Funky Si's Tech Talk by Simon Foster
My road to Certification
11 May 2021 Road to Certification
DotNet on a Raspberry Pi
10 May 2021 DotNet on a Raspberry Pi
Charting my Energy usage with the Octopus Energy API
07 March 2021 Charting my Energy usage with the Octopus Energy API
Azure DevOps Release Pipelines Pre and Post Approval
14 February 2021 Azure DevOps release pipelines have lots of options to do things how you want. One of my favourites is the option for approval.
Goals for 2021
28 December 2020 Here are my goals for 2021
Building a Twitter Clone
22 December 2020 I saw a tweet about building a twitter clone being harder than you would think. So this of course started me thinking how I would go about building something like that.
#005: Twitter Cards
12 December 2020 It has been a bit of a mad week this week.
Weekly Update #004
06 December 2020 dynamic sql
Weekly Update #003
28 November 2020 My first PR and PHP
Weekly Update #002
21 November 2020 Time sync in docker containers
Weekly Update #001
14 November 2020 Dotnet 5, dotnetconf and adding devops buildid and hash
Security Headers
26 September 2020 Check the security headers of your site
Back to Blogging
25 September 2020 Back to Blogging
Testing for expiring SSL Certificates
03 March 2020 Testing for expiring SSL Certificates
A Comparison of All Good Things... and Star Trek Picard
25 January 2020 A Comparison of All Good Things... and Star Trek Picard
How do you keep track of your passwords?
04 January 2020 My top ways to keep your login details secure
A look back at the 2010s
29 December 2019 What I did in the 2010s
Azure Advent Calendar: Azure Devops Pipelines
02 December 2019 This blog post is part of Azure Advent Calendar do check out some of the other videos and blog posts
Infrastructure as Code – Creating Azure Resources with Terraform
11 May 2019 Terraform is a way to script the creation of Azure Resources
Gated Release
05 April 2019 Automated releases of software are great but how can we add an element of feedback so only good releases go live
Documenting your API
27 March 2019 So you have created a super API that does something amazing. How do you document it so people will use it?
Azure Key Vault
19 March 2019 Azure Key Vault is a secure way of storing your keys, certificates, and secrets so your application can access everything it needs to, but you don’t have them being stored insecurely anywhere such as in source control
Technology I want to learn more about
05 March 2019 While at Microsoft Ignite I heard about a lot of cool tech that I want to know more about. The best way to learn something is use it to solve a problem.
Microsoft Ignite | The Tour – London
26 February 2019 I have just spent the first day at the conference Microsoft Ignite | The Tour.
Yaml Builds on Azure DevOps
31 January 2019 I have been using Azure DevOps (Or VSTS or VSO etc) for a while now and one of the great features is doing automatic builds with every check-in
Pwned Pass Update
23 January 2019 Its been a while since I first released Pwned Pass so lets have a look at where we are
Looking back at 2018
27 December 2018 As 2018 starts to draw to a close let’s look at some of the highlights from the past year. New Home –...
Running SQL Server on a Linux Container using Docker for Windows
05 November 2018 Recently I have been investigating what all the fuss is about Docker and it has been well worth my ti...
Picard is back!
08 August 2018 It has just been announced at the annual Star Trek Las Vegas (#STLV) convention that Patrick Stewart...
2018 The Story So far
28 July 2018 Remember me? I used to write blog posts but somehow life got in the way. So much has happened this ye...
Casting and Converting between types
07 May 2018 Recently I was asked how to convert a number to a string. Let’s look at a few ways of approaching thi...
Let’s Encrypt is awesome
30 April 2018 Let’s Encrypt is a free way to get a SSL certificate onto your website and until recently I had never...
DNS for Developers
09 April 2018 DNS is the backbone of the internet and as such I believe every developer should know something about...
Code Reviews
02 April 2018 Reviewing code is a great habit to get into. Code reviews help share knowledge between your team memb...
Android Development Options
26 March 2018 A friend asked me how to get started in Android Development and I thought I might have a go at answer...
Tips for Developing Yourself
19 March 2018 For a while I have been mentoring a friend and I thought I might share some top tips I have implement...
Heroes
16 March 2018 Who was your hero growing up? Mine was Stephen Hawking. What is a hero? A lot is said in the media...
New version of Pwned Pass
05 March 2018 A new version of Pwned Pass is available from Google Play. A couple of weeks ago Troy Hunt released...
Refactoring if statements
26 February 2018 The code base I am working on contains a huge if block. By huge I mean 77 if statements one after the...
Chrome distrusts SSL Certificates
19 February 2018 One of the websites I have been working on has been displaying an error in the console. The error rea...
Content Security Policies
12 February 2018 A content Security Policy or CSP is a HTTP response header that defines what sources of content can b...
