Software Architecture, Homelabs and Videogames
Short post today. NTFY — yes, that's genuinely the name, not a keyboard having a small seizure — is a tool for sending push notifications, especially to mobile. Why would you want this? Off the top of my head, in no particular order of urgency: * Checking if a site is
In-memory cache is a fast, easy way to serve up data — objects, lists, whatever — that gets hammered constantly. Not everything belongs in memory, and Redis will get you the same result for plenty of use cases, minus the part where a bad deploy wipes your entire cache into oblivion. Just
Hello, after a long break, I'm back. Recently my wife came to me for a quick brainstorm: could we submit Jira tickets via a Google Form? Why, I asked her, exactly what you're thinking right now. Her answer: it's easy to build a form,
I smoke test my APIs on every deploy — cheap insurance against “it built successfully” quietly meaning absolutely nothing about whether the thing actually works. If you're on Azure Web Apps or Functions, you've got deployment slots: push to a slot, poke it to make sure it&
This one's short but genuinely important. QR codes are everywhere now — parking meters, restaurant menus, that mysterious flyer stapled to a telephone pole promising to change your life — and yet almost nobody actually knows how the things are generated. They just sort of... appear, like static electricity or
Validation. Nobody's favorite chore, right up there with writing unit tests for code you already personally guarantee works. And yet it's one of the most important things standing between “clean data” and “why does production have a product named null with a price of negative four
Welcome to the finale of this series — a little Azure, a little architecture, and finally, some actual C#. I'm doing this one backwards: Azure Key Vault setup first, then Visual Studio, then the library in action, then the architecture, and only at the very end, the code walkthrough.
When requesting an OAuth bearer token for machine-to-machine communication (usually to talk to an API), the lazy path is client credentials with just a client ID and secret. It works. It's also not great, security-wise — a static secret sitting in a config file is basically a Post-it note
Ever wondered if there's an “easy” way to test the signed-JWT-request flow? There is — if you're already handing OKTA or Auth0 a monthly invoice for the privilege. But what do you do when you're prototyping a POC at midnight, or your actual dev environment
The C4 model is a way of visualizing software architecture that doesn't require a whiteboard, three markers, and a passive-aggressive debate about whose box goes where. It's lightweight, it scales, and — unlike 90% of architecture diagrams I've been handed in my career — a human
