Constrained Types
Making Illegal States Unrepresentable
Hello, I'm Ben
I write mostly about programming and software and related things, but occasionally write about other stuff too. Scroll on down for a selection of my recent articles.
Building Signature Authentication for ASP.NET Core: Part I
Introduction One of the impressive things about ASP.NET Core is how much functionality comes out of the box. There are a number of authentication mechanisms that you can use that are part of ASP.NET Core and supported by Microsoft. However, the bulk...
Forward Pipe vs Composition
The forward pipe operator and the composition operator are conceptually very similar, but are best suited for different scenarios. Here's a brief take the distinction.
Basic Performance Optimization
Introduction I’m working on a Bitcoin library on my own time, and as I work through it I want its performance characteristics to be good, so I’m going to do some profiling along the way and look for low-hanging fruits. I thought I’d...
My Advice to New Developers
My Advice to New Developers I recently read another post like this, and out of the 7 points in it, I only thought 2 of them were really sensible, so I thought being an experienced engineer, I might drop a little bit of my own advice. #1: Learn the...
Book Review: Them
Overview I’ve been saying since it came out that I wanted to read Them by Nebraska Senator Dr. Ben Sasse. Well…I finally did, and I wasn’t disappointed (not much, anyway, but more on that). I found myself nodding throughout most of...
Against Net Neutrality
"Net Neutrality" has captured the zeitgeist (in tech, anyway). The greed of the profit-focused ISPs has finally caused them to go too far - or it might. That's the story, anyway. But is it really as simple as that?
A working example
Motivation In my previous post, Practical Permission-based Authorization in ASP.NET Core, I tried to demonstrate how to implement a regime of permissions-based authorization without having to stuff it all into an ever-exploding list of roles, without...
Using DI in Configuration
ASP.NET Core applications are configured using the Configure and optionally, the ConfigureServices methods of the startup class (typically Startup). ConfigureServices is used to set up the dependency injection container that ships with ASP.NET Core....
Hugo on Azure from GitLab
I found Hugo and decided to give it a whirl on Azure and GitLab. Here's how I did it.
