Welcome to the blog
I used to blog for the 4 years that I worked at elmah.io writing a lot about Blazor and .NET; Often in the format of some kind of tutorial or walk-along style article. I stopped my work there towards the end of 2021 as I began focusing on my other work as an instructor at that time. I have been thinking about blogging for others previously, but I feel like there is a lot of loops to get through for those as they of cause need to have a high level of quality. So, in this post I will introduce myself, show some of the projects that I have worked a lot with, and in the end talk about what I will blog about in the future.
What do I do?
I'm a .NET Developer that posts semi-frequently on Twitter and Mastodon about the open source projects that I work on, on GitHub. I have previously worked professionally with developing/testing Blazor applications as my primary job, but I recently transitioned into a new job that is more heavily architecture-focused. Therefore I work a lot with Blazor in my spare time to get my curiosity satisfied. I graduated in the summer of 2022 with a Master's degree in Computer Science from Aarhus University. So it should be no surprise that I enjoy technically complex problems especially if they have a focus on modeling systems or if they need to work with large amounts of data.
Projects
The ones of you who know me from Twitter/Mastodon probably do so in the context of two of my projects that I have shared a lot about.
The first one is my Blazor Wrapper for the File System Access API. This is a wrapper for a somewhat simple API, but also a very useful API as it enables the consumers of the API to interact with their local file system from the browser. This helps us move towards something a lot of Blazor developers want: Application-like websites. This is not the first wrapper that I have made for Blazor (that is Blazor.Popper), but it is the project that I have learned the most from. It has also sprouted a handful of other API wrappers that I have worked on to facilitate rich interactions with the API like Blazor.FileSystem, Blazor.FileAPI, and Blazor.Streams. Through my work with these I have built myself a good standard for how to wrap browser API's in Blazor and have begun to wrap some of the lower level APIs like the DOM API.
This video is an example of some of the functionality that the File System Access API wrapper supports. This was also one of the first times I had a sample submitted by someone in a PR.
The second project some might know me from is my Blazor SVG Editor. This is a much more creative and mathematically challenging project that I have worked on for 2 years. With it, I can edit SVGs simply by dragging anchors around the screen and seeing the resulting SVG code in real-time. I often get back to this project when I feel like making something visual or if I really need to be able to make that specific kind of SVG be that a gradient or an animated stroke offset. This also crosses over into my wrapper libraries every so often like when I made a partial wrapper for the SVG Animation API.
This is an example of an SVG I created 1½ years ago, which actually landed me my first paid gig outside the borders of Denmark.
This platform
When I started writing this I figured this would be the nerdy part, but I see that I have already geeked out a lot, so let's keep it simple. This blog is a static site, generated from markdown files and some configuration in JSON. It is a generator that I have made myself called StaticBlog.NET, but that is not the important part. The important part is that all the content I will write here is in markdown which can be utilized in a huge variety of ways or be consumed by other blogging platforms. This reminds me of a comment to a post on Twitter by Immo Landwerth:
"This is one of the reasons why folks like me decided that we don’t blog straight via WordPress — we use markdown in GitHub and merging there stages it in Wordpress. If they kill that again, we have a bunch of static markdown files we can easily serve."
This idea of having a structure that I can easily move is important to me and will be a key focus for me when continuing the development of the generator and editor for this blog.
Future posts
I intend to make some posts here every so often. At least one post every month. I know that setting goals for creative work can be bad a idea, but I thrive under these kinds of hard measurable goals. Some of my first posts will be about my existing open-source projects, the work I have recently done on them, and the work that follows in the near future. I have also made a list of some topics that I would like to make some posts about in the near future so that I don't forget:
- .EditorConfig files for .NET and C#
- Performance optimizations in .NET 8
- ActivityPub: The open social network standard
- Concurrency with SignalR and Blazor WASM
- The forgotten Typed SignalR Clients introduced in .NET 7
- StaticBlog.NET: A minimal Static Site Generator written in .NET edited with Blazor WASM.
Feel free to reach out if any of the topics above sounds especially interesting to you. Then I might do them first.