Jeff Makes Software

I haven't been writing much lately, in part because I spent a good portion of my free time in the last week overhauling the POP Forums UI to use the Bootstrap framework. You can see what it looks like on the demo site. It took me a long time to cave and do this, but I think I had pretty good reasoning.

TL;DR: I eventually saved money.

[This is a repost from my personal blog.]

[This is a repost from my personal blog.]

This is probably the most specific post I’ve written in a long time, but given how long I let it fester, and how much debugging it took to figure out, I figure it’s worth saving someone the time. Last fall you might recall that I did a little bit of reverse engineering, and some cutting and pasting of source code, to use the OWIN-based external authentication stuff, decoupling it from ASP.NET Identity. This was a pretty exciting win for me because I was completely not interested in using yet another auth system in POP Forums, when the one I had was already pretty simple and embedded in some of my own projects.

About a month ago, I wrote all about my experience migrating my sites off of dedicated hardware and into Azure. I figured I would wait awhile before writing about the daily operation of those sites, so I could gather enough experience to make a meaningful assessment. As I said in the previous post, this is a move that I was looking forward to make for a good three years or so, when I actually worked with Azure from within Microsoft. The pricing finally came down to a point where it made sense for an indie publisher, and here we are.

As my contract gig ended, I started a new job where I've assumed the role of technical architect. It's a little like a cross between a development manager, development lead and traditional architect role. I'd like to think that it plays to all of my strengths, but I suppose I'll have to still demonstrate that!

Almost a year ago, I started to be a lot more interested in Xamarin, since I already was something of a Mac guy writing software for the Microsoft platform. I've been working in Windows VM's via Parallels for years. At work, the firm we were working with to build out our mobile apps was using Xamarin too. For me, it wasn't just about being able to use C# to write apps for iOS and Android, it was the idea that you could share a lot of code. That's pretty exciting.