random-awesome-memory

Yesterday I was mowing my lawn and couldn't help but think about software development. Weird connection right? But stick with me here.

My lawn isn't huge, it takes about an hour to mow. Like any good project, it starts as a literal greenfield: fresh, well-watered, and looking pretty perfect.

Today we celebrate Towel Day, an annual celebration in honor of Douglas Adams.

For more than ten years, you have been by my side, quite literally.

Together we have traveled parts of the globe, seen beautiful sights that seemed pulled from dreams.

Have you ever had a near-death experience?

A few years ago, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The future was dark, uncertain, not knowing if I would survive it. I wrote goodbye letters to my family, my children.

2001, A.I. Artificial Intelligence. I'm not referring to Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, which also starred an AI entity, but rather the movie directed by Steven Spielberg.

I love my job as a software developer. Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated by computers and the digital world. It's easy for me to get completely lost in it.

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is a term that's been gaining traction lately, but it’s hardly a new concept.

Knowledge has always been difficult for me to organize, and perhaps that’s because knowledge itself is vast. It encompasses experience, skills, and information—whether stored in our heads, written down in notebooks, emails, or elsewhere.

During our holiday, my family and I had the pleasure of staying at a charming Bed & Breakfast called Hunum, located in northern Italy. Our host, Luca Capurso, graciously welcomed us into his humble abode.

For a brief moment in my life, my father was my best friend. An electronics engineer, he excelled at his job and never stopped tinkering in his attic room at home.

In today's world, much of our activity takes place in the Cloud, whether it’s through Azure or another Cloud solution.

As a Cloud application developer, I’ve been immersed in Cloud-based projects for the past several years. Recently, however, I encountered a unique opportunity that I couldn’t pass up—a Cloud solution for sleeping.

Don't be that person in the company who knows everything and upon whom everyone relies. This individual is a fixture in many organizations, often with years of experience. While their expertise can be invaluable, problems arise when vital company information is solely held in their mind, with little to no sharing.

In this article I will continue where I left off and discuss how to automate the deployment of my simple static html website using Bicep and Azure DevOps Pipelines.

Deploying your infrastructure in a pipeline is a more robust and practical solution than deploying it manually using a CLI. Azure DevOps Pipelines is one of the great tools to handle this. My preference is Azure DevOps beacuase I have been using it for a long time and of course it's a Microsoft product and it integrates seamlessly with Azure.

In this article I want to extend what I did in the previous article. I'm going to talk about Infrastructure as Code and how to deploy your infrastructure using Bicep instead of deploying it manually in the Azure Portal.

Bicep is awesome. And sometimes a pain in the ass. But still awesome.

Having a good time at work is a crucial element that ensures you arrive with a smile each day; well, that and a cup of coffee.

A decade ago, while working at a client's office, this delightful combination was still a part of the work culture. One day, a colleague and I embarked on a playful mission: to introduce the tradition of wearing a tie to work, just for the fun of it. However, there was a catch; it was exclusively reserved for Wednesdays, don't ask me why. As expected, people found it absurd and hardly anyone agreed to join our endeavour.

Many years ago I created a website for my company, Theridion IT. It was a simple one page static website with just some information on it, nothing fancy. But since then it had gotten outdated. And then at some point it was completely offline beacuase I was experimenting in Azure and I deleted the resource. So recently, I was checking out Azure Static Web Apps and I wanted to experiment with it and see if it was a good fit for my website.

Today marks a significant anniversary for my family and me, a day to celebrate life, health, and the value of work. It's a reminder that these gifts should never be taken for granted.

Exactly two years ago, I received the devastating news of being diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. The chaos of the COVID pandemic was beginning to settle, and life was about to return to normal...

You know when you share a url on most well known platforms, that after pasting it, it generates a nice box with a picture, a title and a description. Well that's what they call a social graph object. And it's made possible using the Open Graph protocol.

In the article Publishing the ASP.NET website to Azure, we saw how to publish an ASP.NET website to an Azure App Service hosted in Windows. And in the article Migrating to Docker, we saw how to use a Docker image and automatically deploy it to the App Service using a webhook on the Azure Container Registry.

Although these are all valid ways to deploy a website or application in simple scenarios, they probably won't suffice for real enterprise applications.

Renovating a house is just like refactoring application code. The reasons for both are often obvious. The code becomes deprecated, outdated, and unsupported. It may have been poorly written, disregarding coding guidelines and conventions. As developers, we have undoubtedly encountered such situations more than once.

If at first you don't succeed, you probably forgot a ';' somewhere and you get a compilation error. That's the way it goes in software development. Nothing ever works from the first go. And that's alright, as long as everything works in the end and everyone is happy with the result.

In the previous article I secured the domain using a TLS certificate. But the downside of being able to do this was the fact that I had to upscale the App Service Plan from D1 Shared Infrastructure to B1 Basic. The direct result of this operation was a price increase from 8€/month to 46€/month, which I'm not willing to pay.

During our journey through Japan several years ago, my wife and I explored various destinations, mostly relying on trains for transportation. Japan is undeniably a stunning country that I wholeheartedly recommend to everyone.

In this day and age, as a developer I can't imagine the idea of still having to rely on physical servers. The advent of Microsoft Azure and other Cloud providers has revolutionized our lives over the past decade, and the advancements keep getting better and better. Now, with just a flick of a finger, you can have a server or any other Cloud solution up and running in no time.

A website these days needs to be secured using a digital security certificate. In short, this means the traffic from and to your website is secured and no one can intercept this communication. An example of communication you don't want anyone to intercept is your username and password if for example they are sniffing the network or doing other malicious stuff.

So, I have my random-awesome-memory website running in an Azure App Service at 'https://random-awesome-memory.azurewebsites.net/'. But that doesn't cut it anymore for me. I want a dedicated domain of my own choosing to attach to my website. Personally, I think it looks better and has a more professional feel to it.

According to Wikipedia, the definition of Nerd is the following:

A nerd is a person seen as overly intellectual, obsessive, introverted or lacking social skills.

Have you ever had multiple applications running on different App Service Plans? Sometimes there's a good reason and it's for the best. But sometimes it might be a better idea to consolidate your applications on one App Service Plan.

Publishing a website or application can be done in several ways. But for my blog website I'm going to make my life easy, so I'm going to do this using Visual Studio.

I have developed a simple ASP.NET website for this blog and it's up and running locally. Now it's time to find some hosting for this thing. And beacuase I'm Microsoft all-in, it will be hosted in Azure Cloud obviously. I'm approaching it as a Minimum Viable Product, not only programmatically, but also infrastructure wise. So the least functionality to accomplish the main goal while trying to keep the cost as low as possible.

A collega and friend of mine, Sander, once said during a scrum meeting:

Don't Klingon the past, we have Source Control.

A long time ago, in this galaxy, back when I started developing in school, setting up an ASP.NET website wasn't so easy. The process was excruciating. Now we just click a couple of times and tadaa.