As more and more of the world is getting online, a larger part of the internet community is using the internet on lower powered devices. Making websites fast is becoming paramount. Here are 5 tips to improving you web page's performance
Rebuilding this blog for performance
So many people know me as a very performance focused engineer, and as someone that cares about perf I've always been a bit embarrassed about this blog. In actual fact this blog as it sits now is fast by most people's standards. I got a new job in July, and well I work with an absolute mad lad that is making me feel pretty embarrassed with his 900ms page load times. So I've decided to build my own blog engine, and compete against him.
Deploying a react app to azure blob storage websites with azure devops
Back in August of this year Microsoft announced static websites for azure blob storage. So this is the same feature AWS' S3 has had for years. Essentially make a blob storage folder public, and redirect /
paths to /index.html
internally. Also, register 404 pages. Before we had this we use to deploy our files to App Service
or do some weirdness with functions to rewrite urls. For static pages this can really bring costs down in the cloud
VS 2017, and dotnet core tools. Today will be a historic day
Today marks the release of Visual Studio 2017, and with it the final release of the tools for dotnet core. This means as of today you can build, test, and deploy an application completely supported by microsoft. Not just the runtimes, but the tooling as well. The CLI for dotnet core has been finalized, and its awesome. The csproj system has been revitalized. New csproj's can be created, and are fully compatible with the old. Visual studio 2017 has finally released. This is probably the greatest version of visual studio ever created. Finally VS has gone from a slow, archaic editor, to a fast moving IDE. An IDE with a DevOps-First Cloud-First mentality. An IDE ready to tackle today's modern challenges.
Parsing cli arguments in dotnet core Console App
tl;dr view this gist
So its 2016, and we are still making console apps/cli's. In fact I would say there has been a surge in popularity of these types of tools. I think we have come to the realization that buttons on forms are not automatable, and that the command line doesn't have to be scary.
I recently started writing an app in dotnet core, which is the new runtime for dotnet. In the past I have often used command line parser, but as of this writing it does not support core.
I was really lost trying to find an arguments parsing library when I realized the dotnet cli was open sourced.
After much struggle, failing to bingle. I started ripping through the Entity Framework, and dotnet cli's code hoping to find a gem. Thats when I stumbled across a diamond. You see many dotnet projects use Microsft.Extension.CommandLineUtils to do cli parsing.
Less Pager duty, more Yak duty. My (Strange) DevOps (rant) story.
Growing up I always wanted to work with electronics, and as soon as I could work I was working with a computer. I currently work as a Software Engineer at Vistaprint. I work on the Gallery team, which is an agile development team that works on our platform to display products in a gallery (hence the name). Before I joined the gallery team, I spent most of my career doing ops things.
Saying goodbye to my VPS (..and my opinions of cloud providers)
I have used Linode for quite a long time now. My blog was hosted on linode, as was my StarBound server. My linode was the CentOS Pet I always wanted. Full of manual Fail2Ban configs, I make sure I fed my VPS every day. I even used cowsay to give me a cool message from my pet every login.
The major reason I moved my things away from Linode, was not the devops story itself. I could have stuck with linode, and used chef or something to manage my former friend. I decided to host everything in Azure Web apps. Now before I give you my long ramblings why I like azure; I must tell you. I put everything in azure, because my MSDN gave me free credits. There was no huge scientific analysis behind this. The simple fact that I got free money in Azure was the only reason why I started using it.
Watching the Watchers: Monitorama PDX 2014 Day One
I am here in lovely Portland Oregon attending Monitorama. Monitorama is a 3 day open source monitoring convention.
Monitorama had catered food, and drink. The food was plentiful and delicious, and the drinks were amazing.
There were 10 talks, I have made a quick summarization below. I don't have time to write in detail about each one, but I am sure you will get the gist from the basic summary.
ChromeOS: Gateway to portable productivity
Up until the last few years the only devices on the market were all full operating system work horses. However the majority of us would easily sacrifice functionality for portability. This statement has been backed up by the increase of market demand for tablets and ultrabooks over the years.