Jeff Makes Software

This is the fastest release I've had the pleasure of posting to Github in the modern .NET era. Congratulations to all of the product teams, from frameworks to SDK's to Azure, for getting it all out at the same time and in awesome shape. Truth be told, most of this was done two weeks ago on the RC bits. Well done, everyone!

Late in 2018, I got into a groove updating and improving my very-long-running open source project, POP Forums. It was a huge refactoring project, updating the CSS framework, embracing Dapper for object mapping from the database, rewriting the admin area to use Vue.js, adding support for ElasticSearch and Azure Functions... it didn't look new, but the internals were massively different. As that effort went on, leading to a release that following May, I committed to making at least one contribution to OSS per week. Having transitioned into more manager than maker, I wanted to keep some street cred, and frankly I still find the process and the learning to be fun. This week, I've contributed for 100 straight weeks!

(If you missed part 1 of my Blazor exploration, check it out. These are reposts from my personal blog, which is more than just software stuff.)

(This is the first of a series of reposts from my personal blog, which may contain politics and things you don't care about. If you're just here for the .NET and Blazor content, read on!)

Get the fresh bits here:

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.