The Circuit Breaker Pattern

I don't remember where I first heard about the circuit breaker pattern but I had seen it a few times in a few different forms under different names. Over time I have come to believe that the original approach described to me might not be the most appropriate.

2013 statistics

Since I decided to move the blog during 2013 the statistics for 2013 are split between two sites and I'll do this a little different than last year.

TFS Anti-Patterns: Copying work items

Over my years at Microsoft I have encountered what I'd like to call the work item copy anti pattern.

Lunch Dictator or Tweeting from PHP

A while back I needed a way to simply post tweets from PHP. To my disappointment most examples I found were about reading tweets or required a bunch of PHP modules I did not have the opportunity to use on the server where the script was going to run. So I had to do some work.

429 vs 503

A while back I was involved in a discussion around using 429 instead of 503 in order to tell clients they should back off a little. And there are some good arguments for both. Here are my thoughts.

Abstracting time

Probably one of the most common tight couplings I see is a dependency on system time, i.e. using DateTime.Now or DateTime.UtcNow directly in your code without any abstraction around it. A tight coupling that typically leads to very complex and fragile tests when trying to ad test coverage.

When in doubt - don't brick your hardware

Being an Xfinity Home customer I've had two interesting experiences with their hardware. The user experience have been weird at best.

Xbox One Launch Day

So what is it like to launch Xbox One? Given that it started 3am local time when New Zeeland first launched it has been an interesting and long day.

Hiding email until you need to read it

If you ever read a blog by a Microsoft employee before I'm sure you have read about how they struggle with the amount of email they receive. I guess this is my second time around writing about this.

What you really need to know when authoring NuGet packages

I have noticed that most articles on how to author NuGet packages focus on the practical part; which commands to run and how to setup your own NuGet server. All these articles also fail to point out the most important information in the NuGet guidelines.