I’ve been busy for the last month, and I completely forgot to update the blog. In no particular order, here’s what’s been occupying my time lately:

Coworking

I joined a coworking space in East Vancouver with a friend, and I’m working from there 3-4 days/week. It’s like an airy spacious café with fast internet and quiet space, I love it. I find that getting out of the house helps me be more disciplined with my working hours; I’m much less likely to disappear down a Wikipedia+YouTube rabbit hole at the office. And then when I inevitably do that at home, I feel less guilty about it because I’ve accomplished so much at the office.

Node.js

I got really into Node and the modern back-end JS ecosystem.

javascript.info has been remarkably helpful (I can finally remember exactly what a closure is!), it might be the first .info website that is genuinely a great source of information.

This talk by Franziska Hinkelmann on the V8 team is a great overview of JS engine internals.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Node APIs a few times; the Cluster module makes it trivial to fork workers and take advantage of multiple cores, and Buffer+friends make low-level bit manipulation quite pleasant. Which leads me to:

Cryptopals

The Cryptopals Crypto Challenges by Matasano Security are a delightful introduction to practical cryptography. I decided to do them in Node to get more practice with back-end JS, my solutions are on GitHub. The problems are very well-designed. They’re small enough that you can (usually) do each one in a single sitting, and it feels great every time you decode a ciphertext.

Raspberry Pi

I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 and have been loving it. For some reason I always thought of the Pi as only relevant for education and hardware hackers, but I was wrong – it’s a remarkably capable little Linux machine. I’m currently turning mine into a private Dropbox clone using ownCloud.

Anki

I started using Anki flashcards. I have decks for Node internals, uncommon JS syntax, and infrequently-used keyboard shortcuts and CLI options. Creating cards is a bit of an initial investment, but once that’s done I find that 5 minutes of daily study is enough.

I’ve recently been building .NET Core back-end services that run on Linux. Linux .NET development is in an interesting place; it’s clearly the future of back-end .NET, but it’s still a little rough around the edges compared to our old friend .NET-on-Windows.

Let’s dive into what you (an experienced Windows .NET developer or a .NET-curious Linux developer) need to know to start building .NET services for Linux. I’ll cover IDEs, service hosting, Linux system calls and more.

Background & Motivation

.NET development for Linux has been possible via Mono since 2004, but it was always a bit… fringe compared to Windows .NET development. That all changed when Microsoft released .NET Core in 2016 as a cross-platform .NET implementation; first-party support from Microsoft is a big deal to most .NET developers.

We’re also in a world where Linux is the lingua franca for back-end development; if you want to do anything involving cloud services, distributed systems, or containerization, Windows is typically an afterthought (if it’s supported at all). I want to skate to where the puck is going (sorry!), and it’s headed toward Linux.