Author: Chad Michel
Sending Messages to Azure Service Bus Queue Using Node.js
Azure Service Bus is an excellent glue technology that we can use to handle the communication between our subsystems. We often use Azure Service Bus as the “queue” between our subsystems, which works great. We usually build our backend systems using C#/.NET, but what if we need to send a message using Node.js? Node.js is…
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Giving Someone Access to Your AWS Account
Sometimes you need to let someone else configure your AWS account for you. There are two options. One option is to create an IAM user with AdministratorAccess, and the second would be to use AWS IAM Identity Center. In this blog post, we will cover using the IAM user option. Visit https://console.aws.amazon.com to access your…
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Using AWS Cognito as an Identity Provider
AWS Cognito is an identity provider we can use to manage users in our systems. Cognito supports a simple oauth2 sign-in flow. Following this flow makes it pretty straightforward for users to sign in or sign up. Before doing anything else, you must create an AWS Cognito user pool in the AWS Console. For this…
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Using AWS Elemental MediaConvert
Before hosting a video, you usually need to encode it into bitrates that perform well for various situations. AWS has Elemental MediaConvert, a service that generates videos for online distribution. When you first get started, a wall of options emerges. But when you walk through the wall, it isn’t that bad. First, we have to…
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Video Playback with Azure Media Player
In my earlier blog post about Azure Media Services, we transcoded our video for better hosting on the web. In this blog post, we will host the video for playback. This starts with creating a streaming locator, which will handle the requests from our video player. One thing about streaming locators is that they can…
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Quick Look – Postman Newman
Building software often requires running many experiments. Some of these experiments can involve making HTTP requests to a backend. When developing a new API, I usually end up with a pretty comprehensive collection inside Postman, the tool I use to test APIs. If you’re like me, your Postman collection can be something you forget about…
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Getting Started with Azure Media Services
Azure Media Services is a solid group of technologies you can use to host video as part of your web application. There are a lot of other solutions out there that provide similar services, but Azure’s solution may, in many cases, be a cheaper hosting option. For example, hosting 1000 videos on Vimeo will require…
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Is There a Better Way?
It seems like we all use Git for source control. I know that since around 2012, everyone at Don’t Panic Labs has been using Git, and it has been amazing. Compared to what was there before, the difference Git made was like night and day. With Git, branching and merging are pleasant and super easy….
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Adding Angular to Your Electron App
In an earlier blog post, I described how we could create an Electron tray application. In that post, we got a simple Electron application running. In this post, we will augment the application with Angular to provide structure and utilities helpful for building an application. This should be very straightforward, but if you try to…
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SQLite and Full-Text Searches
SQLite is an interesting database technology. While not a technology we would often use on the backend, it is great for mobile projects because of its lightweight nature. A feature many people don’t know about is its ability to perform fuzzy text searches (full text). This ability is pretty much baked into SQLite; it only…
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