Tech articles

How to make hourly billing work - if you must
published on Dec 05, 2022

Hourly billing is terrible. And, it's here to stay. A few ideas about how to make it work better, especially for enterprise change programs.

Is Agile a welfare program for developers?
published on Dec 01, 2022

How do you make developers comfortable? You could implement Scrum. Just don't expect to get anything done anytime soon.

You should probably just use AWS. Or Azure.
published on Nov 25, 2022

The cloud marketing spend gazillions of dollars to lure teams to 'migrate to the cloud'. AWS is the default. A contrarian opinion arguing against the cloud then naturally generates lots of waves. But, does it make sense to be a cloud contrarian?

How to publish a static website to Azure Static Web Apps
published on Jul 03, 2022

With a statically-built website, you have a variety of options when it comes to hosting. You can self-host on your own VPS or use Netlify, Cloudflare... the world is your oyster. On Azure, you can try Azure Static Web Apps. Let's see how it works!

How to set up automated deployment of a Linux function app on Azure Functions Consumption plan
published on Jun 08, 2022

Azure Functions is a serverless platform, and so you should not worry about servers when deploying your code there. That means having an automated deployment pipeline, doesn't it? Things get a little hairy when you use the Consumption plan on Linux, and it took me a while to get it right. Here is what I learned.

How to teach your Node.js app to speak SQL without an ORM
published on Aug 18, 2021

I tell you how you can use plain-old SQL in your Typescript app while retaining type safety and preventing SQL injection at the same time.

How to localize text with a binding in WPF
published on Jan 30, 2021

Recently, I faced a following dilemma: I was binding a TextBlock to a string property of a class instance, and when that instance was null, I wanted to show a placeholder that had to be localizable. Here is what I learned.

How to migrate from Ghost to Eleventy
published on Jan 30, 2021

My tango blog used to run on the Ghost publishing platform. It's fast and comfortable, but since the rest of this website is built statically, I wanted move away from Ghost. Here is what I learned in the process.

Localizing a WPF app running on .NET Core 3 in 2020
published on Jun 24, 2020

I have recently updated my hobby desktop app, Bewitched, from .NET 4.6 to .NET Core 3.1. The process was mostly painless as I was late to the game and most Nugets were already updated for .NET Core 3 / Netstandard support. I lost no functionality - except the ability to localize the UI. Here's what I did to get it back.

The truth about puppies
published on May 21, 2020

I take a breaking from the regular programming and rant about puppies.