TWIL: May 15, 2022

This week I’m highlighting a set of podcasts, namely an episode on how kids can learn to code and another one about the patterns.dev book and website, both by Scott Hanselman. I also recommend the Kubernetes Goat, Dapr Quickstarts and Tutorials and the new Azure Managed Grafana service. Good reading!


Podcasts

.NET Rocks

Episode 1793: Secure Open Source Practices with Jillian Ratliff
How do you know your open source is secure? Carl and Richard talk to Jillian Ratliff about security practices on your own code, and the open-source code you depend on. Jillian talks about some of the high-profile security problems that have happened recently in the open-source world including log4j. The conversation turns to practices for making your applications secure with open-source including security testing as part of your CI/CD pipeline, periodic penetration testing, and more!

The Azure Podcast

Episode 423: Azure Cache for Redis
Kyle Teegarden, a Senior PM in the DevDiv group, gets us re-acquainted with the Redis offering on Azure and discusses all the latest features including the Enterprise tier.

Hanselminutes

Episode 835: How kids learn how to Code with MakeCode’s Kiki Prottsman
Kiki Prottsman is a multihyphenate! Computer Science Educator, Artist, Author of several books, and above all, engineer, Kiki has been helping young developers level up with computers for as long as she can remember. Scott talks to Kiki about how kids learn, the importance of Systems Thinking, the fact that coding with Blocks is not given enough respect, and that jumping into code is far easier and more accessible than most folks realize!

Episode 836: Site Reliability Engineering with PagerDuty’s Stevenson Jean-Pierre
Scott talks to PagerDuty’s Stevenson Jean-Pierre about the art and science of Site Reliability Engineering. What’s the role of the SRE in today’s modern DevOps lifecycle? How do they interaction and share ownership (and uptime!) of your apps and sites? Who carries the pager in 2022?

Episode 837: Patterns.dev with Lydia Hallie and Addy Osmani
Patterns.dev is free book on design patterns and component patterns for building powerful web apps with vanilla JavaScript and React. Lydia Hallie is a full-time software engineering consultant and educator that primarily works with JavaScript, React, Node, GraphQL, and serverless technologies and Addy Osmani is an engineering manager working on Google Chrome. Together they teamed up with some web friends from around the world to bring us a new way to think about Patterns in JavaScript on the modern open web.


Dapr

Dapr Quickstarts and Tutorials
GitHub repo with quickstarts and tutorials on how to use Dapr. It includes quickstart for each building block using multiple language SDKs as well as HTTP. Tutorials go a bit deeper into a topic or scenario, using more than one building block.


Design Patterns

Patterns.dev
Patterns.dev is a free book on design patterns and component patterns for building powerful web apps with vanilla JavaScript and React. Design patterns are a fundamental part of software development, as they provide typical solutions to commonly recurring problems in software design. If you are a web front-end developer, this is a must-have on your tool belt.


Kubernetes

Kubernetes Goat
The Kubernetes Goat is an interactive Kuberentes security learning playground, designed to be an intentionally vulnerable cluster environment to learn and practice Kubernetes security.


Azure Services

Blazor WebAssembly for Headless CMS on Azure Static Web Apps
One of the most popular scenarios to build a static website is to run a blog site for myself or my organisation. WordPress is the most popular service for this purpose. Now, you want to migrate your WordPress blog site to a static website, but it doesn’t look easy. What if you still want to use the WordPress site to write content but only want to refresh the UI outside the site? What if you can even use C# for it through Blazor WebAssembly? You are now able to use the existing WordPress site as the data source of truth and build a UI in a separate instance with your preferred method. Does that sound attractive? Throughout this post, I’m going to discuss how to use the serviced WordPress instance as the headless CMS, build the Blazor WebAssembly app to make use of the WordPress as a data source, and host it to Azure Static Web Apps.

Azure Managed Grafana (preview)
Azure Managed Grafana is a fully managed service for analytics and monitoring solutions. It’s supported by Grafana Enterprise, which provides extensible data visualizations. Quickly and easily deploy Grafana dashboards with built-in high availability and control access with Azure security.

Azure API Management’s Self-Hosted Gateway on Azure Container Apps
GitHub repo by Tome Kerkhove, with a playground to run Azure API Management’s self-hosted gateway on Azure Container Apps.


Cool Stuff

Make & Code
Microsoft MakeCode is a free online learn-to-code platform where anyone can build games, code devices, and mod Minecraft! You can start with block-based coding and move on to JavaScript and Python. This is really awesome!


I hope you found it useful. Have a “learnful” week.

Photo by Robo Wunderkind on Unsplash