Jeff Makes Software

Wow, time flies when work is keeping you extra busy. I haven't done a lot of work on POP Forums or done any speaking gigs since spring. I feel like a bit of a slacker! Fortunately, there's something new to talk about.

Over the last year and change, I've written a number of posts about the challenges around moving my sites (primarily CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz) to Azure. These are moderately busy sites that can for the most part live in a small websites, er, app service, instance, with SQL Azure S0 for the data, some storage here and there, queues, and some experimental use of search, Redis and what not. I know I've done some complaining, but only because I really want one of the core premises of the cloud, namely for all of the maintenance and backend stuff to be abstracted away, to deliver without me thinking about it. Mostly, it has.

My sites (CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz) have now been in Azure for about a year. It has been interesting, for sure. From a high altitude perspective, I can tell you that I've saved money when compared to renting a dedicated server, but there have been challenges in terms of reliability.

This is based on a talk I did at the 2015 Orlando Code Camp, but it strikes me as something worth blogging about. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of anti-patterns, but just a general category of things that end up being a huge pain at some point. Avoid these at all costs! In no particular order...

Yes, it has been entirely too long since the last release, but v13 is here, and it's a big one! This is the first release here on GitHub.

One of the very beneficial side effects of the rise of MVC in the ASP.NET world is that people started to think a lot more about separating concerns. By association, it brought along more awareness around unit testing, and that was good too. This was also the time that ORM's started to become a little more popular. The .Net world was getting more sophisticated at various levels of skill. That was a good thing.

We had some downtime on Tuesday night for our sites, about two hours or so. On one hand, November is the slowest month for the sites anyway, but on the flip side, we pushed a new version of PointBuzz that I wanted to monitor, and I did post a few photos from IAAPA that were worthy of discussion. It doesn't matter either way, because the sites were down and there was nothing I can do about it because of a serious failure in protocol with Microsoft's Azure platform.

I haven't been writing much lately, in part because I spent a good portion of my free time in the last week overhauling the POP Forums UI to use the Bootstrap framework. You can see what it looks like on the demo site. It took me a long time to cave and do this, but I think I had pretty good reasoning.