Darth Seldon - Darth Seldon's Blog

You need to watch this Final Fantasy VII Rebirth analysis

A video game post!!!! So random. Hear me out, it is not a surprise that 2 of my top 5 videogames of all time are Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth. It has so many lore, story depth, hidden plots, music; you name it. However, a lot of people did

Technical

HomeLab with Docker and Raspberry Pi 5.

A HomeLab is a personal, often DIY (do-it-yourself) setup of computer servers and networking equipment used for learning, experimentation, and sometimes practical tasks like hosting services. I have a couple Raspberry Pis as home servers where I can do quick proof of concepts, unit testing, code analysis and a lot

c#

.NET Interactive, NuGet Servers and Polyglot Notebooks. What is this Dark Magic?!

I write a bunch of Enterprise Libraries (fancy name for common code), and I have markdown guides on how to install and use it (via NuGet packages). But somehow, I always end up opening Visual Studio or VS Code and do a real time demo on how things work. But

c#

HTTPS POST and PlantUML, your best friend.

Hello!!! This will be a short post Currently I am working on automating the creation of PlantUML diagrams and embed them into Word documents and Excel Spreadsheets (Yes that is a thing) But instead of copying the image from the PlantUML server, I will be generating the diagram dynamically and

Video Games

StepMania/DDR. I am too old and tired to keep dancing. Kidding!!! No, I am not.

Well, I have not written a game post in a while, I think it is due. I have been playing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) since the first version of the arcade came out and most of the iterations that came after (Yes, I am that old) I remember that when

c#

OData! Oh my!! So powerful indeed!!!

Welcome back, today we will talk about one of my favorite technologies. OData!! You don't know how many times this standard has save me time and discussions as it is a standard. What is OData? "The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a data access protocol built on core protocols like

Technical

NTFY, not a typo, awesome tool for push notifications.

This is going to be a short post. NTFY, is a tool to send push notifications, specially to mobile. Why would you like to use this tool? Use cases that I can think of but not limited are Check if a site is downA long running task is doneA task

c#

In memory cache and eviction with C#

Memory cache is a fast and easy way to retrieve data, objects, lists, etc.; that are accessed constantly. Not everything needs to be in-memory, you can use Redis as well to accomplish the same results. Bear in mind that memory may be "infinite" in the cloud, but costs add up

Technical

Submitting a Google form to Jira. Really? Why? There are good reasons.

Hello, after a long break I am back. Recently my wife came to me for a quick brainstorm to submit Jira tickets via a google form. Why? well, I asked her the same thing. She told me that it was easy to create a form, it will alleviate some costs

Technical

Smoke Test your API with Postman API, Newman and GitHub actions.

I usually do smoke testing on my APIs when I deploy them. When using Azure and regular Web Apps or Functions, there is something called slots. Slots are useful when you do a deployment slot, perform basic smoke testing and if it is successful, you just switch the slot to

c#

Generate your own QR Codes with a minimal API

This is going to be a short but important post. QR Codes are used everywhere but oddly enough explaining how are generated is not well known. QR Codes are made up of modules; a module stores data in rows and columns. Usually, QR codes are version 2 with 25 rows

Validate your Records, Settings, DTOs and whatever else you can think with Fluent Validation.

Ahhh validation of properties and values, I think nobody like to do this work, but it is super important when transferring, reading, deserializing data. In this post I will show you that using Fluent Validation it is great for this purpose. But first let us begin with some of the

Duende (Identity Server), Certificates and Postman. What could go wrong? Signed JWT Requests the "easy" way. Part 03

Welcome to the last post of the series, and this will be involving a little bit of azure, some architecture design and of course C#. We will be doing this post backwards, I will show you first how to set up Azure Key Vault, setup visual studio, use the library,

Technical

Duende (Identity Server), Certificates and Postman. What could go wrong? Signed JWT Requests the "easy" way. Part 02

When requesting an OAuth Bearer Token to be used with a Machine-to-Machine communication (typically to interact with an API), you can use client credentials grant using only client id and client secret, however this practice is not recommended. Enter signed JWT request. According to Wikipedia JSON Web Token - WikipediaWikimedia

Technical

Duende (Identity Server), Certificates and Postman. What could go wrong? Signed JWT Requests the "easy" way. Part 01

Have you ever wondered if there is an "easy" way to test the signed JWT request flow. Well, there is, if you have a paid provide such as OKTA or AUTH0. But what happens if you need to test the flow while developing a Proof of Concept (POC) or while

Technical

C4 Modeling. Show your Software Architecture that easy!

The C4 model is a software architecture visualization that provides a lightweight and scalable way to communicate software architecture effectively. It consists of 4 main hierarchical diagrams: System Context Diagram: Provides a starting point, showing how the software system interacts with its external environment.Container Diagram: Zooms into the system,

Technical

Shiny things sell, so embellish your PlantUML diagrams.

On a previous post I showed you how to get your own UML editor. https://darthseldon.net/plantuml-and-nginx-your-own-uml-designer/ Now here is a guide on how to make your diagrams more stylish. Let's take a look at this simple sequence diagram. @startuml Client -> IDP: Authentication Request IDP -->

Technical

Publishing NuGet Packages with GitHub Actions

This is going to be a short post. Many people asked me how I publish my NuGet packages into the packages section in GitHub. First things first, what are GitHub Actions. "Automate, customize, and execute your software development workflows right in your repository with GitHub Actions. You can discover, create,

Video Games

RetroPie for Retro Gaming

I have been playing games since the Atari 2600 and with no plans with slowing down it is sometimes difficult to play your old games in newer consoles. Sometimes it is because the games are not available anymore in digital form or simply the license is no longer applicable. But

Technical

PlantUML, Docker and NGINX. Your own UML designer.

If you are familiar with Software Architecture, you will stumble with... Sequence DiagramsClass DiagramsC4 DiagramsBizzDesignDeployment DiagramsSo many diagrams it is making my head dizzy. And Visio sometimes to install the stencils and make everything look organized is a nightmare. Well not to worry, PlantUML is here. Open-source tool that uses

Technical

Certificate Reader

Extract from a certificate the base64, JWK and private key

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