Arve Systad - Arve Systad - software developer, nerd and awesome

Arve Systad - software developer, nerd and awesome

Arve Systad

Automating deployments to production with TeamCity and Octopus Deploy

Automatic deployments to production is seen as the holy grail in development throughput, agility, control and flexibility by many. Here's how we do it using TeamCity, Octopus Deploy and a bit of our own code.

Practical tips for clean C#

I obsess over keeping code as lean as possible and removing absolutely everything that doesn't have an explicit purpose. Having worked with C# for many years, I see some unfortunate patterns repeat themselves. Here, I describe some practical tips on what to look for, what to avoid and how to fix it.

TeamCity builds crashing after enabling native Git in TeamCity

After upgrading to the newest version of TeamCity and enabling native git, roughly half of our builds just immediately failed with an error. Here's the solution.

Embrace instability

We loathe downtime and failing services. We talk about how we can keep our code stable. How we can avoid instability. However, certain types of instability should be embraced.

Running Backstage in development without authentication

Working with Backstage.io in a local development environment, can often be made a lot easier by simply removing authentication. Here's how to simplify development, while keeping your production instance secure.

NotAllowedError when importing components into Backstage

While importing components into Backstage, you may encounter a NotAllowedError telling you that "Entity [...] is not of an allowed kind for that location". Here's how to fix it.

Proper test output when building with Cake, NUnit and TeamCity

You've just migrated to Cake for building your freshly upgraded NUnit test project, but TeamCity won't run your tests. Here's how to fix it.

Setting up Backstage.io on Azure App Services with Github Actions, Azure AD Authentication, Terraform and Azure Container Registry

Backstage.io is a platform to build developer portals, made by the people over at Spotify. In this post, you'll get a complete guide to setting it up with Azure, Github and Terraform.

Write your own code

Write your own code

Writing code is easy. Dealing with the the wrong dependencies down the line is hard, and can cost hundreds or thousands of hours to clean up when you suddenly need to. Spend time actively managing your dependencies - for any lasting software, this'll save both time, risk and money in the long run.

The cost of not deleting code

Through the years, I've stumbled across thousands of lines of unused code of all kinds. It might have been nice, well tested, neatly architected code fitting perfectly into all the tools, frameworks and standards for its time. But in the end, it was never called.

Sharing message types between gRPC services in .NET

When we started our move from WCF to gRPC, among the first problems we had to solve was how we can share message types between contracts in different independent services living in separate repositories.

Moving from WCF to gRPC

As part of migrating a fairly large (for our team size) code base into modern technologies, moving away from WCF as our internal communications protocol was essential, as WCF is not supported in modern .NET (.NET Core, if you like).

Graph from Stackify showing memory consumption rise rapidly

Memory leak with Castle.Core ProxyGenerator

After investigating why our web app had rapidly rising memory consumption even with fairly low traffic after some simple changes, we found that creating a new ProxyGenerator for every time a service was invoked was the culprit.