A little while ago now, my team at work was looking at improving the performance of a FHIR Server API. Thanks to Azure Workbooks, we’ve already been able to identify a bottleneck with the underlying data storage resource - CosmosDB. Now, as we explore options to enhance performance, we need a way to reliably benchmark the server. These benchmarks will help us measure the impact of any changes we make to the configuration and infrastructure.

With 2022 well underway I’ve realised it isn’t too late to set a couple of personal development goals for the remainder of the year. Last year I was working in the infrastructure team at DrDoctor. Over the course of the year I learnt many valuable things: Bicep (infrastructure as code) Azure DevOps pipelines Azure networking (virtual networks, subnets, how to isolate App Services and keep data private in a cloud first world) All of these areas of growth were infrastructure related, not terribly surprising given I was in the infra team.

This year I have been participating in the Advent of Code, a yearly (for obvious reasons) event where a new puzzle is released each day of Advent which requires some coding skills to solve. It has been fun so far and I’m sure it’s only going to get harder. It’s an excellent opportunity to practice some algorithm skills and also to learn some new things. The Day 4 challenge titled Giant Squid involved playing some games of bingo against a giant squid.

Cookie banners suck, and a lot of websites do them very badly. When I launched unravelled.dev I included Google Analytics since I wanted to know what posts were the most read, you know to give me an indication of what my audience was most interested in. However given that this is a developer centric blog I suspect that a good amount of visitors have browser based ad blockers or use something like NextDNS to block analytics from being collected.

Earlier this year I decided I wanted to get back into blogging, and nothing screams getting back into blogging then changing the platform you’re using! I had been a long time user of Wordpress and blogged regularly from 2013 to 2016 and figured adopting a new platform is exactly what I need to do to get back into the swing of things. Side note: changing tech is not the answer, I spent waaaaay too long working through various issues related to Hugo, I got there in the end but I should have just stuck with Wordpress and spent the time writing posts instead of tweaking toml files 😱

I’ve been hearing a lot about Cloudflare lately, a few weeks about I read a post by Troy Hunt where he talks about one of his recent experiences using Cloudflare Workers. Prior to this I had read about doom scrolled past tweets about Workers, but never had a chance to try them out. And again this weekend someone I follow on Twitter posted about Workers again, so I figured it was now time to give them a try.