I have been reading The Pragmatic Programmer and I have to say it is a fantastic book. It is full of great advice and tips for programmers. I highly recommend it to anyone who is a programmer at any level. Lots of the advice is common sense and things I already do, but there are also lots of things I know in the back...
While at NDC London I heard a great talk by Matt Burke about exceptions. I will share some of the points here. The talk was based in part on the blog post Vexing Exceptions by Eric Lippert. It defined four types of exceptions: Fatal Exceptions Boneheaded Exceptions Vexing Exceptions Exogenous Exceptions Fatal...
I was lucky enough to hear Mads Torgersen (The Lead Designer of the C# language) speak at NDC London about some of the plans the team has for the next version of C#. Many of these new features are in the preview stage, and can be enabled by using the c# preview flag in your csproj file. The C# team welcomes feedback on...
I have just come home from volunteering at NDC London. It was a great experience and I learned a lot. I met some great people and had a lot of fun. I can’t wait to go back next year. You may have heard of NDC London before. It is a conference for software developers. It is held in London every year and attracts people...
Grafana is an open-source analytics and monitoring platform that allows you to query, visualize, and alert on your metrics data. It is a popular tool for monitoring systems, applications, and services in real-time. In this post, I will guide you through setting up Grafana in Docker to monitor a simple .NET API. Setting...
A few weeks ago I talked about .Net Aspire , well lets take a look at how we can use it with Elasticsearch. Elastic search is a powerful search engine that can be used to index and search data. It is built on top of Lucene and provides a powerful way to search through your data. Aspire allows dependencies like...
Managing dependencies in .NET projects can become complex, especially when dealing with multiple projects that share common packages. NuGet Central Package Management (CPM) is a feature that simplifies this process by allowing you to manage package versions centrally. What is NuGet Central Package Management? NuGet...
A long time ago in my SysAdmin days, I was a big fan of Nagios . Recently, I decided to revisit it and see if I could run it in a Docker container to monitor my local network. This guide will walk you through the process of setting up Nagios monitoring using Docker. Finding a Docker Image for Nagios First, we need to...
It is that time of year again, time to reflect on the year that has passed and look forward to the year ahead. As with many years 2024 has been a mixed bag, some good stuff, and some not so good stuff. I did not make any goals at the start of 2024, but I am going to fix that for 2025. Goals for 2025 Blog Posts More...
Creating pull requests is part of the development process when working with version control systems like Git. Pull requests allow developers to propose changes to a codebase and collaborate with team members to review and merge those changes. When you have long running branches, it can be challenging to keep them up to...