As it is customary to do in January, lets look back at 2018. It was a very big year for me. You rarely achieve all the things you hope for in a year, but this year was definitely one to remember.
Static web hosting is now a thing in Azure Storage and is pretty easy to setup. There’s a small caveat with the CI/CD solution they’ve provided though.
Seems every time I logged into WordPress I’d have some kind of update to do and I had the bare minimum of plug-ins. Enough is enough.
What a busy month! Taking a break from talking about the DieRoller (which I did put onto NuGet now), but so many other fun things have happened!
When building the Die Roller, I had two main use cases for it. Determine the probability of a given roll configuration and provide a simulation of the roll with all the information about what took place. When it comes to unit testing, probability calculations are more straight forward. They make sure that the code returns the expected result. Simulations are much more difficult to test because rolling a die is inherently random. Which means of course that you have to abstract the randomness away for the purposes of the tests.
So I went and did it again. Not too long after writing the last post did I realize I started from an angle I shouldn’t have. Again.
So as I alluded to in the first post, I wasn’t happy with the tiny bit of code that I had done so far. I literally had one class and one test just to get some probability calculations going. But there were two things that I didn’t like.
So a few friends of mine recently decided to take up collecting and playing the table-top miniature game Warhammer 40k. I collected a bunch of this stuff when I was a kid and I’m excited to finally have a reason to unpack it from storage and give it another go. Why is this relevant to a development blog? Simply because I now have a reason to make a small little library that would be useful for doing some number crunching related to the die rolls that take place in the game.
Steve Smith blogged a while back about how one of the best times to teach something is while you are learning the topic or right after. You will still remember the steps it took to reach your conclusions and the hardships you found along the way. These are important for those who are also learning and easily forgotten when you’ve been involved in the subject matter for a while. I don’t plan to re-blog his blog, but rather share an experience.
If you are following Jimmy Bogard’s style of MediatR commands and queries that he did within his Contoso University example you’ll find that Swagger does not play nice by default with that type of class nesting.
