Jeff Makes Software

[This is a repost from my personal blog.]

Again this year, I did a couple of talks at Orlando Code Camp, the amazingly awesome free mini-conference that our local user group, ONETUG, has been putting on for a decade now. I am again fascinated by the vibrancy of our community, and all of the people who volunteer their time to share knowledge. It's humbling and amazing. (My decks are on GitHub, by the way. I won't rehash the mentoring and career development stuff here.)

Jumping into the brave new world of .NET as open source has been an experience, to say the least. The feedback loop is tight, things change quickly, and it's definitely a different world than the days of big bang releases. I think it's a great thing, but admittedly, it makes the early adoption thing a lot harder. Sometimes I find myself disappointed (as with the deferred release of SignalR 3, for example). Still, the scope of the frameworks and the number of people working on them is impressive, and I look forward to this new world.

While I'm still enthusiastic about ASP.NET 5, there are things that I run into that seem way harder than they should be. Beta software, no docs, I know... I need to keep my expectations in check. Localization is just such a thing. The samples currently in GitHub along side the code lack context, especially relative to what we're all used to.

Wow, time flies when work is keeping you extra busy. I haven't done a lot of work on POP Forums or done any speaking gigs since spring. I feel like a bit of a slacker! Fortunately, there's something new to talk about.

Over the last year and change, I've written a number of posts about the challenges around moving my sites (primarily CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz) to Azure. These are moderately busy sites that can for the most part live in a small websites, er, app service, instance, with SQL Azure S0 for the data, some storage here and there, queues, and some experimental use of search, Redis and what not. I know I've done some complaining, but only because I really want one of the core premises of the cloud, namely for all of the maintenance and backend stuff to be abstracted away, to deliver without me thinking about it. Mostly, it has.

My sites (CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz) have now been in Azure for about a year. It has been interesting, for sure. From a high altitude perspective, I can tell you that I've saved money when compared to renting a dedicated server, but there have been challenges in terms of reliability.

This is based on a talk I did at the 2015 Orlando Code Camp, but it strikes me as something worth blogging about. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of anti-patterns, but just a general category of things that end up being a huge pain at some point. Avoid these at all costs! In no particular order...