Getting Cloud Networking into your Head​

This year I had the privilege of presenting my perspective on cloud networking to two conferences: DevOpsDays Austin 2024 and KCDC 2024. This talk is an analysis of a LOT of psychic debugging situations I had resolved where the onlookers were genuinely surprised that I was able to diagnose the problem and suggest a solution that usually worked (or at least got them closer to working). Most of the time, especially in cloud environments, the issue was networking related. Even in non-cloud environments, it was usually a network issue that the developer hadn't considered. What I was doing was "software whispering" and for the uninitiated, it felt like magic. However, I don't like being a magician (or an illusionist) so I thought this talk would help codify some of my thinking to make it easier for others to peek behind the curtain.

DevOpsDays Austin 2023​

I recently gave an "Ignite" talk at DevOpsDays Austin 2023 (in Austin) about a mental model for the cloud to build a foundation of knowledge for you to better understand cloud technology as a whole. An "Ignite" talk is a 5 minute talk where you present 20 slides, each advancing at 15 seconds, without stopping until the end. The challenge is to distill your message such that it can be presented in 5 minutes. It's a fun, but challenging, format that really makes you edit, edit, and edit some more.

C# Advent 2020​

This article is part of the C# Advent 2020, if you're interested in more articles about C# from some great authors, please go check it out! The previous year advents are also available and some alternatives too.

ASP.NET Core applications can be run serverless in AWS Lambda as-is and still be run locally or in a container.

Introduction​

Since AWS Lambda functions are lightweight containerized Amazon Linux runtimes that can run .NET Core 3.1, you can run a mostly regular ASP.NET Core workload on them just the same.

Gatsby JS and MDX​

I'm a fan of nice documentation. You know the kind: it has the right examples for all the complicated stuff, sane organization of all the topics, and isn't just an autogenerated list of all the function names or API actions. Solid documentation is one of those rare vintages that you slowly imbibe and learn every nuance and tasting note of it. I'm sure I'm not the only one, you can confide in me (and the Internet). I'm going to let my documentation freak flag fly high and proud!

Overview​

In the last segment, we setup a database and reviewed all the code that interacts with it. This time, we'll setup authentication so we can lock down the security of the system and the database, and add a few user-centric capabilities like editing and deleting comments.

If you're just seeing this, you should start with the first article in the series instead: Sample JavaScript Application Introduction.

These instructions assume you're starting from the application we setup in the previous article: Sample JavaScript Application Part 3 - The Database. If you don't have that handy, you'll need to follow the instructions in the previous articles to get a project configured that points to your own Firebase project on Google Cloud.

Overview​

In the last segment, we discussed how we should do data modeling and arrived at a possible data model to use with the database. This segment, we'll walk through how to setup the database and connect your frontend to it to start saving data about the map.

If you're just seeing this, you should start with the first article in the series instead: Sample JavaScript Application Introduction.

These instructions assume you're starting from the application we setup in the previous article: Sample JavaScript Application Frontend Part 2. If you don't have that handy, you'll need to follow the instructions in the previous articles to get a project configured that points to your own Firebase project on Google Cloud.

Overview​

In the last segment, we implemented a simple map user interface we could use to find certain areas on the map and show markers for them. This time, we'll look at connecting a database to the backend, allowing us to click on the map to add comments to a latitude / longitude coordinate on the map, then allow others to see all the data that's been added to the map. We won't implement login yet, but leave it open for now.

If you're just seeing this, you should start with the first article in the series instead: Sample JavaScript Application Introduction.

These instructions assume you're starting from the application we setup in the previous article: Sample JavaScript Application Frontend Part 1. If you don't have that handy, you'll need to follow the instructions in the previous article to get a project configured that points to your own Firebase project on Google Cloud.

Overview​

In the last segment, we setup an initial empty Firebase application and got environment working. Now we'll add a new frontend to the application to show a simple map view and let us search for our current location and other useful things.

If you're just seeing this, you should start with the first article in the series instead: Sample JavaScript Application Introduction.

These instructions will walk through updating the frontend to add a free map control and have it do some searching for us.

Overview​

This series of posts describes how you can build up a simple web application hosted on Google Cloud to allow users to store extra information about locations on a map. It's meant for people who are just getting into JavaScript and have at least basic knowledge of how it works. When there's a more advanced concept, I'll try to explain it a bit more fully. The goal is to have a simple application that you can build and host that you can think of as a "real" application.

I'm writing this series after being a teaching assistant for a high school Computer Science Discoveries class through TEALS. Some students are (hopefully) interested in how to take the assignments they've done in class to the next level.

You can run this tutorial on any computer: Windows, Mac, or Linux. If you are on a Chromebook or otherwise running ChromeOS, you may have some challenges to getting Visual Studio Code and NodeJS running on there, but you'll need to turn on "Linux App" support then you can treat it like a "Debian Linux" install.

When I first started using .NET Core, all the examples online for applications were for web applications using ASP.NET Core. However, I wanted to start simpler and build a simple command line tool. This required a LOT of trial and error in manually setting up configuration, logging, dependency injection, and tearing everything down appropriately so that all the logging output would properly get flushed. I kept that example around ... somewhere ... and had to refer my coworkers to it a few times over the year. Now with .NET Core 3.1 and the new Generic Host, we can get a simple (but fully featured) command line application built up following Vertical Slice Architecture.