It’s been a while since I wrote an open-source contribution. A while back, a mini-project as I was involved required parsing of Sendgrid Webhooks in C#. As it turned out, there wasn’t much around and Sendgrid didn’t have an official library. Although at the time I pretty much stopped writing any C#, it was a good opportunity for an open source project.

Since then, it was included on Sengrid’s library list and so it means we’re famous right ..? Also, people wrote about it on stack overflow so we’re def famous!

There is so much to love about Elastic Search. If you, like me, end up creating more than one cluster, you start to think about automating the task whole task including infrastructure.

Cloudformation and ansible scripts can make this tedious job super simple.

Application monitoring and service metrics

If you don’t track it, you can’t measure it. Realtime service and business metrics should be part of any production application. Knowing how is the app performing is as important as measuring whether the product impact of your changes.

A good set of service metrics lets you effectively monitor the impact of your changes on the app performance. Has your change to multi-threading really achieved the times x throughput? Has the last dependency injection change caused a slow memory leak? Are there levels of response codes you’re not expecting in your app?

Logging visibility when scaling

Every decent app produces some kind of logging. Traditionally, this has been achieved by wrapper such as log4net, slf4j log4j and many others. The information it produces is invaluable as it’s usually the only source of information when troubleshooting issues.

I’ve been looking to re-launch my blog recently and be a bit more active in contributing to the community. While doing so, I wanted to change my existing blogging platform as well as hosting.

I just got back from NDC Oslo. It was a great week filled with some quality speakers and content. It’s very hard to pick what I enjoyed the most, because the overall quality was just so high. Nevertheless, I’m going to attempt it :-) Bear in mind it’s my subjective view and I’m happy if you disagree with me. I will update the post once the videos are up.

In a common Web API scenario, you may want to secure your endpoints so that certain actions can only be executed by authenticated users who posses the correct permissions and are authorised to access the endpoints. For example, you would not want expose your DELETE endpoint of a resource to the general public.

An important part of Web API is resource content negotiation. The HTTP protocol RFC defines content negotiation as the process of selecting the best representation for a given response when there are multiple representations available. In practise the same resource can be represented in a variety of different ways – lets say a contact information resource can be shown in JSON representation, but also in XML or even as a PNG QR code containing the same content.

There are several options you can go for when deciding what technology you adopt for your RESTful API. In fact, you’ve got lots to chose from.

SignalR was built with scalability in mind. Even though you will be able to run a fair number of concurrent connections on a single server instance, there will come a point where a single node will not be able to handle the load.