Recently, I’ve been replacing bit.ly with the Google URL shortener service for a .Net project. It’s a pretty simple service, and the documentation shows very clearly how to get going. Google have 3 different ways of authenticating using OAuth 2.0 (details), the method I am using is as a “Service Account”. Their code sample is thus: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 String serviceAccountEmail = "SERVICE_ACCOUNT_EMAIL_HERE"; var certificate = new X509Certificate2(@"key.

Last week I needed to configure Splunk to consume JSON log fies, the documentation on the Splunk website wasn’t particularly clear, and ended in some strange results with data being repeated…With the help of an old colleague of mine (thanks Matt) he pointed me in the direction of this Splunk Answers question, which described the problem that I was having as well as the solution - fixing the configuration. So here are the steps required to setup Splunk to consume JSON from a log file.

I’ve recently started using Codealike, a service that tracks various metrics while I’m coding. The data it collects is then presented in a bunch of really useful ways to help determine when I’m being most productive, as well as the places our code base I spend most of my time and various other things. One of the metrics they calculate as part of this process is how “focused” you are and from this they determine whether or not someone should interrupt you - they have three different levels, No Activity, Can Interrupt and Cannot Interrupt.

At DrDoctor we’ve been using Nancy as our web framework for quite sometime now. We’ve found it to have many advantages over ASP.Net MVC (we still have one legacy ASP.Net MVC site running) as well as excellent community support. Recently we started using New Relic to monitor the performance of our web applications. However I was a bit disappointed when I was first looking at the data it collected and saw this

If you haven’t tried NCrunch before then stop reading this and go download the trial and try it out, it will forever change your testing habits* - for the better. NCrunch is the breakfast of champions -KenR At DrDoctor we use Nancy (rather than the typically used ASP.Net MVC Framework) the main reason is summed up by the overall goal of the framework: The goal of the framework is to stay out of the way as much as possible and provide a super-duper-happy-path to all interactions.

I recently came across this brilliant quote while reading the Klarna engineering blog and thought it was worth posting. If development is frequently called in the middle of the night, automation is the likely outcome. If operations is frequently called, the usual reaction is to grow the operations team. -James Hamilton (source)