James' Blog

Alexa is the virtual assistant bundled with Amazon's Echo range of devices. Like Google Assistant and Apple's Siri, Alexa offers a Voice User Interface (VUI) to Amazon's services as well as a huge number of 3rd party services through Skills.

I recently discovered Github Actions as an amazingly simple way to set up continuous integration for my .NET Core web apps.

A long time ago, I wrote about how I host my webapps on a small Linux VPS. To deploy a new version I have to build my web app, copy the files over onto my server and then restart my systemd service that starts the dotnet runtime and runs the application.

It's a new year (and decade!) and I like to take stock of what I've achieved and what I plan to do in future. This is really just a post for myself, so don't take too much notice.

Blog

I've always intended to start a blog and write up some of the things I've learnt - and I think it helps with the learning process putting thoughts to paper. However, I still hate writing and would rather spend my limited spare time coding something I can see the results of.

I love messing around with LEDs and now you can do it with .NET Core running on a Raspberry Pi!

Small Linux virtual private servers (VPS) are a super cheap option to host .NET Core apps.

I'm going to set up an app on a brand new VPS from INIZ - a simple single CPU server with 512MB RAM, 40GB of storage and 1TB bandwidth is more than enough for most simple apps and only costs £15 a year!

Hello. I'm James.

I had no idea how to start a blog, but it's something I've wanted to do for a long time. Enough. Now is the time. You're never going to have a blog until you've written one. And a journey starts with a single step...