Handlebars.Net & JSON templates

I ❤️ Handlebars! So I was very very very happy to see that Handlebars was ported to .NET! It is a mega flexible templating engine as it can easily be extended. I’m currently working on a project where a I need to parse objects via JSON templates to JSON strings. This blog will show how to instruct Handlebars to parse into JSON and add some nice error messages if your template fails.

Connect Ikea TRÅDFRI with KlikAanKlikUit (ICS-2000 / KAKU)

Let’s connect some Ikea TRÅDFRI bulbs to your KAKU ICS-2000. Adding them is not so easy, as the manuals just did not work.

Don’t use Slack Incoming WebHooks; App Creation is Dead Simple!

At Wehkamp we ❤️ Slack! Seriously, in order to improve our efficiency, we’ve connected many of our applications, alerts and dashboards to Slack channels. But, as with all things, there is a right way and a wrong way of integrating a webhook at enterprise level.

Let’s explore how easy it is to create an application.

Full Stack Live Meetup: How to handle the immense web traffic caused by a successful influencer campaign? (Dutch)

Chris Vahl (Cloud Engineer) and me did a talk on Full Stack Live #2 (Orange Talent: At Wehkamp we did a very successful influencer campaign, but it didn’t go well for our website. In this session we discuss what happened and how we mitigated our problems. We also show how we want to move forward using Kubernetes, Karpenter and Keda, to create a platform that scales better. This session is in Dutch.

Task: Save Article to Markdown

Let’s use a small snippet to convert any article to Markdown. This might come in handy if you want to repost your articles to blogs that support Markdown like DEV.

Jupyter Notebooks + VSCode Dev Container with Puppeteer support

Let’s run Jupyter notebooks in a Visual Studio Code development container, so we keep our host system clean and our development setup replicable. We’re building a scraper, so let’s add support for Puppeteer (pyppeteer) as well!

DateOnly in your .NET 6 API

Let’s face it: sometimes DateTime is just too much: you only want to deal with dates. Since .NET 6, we finally have support for DateOnly. In this blog I’ll look at how to interact with it and how to add it to your Swagger API docs.

Task: take some website screenshots and put them in a folder (in parallel)

You have a bunch of online services that let you take screenshots of a site and save them in a folder. While it can be very useful to pay for such a system, it is not so hard to create it. Let’s use Chrome / Chromium with Puppeteer and Node.js (cluster) to take some snapshots in no-time. We’ll use the Puppeteer Cluster package to run multiple threads / workers to grab those screens in parallel. We’ll be using TypeScript.

Retry with Exponential Back-Off utility method

Have you tried turning it on and off again? The web is a weird place and calls might not always succeed in the right manner. A retry with an exponential back-off mechanism helps your code to be more resilient when it connects to services outside of your control. While there are many packages that can help in this area, it pretty easy to add some utility methods to your project. In this article I’ll show how you can create a general-purpose exponential back-off and retry mechanism using TypeScript and Node.js.

Using the S3P API to copy 1.3M of 5M of AWS S3 keys

This week we had to exfil some data out of a bucket with 5M+ of keys. After doing some calculations and testing with a Bash script that used AWS cli, we decided to go a more performant route and use s3p. They claim to be 5-50 times faster than AWS cli 😊.