Archives
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100 weeks of open source software contributions
Late in 2018, I got into a groove updating and improving my very-long-running open source project, POP Forums. It was a huge refactoring project, updating the CSS framework, embracing Dapper for object mapping from the database, rewriting the admin area to use Vue.js, adding support for ElasticSearch and Azure Functions... it didn't look new, but the internals were massively different. As that effort went on, leading to a release that following May, I committed to making at least one contribution to OSS per week. Having transitioned into more manager than maker, I wanted to keep some street cred, and frankly I still find the process and the learning to be fun. This week, I've contributed for 100 straight weeks!
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Blazor discovery part 2: WASM and glorious components
(If you missed part 1 of my Blazor exploration, check it out. These are reposts from my personal blog, which is more than just software stuff.)
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Blazor discovery part 1: You can't entirely escape Javascript
(This is the first of a series of reposts from my personal blog, which may contain politics and things you don't care about. If you're just here for the .NET and Blazor content, read on!)
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POP Forums v17 released
Get the fresh bits here:
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POP Forums, the product launch retrospective
At some point over the last six weeks and change, I launched POP Forums as a commercial, hosted product. By that I mean, it was something I could sell to others. I'm not suggesting that I've done any real sales effort, obvs, because I don't have any external customer yet. But there was a lot to learn from the effort.
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Amazing custom metrics using Azure Application Insights
You know that old management saying, that you can't improve what you don't measure? It's annoying because being measured feels personal and uncomfortable, but it's useful in technology because it's totally true. There is a fairly lucrative market around monitoring stuff in the cloud now, because as our systems become more distributed and less monolithic, we do less tracing at the code level and more digestion of interaction data between components.
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Approaching multi-tenancy with cloud options
Building multi-tenancy into your app is an interesting (and dare I say fun) problem to solve, because there are a number of ways to approach it. And now that we don't have to spin up closets full of hardware in some basement, there are better options that we didn't have in the dark ages. I'll talk a little bit about the options that I've used, and how I solved the problem this time around with hosted POP Forums.
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Using Azure DevOps pipelines for cloud-hosted POP Forums
Last week I did my first production deployment of the cloud-hosted version of POP Forums. I'm really excited to offer a version that others can use without setting it up themselves (I'm really excited about the performance, too!). If you've followed me for any length of time, you know that I've been maintaining POP Forums as an open source project since around 2003. The new cloud-hosted version is about 95% the same code, with a few substitutions in the dependency injection container to facilitate multi-tenancy, especially in the asynchronous Azure Functions to make sure that they're acting on behalf of the right tenant. What I'm excited to share is that it's so easy to use the output of the open source project and get those bits into the commercial product.