One of the points I made in my recent NDC talk on 12 Factor microservices, was that you shouldn’t be storing sensitive data, such as API keys, usernames, passwords etc. in the environment variables. Don’t Store Sensitive Data in the Environment My reasoning is that when you were accessing Environment Variables in Heroku’s platform, you were actually accessing some (probably) secure key-value store, rather than actual environment variables. While you can use something like Consul’s key-value store for this, it’s not much better as it still stores all the values in plaintext, and has no auditing or logging....

I saw an interesting question on twitter today: Hey, people who talk at things: How long does it take you to put a new talk together? I need like 50 hours over at least a couple of months to make something I don’t hate. I’m trying to get that down (maybe by not doing pictures?) but wondering what’s normal for everyone else. Source I don’t know how long it takes me to write a talk - as it is usually spread over many weeks/months, worked on as and when I have inspiration....

We have a test suite at work which tests a retry decorator class works as expected. One of the tests checks that when the inner implementation throws an exception, it will log the number of times it has failed: [Test] public async Task ShouldLogRetries() { var mockClient = Substitute.For<IContractProvider>(); var logger = Subsitute.For<ILogger>(); var sut = new RetryDecorator(mockClient, logger, maxRetries: 3); mockClient .GetContractPdf(Arg.Any<string>()) .Throws(new ContractDownloadException()); try { await sut.GetContractPdf("foo"); } catch (Exception e){} logger....

Since I have been trying to learn a functional language (Elixir), I have noticed how grating it is when in C# I need to call a few methods in a row, passing the results of one to the next. The bit that really grates is that it reads backwards, i.e. the rightmost function call is invoked first, and the left hand one last, like so: await WriteJsonFile(await QueueParts(await ConvertToModel(await ReadBsxFile(record)))); In Elixir (or F# etc....

When we are developing (internal) Nuget packages at work, the process used is the following: Get latest of master New branch feature-SomethingDescriptive Implement feature Push to GitHub TeamCity builds Publish package to the nuget feed Pull request Merge to master Obviously 3 to 6 can repeat many times if something doesn’t work out quite right. There are a number of problems with this process: Pull-request after publishing Pull requests are a great tool which we use extensively, but in this case, they are being done too late....

Having recently finished reading the Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change book, I got to thinking about a system which was fairly representative of an architecture which was fine for it’s initial version, but it’s usage had outgrown the architecture. Example System: Document Storage The system in question was a file store for a multi user, internal, desktop based CRM system. The number of users was very small, and the first implementation was just a network file share....

It’s no secret I am a fan of strong typing - not only do I talk and blog about it a lot, but I also have a library called Stronk which provides strong typed configuration for non dotnet core projects. The problem I come across often is large configurations. For example, given the following project structure (3 applications, all reference the Domain project): DemoService `-- src |-- Domain | |-- Domain....

I’ve been on-call for work over the last week for the first time, and while it wasn’t as alarming (heh) as I thought it might be, I have had a few thoughts on it. Non-action Alarms We have an alarm periodically about an MVC View not getting passed the right kind of model. The resolution is to mark the bug as completed/ignored in YouTrack. Reading the stack trace, I can see that the page is expecting a particular model, but is being given a HandleErrorInfo model, which is an in built type....

I gave a little talk at work recently on my use of Vagrant, what it is, and why it is still useful in a world full of Docker containers. So, What is Vagrant? Vagrant is a product by Hashicorp, and is for scripting the creation of (temporary) virtual machines. It’s pretty fast to create a virtual machine with too, as it creates them from a base image (known as a “box”....

We have a service which consumes messages from a RabbitMQ queue - for each message, it makes a few http calls, collates the results, does a little processing, and then pushes the results to a 3rd party api. One of the main benefits to having this behind a queue is our usage pattern - the queue usually only has a few messages in it per second, but periodically it will get a million or so messages within 30 minutes (so from ~5 messages/second to ~560 messages/second....