Building Async and Cloud Native organizations - Issue #29

API Security, GitHub Operations, and Azure Insights: A Deep Dive into Coding and Architecture

Welcome to my weekly newsletter! Every week, I bring you the latest news, updates, and resources from the world of coding and architecture. Thank you for joining me, and happy reading!

REST and APIs

Want to apply security to your API, but are unsure where to start, then have a look at this checklist.

Do you know the TTFHW of your API? The Time To First Hello World indicates how easy it is to consume your endpoints. It is one of the few metrics that can be tracked when you run APIs in production.

Long gone are the times when it was easy to do something with the Twitter API. When Musk decided that asking 42.000 dollars per month (yes, that is USD 42k PER MONTH) was a good idea, it killed many businesses and startups.

But no worries; there is now a Pro plan. Not the 42k per month, but a mere 5000 USD per month. Still way too expensive and way too late. This wont help the very valuable ecosystem around Twitter and will help kill the platform even more.

Coding technicalities

I m a big fan of putting stuff into code, and I like Infrastructure as Code, Documentation as Code, or even Config as Code. But did you know there are a lot of other concepts which you can put into Code?

Interested in running Azure Functions on Azure Container Apps? This repo shows the steps needed to leverage container apps for functions.

Steven Giesel shows a couple of extensions that add partitioning, shuffle, median etc support to IEnumerable.

GitHub related

Wonder what GitOps is and how to apply this in GitHub? The GitHub blog provides some use-cases and what kind of features you can and should use to apply these practices:

A new beta feature; the Activity view. When you have read access to a repo, you can now get detailed information about changes to your repository. For example, who did a force push, and what changed before and after:

An interesting change; when you added attachments to issues, pull requests, discussions, wiki they got an unguessable name. But you could still access the attachment if you knew the URL, so you could share the URL with others.

With this change, the attachments are only accessible after authentication. It makes sense, as someone needs to pay for storage in the end. This adds more control over who can access the data.

Computing in general

Looking for some guidance on how to apply system thinking? Need to solve a problem or make a decision? Untools contains a library of tools and frameworks for these issues:

It is always fun to see Scott Hanselman on stage, and this time even with Mark Russinovich. Expect some live coding of an astroid game with heavy usage of GitHub Copilot while Mark tells about the ins and outs of Large Language Models.

Are you using Azure Application Insights? Then it just became a bit smarter. With Code Optimizations you get AI on top of AppInsights. It should be able to spot performance issues and tell you how to improve those.

Talking about Application Insights; ever wondered why you missed data? Or why the user is not logged, or the IP address is set to 0.0.0.0? Anthony Simmon lists different issues and their solutions:

Helpers and utilities

Not sure how to keep a changelog? What should be in it, and what kind of structure is needed? The below site has you covered:

I hope you've enjoyed this week's issue of my newsletter. If you found it useful, I invite you to share it with your friends and colleagues. And if you're not already a subscriber, be sure to sign up to receive future issues.

Next week, I'll be back with more articles, tutorials, and resources to help you stay up-to-date on the latest developments in coding and architecture. In the meantime, keep learning and growing, and happy coding!

Best regards, Michiel

Join the conversation

or to participate.