Using Nix with GitHub Actions

Nix is great for ensuring reproducable environments, I am going to trial this approach for a few GH Actions workflows I have for working with automated testing of DbUp-revisioned schemas on live data.

For run-of-the-mill builds, NUKE + GitHub Actions works very well, so not much need there.

Streamline your GitHub Actions dependencies using Nix

HTMX for ASP.NET Core Developers

At work we mostly use Blazor, but it is not without issues. I would like to trial HTMX with Razor Pages/Static Blazor, it looks like a solid alternative (in the vein of Rails Turbo/Stimulus) in between old-school server-side web and Blazor. https://www.jetbrains.com/guide/dotnet/tutorials/htmx-aspnetcore/

Build your own voice assistant and run it locally

Whisper, Ollama and Bark, then stitch it together for a voice assitant with LLM “intelligence”. My Python-foo is not strong, but it would be fun to use C# to recreate this.

https://blog.duy.dev/build-your-own-voice-assistant-and-run-it-locally/

An actual useful Blockchain case

Beyond Bitcoin (which I consider mostly evil, being an enabler/driver of corruption, terrorism, cyber crime and green house emissions), I had yet to see a use case for Blockchain, and the hype has mostly died down with the new LLM craze (some time before actually). But the other day at an event, I ran into an employee from Partisia, who described their actual useful software, which relies on Blockchain to reach consensus between multiple parties with no peer-to-peer trust. Interesting.

Stripe on the common 4-step data migration process

While not at their scale or tech stack, we do operate a platform with ~0 downtime requirement at work. I have performed many migrations like this, I like the explicit framing of the process presented.

https://stripe.com/blog/online-migrations

Replacing Exceptions as flow control

A great, quick-to-read series balancing pros and cons, with current best-practice (using LINQ SelectMany) applied. I dabbled in Result before, but fell into many of the traps listed.

https://andrewlock.net/working-with-the-result-pattern-part-1-replacing-exceptions-as-control-flow/

Developer “Bad Days”

Interesting paper i skimmed - not a lot of hard conclusions, but I can relate to the pain of days where you feel you have a hard time making progress matching your expectations.

Identifying Factors Contributing to “Bad Days” for Software Developers: A Mixed-Methods Study

Non-JS frontend alternatives for .NET Developers

I agree with the critisism of Blazor going backwards in approachability while chasing frontend trends (server-side prerendering etc.). I hate having to split my Frontend feature organization across 2-3 projects, and having to debug weird issues when stuff runs on the server in prerendering steps quickly leads to me disabling all the “fun” stuff anyway.

Not sure I have the capacity to investigate alternatives, but I would like to find time for the JetBrains HTMX series for ASP.NET Core Developers and perhaps spike a bit on Hydro (which tickles my Turbo/Hotwire envy)

Or I could just bite the bullet and invest in TypeScript/Angular, which is widely used at work…

Can You Measure a Technology Team’s Efficiency?

The article is partially paywalled, but the summary resonated with me:

If tech workers are doing measurable work, they’re doing easy work. They’re doing repetitious work. This work isn’t the most valuable work, and you should minimize it when possible.

If tech workers are adding huge value, such as inventing new things their company (or the world) hasn’t seen, then their work is hard/impossible to measure. They can swag (guess), but not accurately predict their work.

https://www.scarletink.com/p/can-you-measure-technology-teams-efficiency

draw.io integration in VSCode (and GitHub)

It works flawlessly, and supplements the support in Confluence nicely. I can see myself using this for things Mermaidjs cannot visualize.

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draw.io VSCode extension

Fluentd

A coworker had positive experience with using Fluentd to unify log streams from different sources. However in a world of .NET, seeing an 8 year old NLog target as the only .NET option does not inspire confidence (but indicates a lot of work ahead). Similarly, the presence of a Twitter plugin indicates that keeping up with sources is not a priority…

https://www.fluentd.org/architecture

Why dynamically-typed languages exist or “No one wants to program in a dynamically typed language”

I am sure many would disagree, but I like the take that they exist mostly because they are easy to create, while providing good ergonomics for small solutions (vs old-school staticly typed languages which offers poor ergonomics but scales to large solutions).

That at least is the story of JavaScript, and each time I take a look at the Python ecosystem I project the signal of poor code quality

No one wants to program in a dynamically typed language