to be exact). Service Locator is not an Anti-Pattern I appreciate Jimmy’s take on Service Locator. When I was learning about the Service Locator pattern, I was told that it was always A Bad Thing™️. As I’ve grown my skills, I’ve learned to try and avoid blanket statements like that. Similarly, I am not a fan of the term “Best... Read more.
Using Tailscale with an Azure Linux VM and Terraform
I learned about Tailscale from Scott Hanselman’s excellent Podcast Hanselminutes. Since it supports macOS, iOS / iPadOS, Linux, and more I quickly got a simple network created between my devices at home. The setup was completely effortless, and I was able to securely communicate between my devices at home or away. Awesome! I also have a small Azure Subscription that I use to host this... Read more.
Using the Luxafor Flag and a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a Teams Status Light
When working in an open office, how do you avoid being interrupted so often? Pre-COVID I got a Luxafor Flag as a way to indicate to my coworkers when I was busy. The Luxafor did great for this when paired with my Elgato Stream Deck. With the tap of a button on the Sream Deck, I could show whether I was busy or open to interruptions. But then COVID hit and I was working from home full time. Our... Read more.
Azure DevOps Exploration
Building software has always been a hassle. Over the years, the effort it takes to create a reliable build system has decreased drastically. Tools like Travis CI dramatically reduce the time and effort it takes to go from nothing to a functioning continuous integration pipeline. I’ve tried a few CI tools like Travis, AppVeyor, and TeamCity. One CI application I had not tried, was Visual... Read more.
Azure Web App for Containers Using Terraform
Recently at work I have been tasked with helping our organization transition from our traditional on-premises infrastructure to Azure. To do that, I’ve been learning how to automate our infrastructure by using HashiCorp’s Terraform. Terraform was introduced to me by a few members of our infrastructure team and I’ve found it quite fun to work with. As I’ve been working on... Read more.
Getting to Know Swift
For the last several years I’ve primarily been a backend developer using C# and occasionally doing work on the frontend with JavaScript. I’ve dabbled in learning Rust as well but I wanted to try my hand at writing native iOS and macOS applications for a change. After doing some research on where to begin, I started reading the book App Development with Swift by Apple. This book has... Read more.
Discovering Podcasts
I’ve never paid much attention to podcasts. Up until a few months ago I was commuting to work by train and used that time to either read books, or play games. All of that has been great and I’ve enjoyed the time I have had to read, relax, or learn something new. Recently, I’ve had to begin commuting to work which completely threw the routine I had developed. Since I can’t... Read more.
Keeping up with JavaScript
I like JavaScript, I really do, but I just haven’t been able to keep up with the insane change that is going on in that world. Over the last several months at work I’ve been building out a project that is mostly back end work. When I have been able to do any sort of front end work, it has been in a desktop Windows application using WPF. While working on this application I started to... Read more.
Using qDslrDashboard with the Sony a6000
Most of my posts are going to be something technology related but I do happen to have other interests. For a while now, I’ve had a Sony a6000 that I’ve been very happy with. I’m very much an amateur at photography but I find it fun and I like the images I get of my family more than the ones I can get from my iPhone. So I’ve been slowly trying to level up my photography... Read more.
Learning Rust as a C# Developer
Choosing a new programming language to learn is difficult. What do I want to focus on? Do I want to learn something low level like C? Do I want to go all out functional and learn Haskell? What about Go? Everyone seems to be glowing about that language. Elixir? I hear Rubyists are really digging on that language, and it is built on top of Erlang! So many choices! As you’ve probably guessed... Read more.