Writing a dockerfile that adds features to an existing image — I wrote containerized SQL Server on Docker a few months ago when I migrated my company from a “developer desktop setup tutorial”-style environment to a “docker compose up”. Using SQL Server on Docker, we were able to end manual installations of SQL Server which wasted developer time and made it…

Tips and tricks for more complex Docker container build scenarios It’s important to make your new developer onboarding process simple, and a great way to do this is by using Docker Desktop to configure a computer for development rather than installing programs directly. Instead of installing MongoDB locally, you install…

The complex usability challenges of authentication for unattended API calls The days of storing usernames and passwords in a database have been over for a long time. If you have a website, your users should log on using either OAuth or SAML. But how can we help developers use our…

Make your program testable even if it depends on an underlying data store I recently wrote about Searchlight, a DotNet API domain specific language for REST API queries. This package is available on NuGet and it’s used in a couple of high profile APIs. …

A simple PowerShell script to scan your projects for security issues Most software projects have too many dependencies. In one famous example, the NodeJS project chokidar was able to eliminate 186 dependencies when it upgraded to version 3.0, saving many terabytes of network traffic each week from people downloading dependencies. …

Creating a customized query language with controllability features There’s something satisfying about having your own domain-specific language — in my case, I decided to build one to make my REST API easier to use, friendlier to novices, and more powerful for advanced users. Let me take you through the design…

A walkthrough of useful tips and tricks for beginners to Python and Jupyter When learning Jupyter and Python, a student might be asked to install a package using pip install, and they might get a weird error message they don’t understand. …

Adapted from a talk delivered at Bellevue College Earth Week, 2023 Unlimited free energy is a great topic, and the possibility is so exciting that it’s been well covered as wishful thinking in popular movies. In The Avengers (2012), heroes discover a terrible and frightening new power source, the Tesseract…

You can write software as part of a team without creating roadblocks for yourself A famous proverb goes something like this: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with others.” As software developers, we know that it takes effort to work with…