I occassionally write blog posts about things I've learnt. Here are some recent posts.
Back in 2016 I wrote about using Consumer-Driven Contracts and the Pact framework when designing and testing contracts for RESTful APIs.
I’ve been using .NET Core for a few years now: I think the first version I installed was ASP.NET 5 beta 6, in mid 2015. I’ve installed a lot of different verions since then - my SDK folder currently contains 14 different versions - but it occurred to me recently that I’ve never really looked at what is being installed. So, I thought I’d take a quick look.
In my post Diagnosing Process Crashes, or, What To Do When Computers Choose To Hate Us I wrote in passing about knowing how to use the correct tools to solve the problem in hand. However, knowing which tool best solves a problem does not necessarily mean that we know how to use that tool efficiently.
By their very nature computers are deterministic. We tell them what to do, and they unquestioningly follow our orders, repeatably and consistently. This is what makes us techies the happy, contented people that we are; we are the masters of our machines.
I’ve been spending some time recently setting up build pipelines for a number of open source projects I contribute to. I’ve been using automated build pipelines for about 15 years, but it’s been a while since I’ve built one from from scratch, and in the meantime technology has moved on. So, despite my previous experience, setting up the new pipelines has been a great opportunity to learn.
Like many tech companies, at my employer we have a spider’s web of internal services communicating over HTTP. Services call other services. The website calls services. Our iOS and Android apps use these services. The services are owned by a number of different teams, and the apps are owned by entirely separate teams.