Recently in CodeSession I encountered the following logged warning:

No XML encryptor configured. Key {6848a46f-d0d6-49a6-b035-0f30f5448f9d} may be persisted to storage in unencrypted form.

This was totally new to me, so I started Googling. There I learned all about .NET Core’s Data Protection API.

After reading the MS docs, this was still confusing. The documentation states that this API is used for things like .NET Authorization, but CodeSession doesn’t use that functionality. So why was this happening?

It’s amazing how quickly 4 years can go by. But I’m back to blogging, and promise to follow this post with more regular entries going forward. In fact, I already have a technical topic scheduled for later this week, and plan to return to Engineering Management topics in the coming weeks as well.

So what have I been doing since my last blog post over 4 years ago? LOTS. Let’s talk about it.

Well, once again I’ve fallen off of the blogging wagon. And once again I am now getting back on said aforementioned wagon. Let’s try and make this a more regular thing than once a year or so, shall we?

I recently built a quick little hobby site / side project with .NET Core MVC. I have a lot of experience with ASP.NET MVC but I was totally new to .NET Core MVC. As a result, I had to teach myself the new ways of doing old things.

Sabbatical week one is complete, and I’m finally finding some time to blog about it!

I had a pretty active week. It started with hurricane preparations as Dorian burled toward Florida, however in the end we suffered a very light glancing blow. In short, we got off easy.

The Bahamas did not get so lucky, however, and got pretty messed up. I’d love for you to take a moment to donate to their recovery here: https://www.bahamas.com/relief .

One of the most amazing perks of working at Stack Overflow is the sabbatical. After 5 years of FT employment, you are entitled to 20 paid days off (outside of normal vacation) that you can spend however you please. My sabbatical officially begins on Tuesday (as Monday is a holiday). Practically speaking, I am out from Aug 31 - Sept 30, returning to work Oct 1st. This is an amazing opportunity and benefit, and I can’t thank Stack Overflow enough for how well they treat employees.

In this post I’d like to show you how I ported an Azure Classic Cloud Service application (which cost me $16 USD a month by the way) to a .NET Core Azure Function, and now host it in Azure for $0 a month! That’s right - Azure Functions are both awesome and (usually) free!

Introducing realDonaldTron

So back in late 2016, when our dear leader was elected president, I decided to have a little fun at his expense. I created a Twitter account and generated API keys. I then created an Azure Classic Cloud Service and wrote a quick and dirty Twitter bot. This bot consumes 1000s of the most recent tweets from Donald Trump, cleans up his grammar and punctuation a little (because he can’t write words good), generates a Markov Chain

from the Tweets, and then schedules a .NET Timer to generate and publish a new Tweet at the top of every hour.

It’s been a while since I changed things up, so I decided on a new Twitter handle and blog domain.

This site is now hosted at davidhaney.io and called “David Haney” which in my opinion is a much better (and more descriptive and maybe even more egotistical) domain than haneycodes.net and the old name of “Haney Codes .NET”

Don’t worry - haneycodes.net deep links will redirect properly for years to come, so you won’t miss anything at all. I’ve told Google’s search engine all about the change too, so links should work properly in results there as well.

A few weeks back I wrote this tweet:

I did a presentation / speaking thing last week that got me thinking: would it be useful to blog about how to build a resume as someone new to tech, from the perspective of a hiring manager? I might whip that up today or tomorrow if people like the idea.

— David Haney hachyderm.io/@haney (@haneytron) July 9, 2018

43 likes later, it’s clear to me that this topic is in-demand. So, let’s skip over the pleasantries and talk about how you can create a great technical résumé as a junior developer, from the perspective of me (a hiring manager).

Well I failed badly in my mission to blog every week of 2017. I guess life and stuff just got in the way in the end. I’ll try to be more consistent in the second half of 2018.

Anyway, I bring some news: I have a new blog engine, and we are hiring at Stack Overflow!

New blog engine

I was previously using WordPress but had many issues and concerns with it. One of the biggest concerns was that the site was not mobile friendly, and making it responsive was next to impossible.

This post is for those of you who hire developers, and also junior developers who want to be hired. Let’s talk about how developers are just like individual stocks in the stock market. Time for a little role-playing: you’re now a stock market investor.

As a financial advisor, your company has given you $2,000,000 USD to invest in the stock market. It’s made very clear that the future of the company depends on the return on investment (herein called ROI) – “gains” – that your investments bring to the company. Your decisions will have a major impact on the company’s future. Given that kind of pressure, what’s your investment strategy for success? Begin by reviewing the kinds of stocks available to invest in.