I recently took a new opportunity at a new company and was quickly faced with a challenge that was totally new to me: how do you create a hiring process from scratch? Up until this point, the company had leaned on it’s network to hire a small team of incredibly competent people, most of whom had worked together before. As we grow, how can we ensure that base line of competency is kept and that the team continues to work well together?

Earlier this week, things started getting really strange on my work PC. Rider (THE best IDE for .NET, sorry Microsoft) stopped being able to open certain projects, Docker containers that I’ve been running for months stopped working, and things generally just felt off. This particular PC was built back in 2019 and has been accruing cruft ever since. A recent inspection of disk space showed that I had nearly filled the 900 GB SSD, but with now one obvious culprit. It was just time.

Azure Container Apps require an SNI/SSL Certificate to be bound in order for custom domain names to work. You can use Azure DNS Zones and this helpful open source project to create automatically renewing certs via Let’s Encrypt, but Azure DNS Zones cost money (as do the Azure Functions and other resources required for the automatically renewing cert). Instead, I opted to use Cloudflare’s free Origin Certificates, which can be set to expire every 15 years and you can configure notifications for expiring certs.

My original intention when buying a Le Potato SBC from Libre Computer was to host my own Mastodon instance. After having run one briefly on a very small Linode server, I realized that the headache would likely end up being too much. I did have some fun poking around at Mastodon’s tech stack, but ultimately decided it just wasn’t worth it.

According to my wife, it is officially Christmas. Now, I’m not exactly one to get fully into the “Christmas spirit”, but I do contribute to the holiday cheer with a little bit of home automation. This all started one fateful christmas season, when I got tired of unplugging the Christmas tree before going to bed. I could have bought a physical timer, like a normal person, but I had been listening to that year’s “Shopping Spree” episode of Coding Blocks and one of the hosts mentioned the Kasa smart plugs from TP-Link (his list can be found here).

On the last episode of “Building Incognitum”, I created a brand new Fable-based React application using Feliz. This app has a very basic form that attempts to solve one small piece of the Mastodon Client problem: initiating an authorization flow. If you read this previous article, you’ll know that I promised to keep down that path. However, I lied.

Common Image Manipulation Tricks

Due to some unforseen circumstances, I am unable to work on migrating my Mastodon instance to Le Potato, but I’ve still been thinking about Mastodon and the broader Activity Pub ecosystem. Couple that with a crippling guilt around abandoning an F# project I started a while back, and you have the impetus for my latest project: a Mastodon client written in F# using Fable (an F# -> Javascript transpiler).

The Prologue

I Promise This Is Not an Ad