Jeff Makes Software

At some point over the last six weeks and change, I launched POP Forums as a commercial, hosted product. By that I mean, it was something I could sell to others. I'm not suggesting that I've done any real sales effort, obvs, because I don't have any external customer yet. But there was a lot to learn from the effort.

You know that old management saying, that you can't improve what you don't measure? It's annoying because being measured feels personal and uncomfortable, but it's useful in technology because it's totally true. There is a fairly lucrative market around monitoring stuff in the cloud now, because as our systems become more distributed and less monolithic, we do less tracing at the code level and more digestion of interaction data between components.

Building multi-tenancy into your app is an interesting (and dare I say fun) problem to solve, because there are a number of ways to approach it. And now that we don't have to spin up closets full of hardware in some basement, there are better options that we didn't have in the dark ages. I'll talk a little bit about the options that I've used, and how I solved the problem this time around with hosted POP Forums.

Last week I did my first production deployment of the cloud-hosted version of POP Forums. I'm really excited to offer a version that others can use without setting it up themselves (I'm really excited about the performance, too!). If you've followed me for any length of time, you know that I've been maintaining POP Forums as an open source project since around 2003. The new cloud-hosted version is about 95% the same code, with a few substitutions in the dependency injection container to facilitate multi-tenancy, especially in the asynchronous Azure Functions to make sure that they're acting on behalf of the right tenant. What I'm excited to share is that it's so easy to use the output of the open source project and get those bits into the commercial product.

Get the release on GitHub:
https://github.com/POPWorldMedia/POPForums/releases/tag/v16.0.1

(This is a repost from my personal blog.)

Last week I published the release for POP Forums v15.0.3, the forum application that runs on ASP.NET Core. The supporting documentation is in solid shape as well, including information on using it all by way of package references. Check the wiki for that information.

That's weird. I haven't made a post here in more than two years. Kind of lame, right? I got out of the habit because it took me years through the betas and changes to port POP Forums to Core, and I'm in that career stage where I've been bouncing in and out of writing code. I don't write any at all for work now, which gives me more of that flavor of mental bandwidth for it now. Because of that, I've made more than a hundred commits to POP Forums the last few months. It's an actual thing, and even gets a PR now and then.