Pluralsight
05 February 2018 Earlier this year I signed up for pluralsight. If you want to sign up to pluralsight as well use this...
Flexible Architecture with Interfaces
29 January 2018 I have blogged a few times about interfaces, and how useful they are for producing good quality maint...
Moving files into blob storage
22 January 2018 We are in the process of moving our companies websites onto the Azure platform. One of the challenges...
Website UI Testing
15 January 2018 Last week I looked at testing the UI of mobile apps, this week lets look at how we could do a similar...
Mobile App UI Testing
08 January 2018 Since I started creating an android app I have been writing simple UI tests. I have been taking adva...
Lets see what 2018 can do!
01 January 2018 It is 2018 so it must be time to think about what my plans and goals are for the new year....
Looking back at 2017
28 December 2017 As 2017 starts to draw to a close let’s look at some of the highlights from the past year. 1) Edwa...
Getting started with Azure Table Storage
17 December 2017 Azure Table storage is cheap way to store data, however it has some drawbacks that you should be awar...
How to get Zero Code Changes outside of Source Control
13 November 2017 Source control is bread and butter for web developers, however not so much for SQL developers and oth...
SQL with Visual Studio Code
06 November 2017 Writing SQL queries is typically done with SQL Management Studio (SSMS). However this tool is a bit o...
Interfaces are cool!
31 October 2017 A while back I blogged about learning about interfaces as I didn’t really understand the value of the...
Creating DNS records programmatically
16 October 2017 DNS is the backbone of the internet. It converts domain names into IP addresses. But how can we do cl...
Discovery – My thoughts so far
10 October 2017 I tried to resist but I am going to have to write about the new Star Trek series Discovery. Warning t...
Star Trek is back with Discovery
22 September 2017 In November 2015 it was announced that a new Star Trek series was going to be launched. It has been a...
Azure Friday
18 September 2017 I think Azure is great, but there is loads to it so I can never know about all of its features. There...
Azure Functions
12 September 2017 I recently blogged about using Azure Web Jobs, Azure Function is another way of doing the same thing,...
Pwned Pass – Available from the Play Store
14 August 2017 Pwned Pass is now available from the Google Play Store. Pwned Pass is a simple android app that al...
Android App Development and the Visual Studio Mobile Centre
07 August 2017 For the past week or so I have been playing around with Xamarin and creating an android app. Well I...
Creating your own nuget packages with VSTS
31 July 2017 For a while I have found myself writing the same bits of code for different web projects. This annoys...
Async and Await
24 July 2017 For a while the Async and Await commands in c# have confused me. Like most things the best way to le...
How good is your SSL?
17 July 2017 I recently watched Troy Hunt’s What Every Developer Must Know about HTTPS course on Pluralsight. It...
Writing your first test
10 July 2017 Whenever I write a new test I have to think how best to do it. Hopefully I can summarise a few tips h...
Uploading Files to AWS
03 July 2017 I am a fan of Azure but today I have been looking at AWS. Specifically how to upload and download fil...
Using Azure WebJobs to Automate Stuff
26 June 2017 I keep hearing about Azure WebJobs but I have never used them. Time to change this. WebJobs are a fe...
What the heck is Business Intelligence?
05 June 2017 The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collec...
Office Move
01 May 2017 For the past few weeks my software developing has been taking a back seat as I planned and coordinate...
Interfaces
27 March 2017 I am trying to understand interfaces and when to use them in my code. An interface defines a contrac...
Learning R
27 February 2017 Today I spent some time learning the R language. The problem I was trying to solve was to convert lo...
Amazon Web Services
21 July 2016 I am a big fan of Azure but I know zero about its biggest rival – Amazon Web Services or AWS. So let...
I’m 100 blog posts old
02 June 2016 That’s right this is the one hundredth post that I have written on this blog. So what have I learn...
SQL Server Management Studio
03 December 2015 I use SQL Server Management Studio all the time for writing queries, getting data and general SQL dev...
Star Trek is back (in 2017)
12 November 2015 As you have probably heard Star Trek is coming back to TV. I recently joined with the Sci Fi Waffle...
Runaway SQL Log growth
12 June 2015 Today is my day off, but I wake up and have a quick look at nagios to see if there is anything I need...
Source Control Fail
16 March 2015 Every developer uses source control, it is a great tool for keeping track of changes to your code, se...
Azure Traffic Manager
12 March 2015 However Azure has some amazing features that you can configure to help manage when downtime occurs
Tidying my desktop
11 March 2015 My desktop is always a mess. I constantly download files there and forget all about them.
I love Nagios
24 September 2014 You may not have heard of Nagios but it has saved my bacon quite a few times. Nagios is an open so...