In this post I share my experience with self-hosted agents for Azure DevOps running in Docker, with Ubuntu; and information about images I prepared and published in GitHub and Docker Hub.

According to recent runs of TechEmpower benchmarks, BlackSheep is one of today’s fastest web frameworks for Python ^{[1.] [2.] [3.]}. It is high time I write something about this project of mine!

This post describes how to validate JSON web tokens (JWTs) issued by Azure Active Directory B2C, using Python and working with RSA public keys and discovery endpoints.

I used to store my family pictures and videos in Google Photos. Since I have two small children and we are in 2018, I rapidly ran out of the free space that Google offers to store original, full size, pictures. I decided to create my own media storage using Azure services, for a few reasons:

In the last months I wrote an alternative Python SDK for Azure Storage using aiohttp, to take advantage of asynchronous web requests. Recently I did the same for Azure Application Insights. For those who don’t know it, Application Insights is a monitoring service that enables collecting telemetry data from applications, such as custom events and traces, unhandled exceptions, web requests, page views and much more.

In the last months I had occasion to use Azure Storage as primary persistence layer for a document management system for my employer, William Demant Holding. For those who don’t know it, Azure Storage is a cloud based storage service by Microsoft, comprised of several services:

• Table Service - NoSQL database
• Blob Service - binary files storage, with support for virtual folders
• Queue Service - simple, cost-effective messaging system for large volume systems
• File Service - distributed file system

In my previous post I wrote about performance comparison of ASP.NET Core applications hosted in Windows vs Linux + Docker, inside Azure Application Service Plans. Since this topic is interesting for many, I decided to write more about it.

What is faster? An ASP.NET Core application hosted inside a Linux machine and Docker container, or one hosted in a Windows machine, when using Azure Application Service Plan? Which setup offers the best performance, and to which extent?

This post describes how to deploy web applications in Azure Application Service Plans, using Docker containers and custom images from Docker Hub, covering the following topics:

• how to push a custom Docker image to a public registry in Docker Hub
• how to prepare an ARM template to deploy a Docker powered web application in Azure Application Service Plan
• how to configure Docker containers so they can be accessed through SSH, optionally by application settings

This post describes how to create an image for a Docker virtual machine, hosting a Python web application powered by PyPy 3, Gunicorn server, Gevent networking library and Flask web framework. I am using Linux, but the same concepts apply to Windows 10, assuming that you have Docker installed on your system.

This post describes how to deploy services in Azure, using Azure CLI 2.0 and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. I am using Linux, but the same concepts apply to Windows and work there as well.

Since I changed job and joined the wonderful William Demant, I have occasion to use Microsoft Azure daily at work. Recently I worked on a web application for documents administration (PDF, Word, Excel, etc.), featuring files upload, download, administration of metadata, search of documents by metadata and contents.

I recently published in GitHub the second version of a library of mine, for administrative tables. The first version of this library helped many, who contacted me in the last months, asking things and giving great advice; so I decided to create a new, improved version, in plain vanilla JavaScript (in ES6).

While I am planning to write a review of aiohttp, an event-driven HTTP client/server implementation for Python, I decided to write something about asynchronous programming and the async/await syntax in .NET, Python and JavaScript.

I am not surprised by Trump’s victory and I don’t feel sorry about it. Because I saw it already happening in Italy (my home country), with Berlusconi. I was adolescent when Berlusconi started gaining popularity, I was already interested in politics and following the news regularly. Of course things in Italy were on a different scale: apparently, everything comes in bigger size in USA, but still the same substance.

Few months ago I came across the picture of a slide on the internet, stating this sentence:

I read few times a book with a collection of Murphy’s laws, and I don’t remember if I read anything like this:

Ferdi Giardini is one of the best teachers I had during my university studies. He’s both artist and designer, and he’s famous in Italy for work of arts and objects he designed. Among the things he told during his lessons, is this sentence:

For many centuries, in Europe, scholars used to say the latin words “ipse dixit”, that mean “he, himself, told it”, to end any debate and justify any of their subjective arguments, if the same arguments had been previously used by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.