James' Blog
Dev stuff
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Let's build an Alexa Skill with .NET and pizza 🍕
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.
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Automatically deploy your .NET Core app using Github Actions
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.
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New Year Update
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.
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Controlling WS2812B strip with .NET Core on Raspberry Pi
I love messing around with LEDs and now you can do it with .NET Core running on a Raspberry Pi!
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Hosting a .NET Core app on a Linux VPS
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!
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Hello, World
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...