Posts

Problem You have installed WSL successfully on your machine only to find out that you cannot connect to the internet. I have encountered this problem before sometimes it can be fixed externally, but from my experience, no matter what you do, you will end up having to mock around with the resolv.conf file within WSL, more on that later. You may encounter an internet issue in WSL when the network administrator had configured Windows Defender to not allow local fire rules to be merged with rules applied at the enterprise level. You can confirm that this is applicable to you by searching for Windows Defender Firewall with Advance Security on the start menu, then going to Action, then Properties, under properties switching to the Public Profile tab, then clicking customize under settings. Now look under “Rule Merging”, if these options are set to no, then you will not be able to connect from WSL. ...

The Postman app is an excellent tool for building and testing Web APIs. It gets even better when you combine it with Newman, which allows you to execute your Postman scripts on a continuous integration system like Bitbucket Pipelines. While both Postman and Newman are awesome, you may encounter issues while working with both apps. 1 2 3 if(pm.request.body.isEmpty){ // Code Omitted For Brevity } One issue you may encounter is having a script that was written in Postman, successfully tested using Postman, fail when executed using Newman. For example, the script above, which was written in Postman, is part of a series of tests that inspects the HTTP request body. The script can fail when executed on Newman because the function isEmpty does not exist. ...

I was recently presented with a unique challenge at work. I needed to create a script that clones repositories from Bitbucket. The problem is that as of June 2022, Bitbucket only supports managing repositories using OAuth via two grant types, the authorization code grant & the implicit grant. I won’t get into the details here but the implicit grant is no longer recommended and is in fact discouraged from ever being used. Regardless of which flow I use I will end up facing the same problem, the browser. In both the implicit and authorization grant, user interaction (3-legged OAuth) is required, the end-user must provide their credentials in order to properly authenticate, in some cases this may even include multifactor authentication. ...

I was recently talking to another developer about the importance of never exposing internal identifiers to the outside world. A well-known example of this is using an auto-incrementing identity field in SQL and exposing that field through an API. A client can look at the highest number to tell how many records exist, in an ordering system this is far from ideal. Now everyone will know how many orders you have created. I recommend watching The Internet of Pwned Things by Troy Hunt for a real-world example. ...

Learned a cool little trick a while back from Khalid. As a developer, you will often run into scenarios that require you to get a subset of all fields from a model. There are many ways to achieve this task, returning the type and then grabbing each property, for example, take the following User type. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 public class User { public User(string name, DateTime dob) { var random = new Random(); Id = random.Next(); Name = name; DateOfBirth = dob; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name {get; set; } public DateTime DateOfBirth { get; set; } } If you want to obtain the name and id property you can take the following approach. ...

I’ve been thinking about what it takes to build a good Web API, regardless of the technology (REST vs GraphQL) or philosophy used. One concept that has been stuck on my head is the idea of marking up API documents to provide more context around the data. A Web API document is the response returned by the API itself, you will often see this term used in API specifications like GraphQL, HAL, JSON-LD, and JSON:API. Web API documents can be very simple, for example, imagine working with a Web API that manages users. This API may choose to represent the user resource using the following JSON. ...

.NET makes it super simple to update the dependencies of a project. If you are following a solution structure like Clean Architecture where the Web project should not be referenced by the Core project or you have created your own solution structure that requires certain projects do not reference another project then you might need a way to avoid having developers incorrectly adding dependencies. The diagram above gives a high-level view of all project dependencies in a Clean Architecture solution. Built with Excalidraw. ...

A few weeks ago I came across a blog post from Aaron Francis in which he talks about creating efficient pagination using deferred joins. A technique he remembered reading in High Performance MySQL: Proven Strategies for Operating at Scale. The idea is that without deferred joins pagination queries can impact response time. Pagination is done using an OFFSET to skip over a number of records, however, even though the results are skipped, the database must still fetch those records. Meaning we are reading data from the disk and immediately discarding it. This is an inefficient process and is what causes pagination performance to degrade as you paginate over more records. ...

It has been a while since I blogged about JSON:API. In my last post on JSON:API I covered how to create new resources. In today’s post, I want to go over how I expose pagination links. Pagination links allow a client to page through a collection of resources. A shift of control from the client back to the server. Here is an example of a possible JSON:API response that includes pagination links. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 { "data": [ { // omitted for brevity } ], "links": { "up": "http://example.com/", "self": "http://example.com/articles?page[number]=3&page[size]=1", "first": "http://example.com/articles?page[number]=1&page[size]=1", "prev": "http://example.com/articles?page[number]=2&page[size]=1", "next": "http://example.com/articles?page[number]=4&page[size]=1", "last": "http://example.com/articles?page[number]=13&page[size]=1" } } As you can see, along with the data object, the API responses included a Links object, within the Links object, you can find links for up, self, first, prev, next, and last. These are all relationship name as defined in Link Relations by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). ...

Over the last few years, our industry has moved away from monolith architectures to microservice architectures. For a good number of reasons, this trend continues to remain strong. One issue you may encounter with creating microservices if you are not using a monorepo is that you may have to build a new project whenever you need to add a new microservice to your app ecosystem. Creating a new project may include creating new repositories in Bitbucket/Github, configuring a continuous integration pipeline, adding build/deploy scripts, building the project based on some folder structure that has been determined by the team. It can also involve configuring how the service captures logs, communicating with other services, exposing an Open API definition, configuring a docker file, having a helm chart to deploy to k8s, installing external packages, and so on. ...