Note: Apparently this post had been sitting in my drafts folder and I never published it. So with a months delay, here is the March recap

Yet another month has passed - somehow time just seems to pass right by. Anyways I dipped my toes in quite a lot of new things this month, some of them might earn some separate posts going forward.

My wife Maria is starting he own business - being a mindful coach - and of course I try to help where I can. For now, she has a page with a single site for a group training, in the future she needs a lot more.

She is in some odd middle ground where she needs some features from a blog, a few from a shop, a few from an intranet and some other bits and pieces. This adventure has lead me into:

Static websites

I hoped I would be able to setup a Ghost account for her and that would be enough for her site, but she doesn’t really need a blog, she needs some pages to act as marketing and sales channel. I considered Jekyll and Hugo and I especially likes Hugo, but I’m not sure they are the right tool for the job. For now, it’s just a simple ASP.NET MVC site with no features.

Quickpay and Azure Functions

At some point in the not too distant future she needs to be able to take card payments on her site. I looked a bit in to shop options, but the all seemed like a massive overkill. She has no inventory, only a small handful of products and few customers. I played around with the possibility of making my own simple payment integration with Azure Functions. It turned out to be very easy, and within half an hour I managed to create a test account, create a payment link and being able to pay for a product. I have not done a lot of payment stuff before, but Quickpay’s API is very easy to work with.

AWS API Gateway & Akamai DSD

At my day job, we have taken the first steps towards retiring our unmanaged NGINX reverse proxy and use AWS API Gateway insted. There are still some short comings in API Gateway, but the progress the last year have been very good, and the proxy feature is excellent. But still some odd short comings in regards to integration to e.g. Elasticsearch Service.

In the same project, we are also going to route our traffic through Akamai’s CDN. I have a lot of features and covers our needs, but it’s a pain to work with. Slow web interface, no API and the kicker is the 20-60 minutes you must wait to test your changes.

Working from home remote

Due to my quite long commute I have been working from home a couple of days each week for the last year and a half. Sometimes things get a little boring when sitting at home alone, so this past Friday I met up with Thomas Ardal from elmah.io and Casper Skydt (who is at the same team as I’m) at Lynfabrikken and set in the cafe working with them. It was fun to work from another environment than I’m used to, and we had some good discussions. I would not do this every day I was working remote, but I think I’ll try to do it a couple of times a month.

Sneak peak of April

The last day of March I was told that I’m to join another team and do some new things the next couple of months. So, I guess I’ll have a lot of new things to try out and report back on.