.NET Core & the Google Analytics Real Time Data API

At Wehkamp, we use Google Analytics extensively to measure how many users are active. It is hard to correlate active users with your other statistics that “live” in Prometheus. In this blog I’ll show how you can use the Google Real Time API to produce statistics for active users, page views and screen views.

ALB access logs + Athena: identify target problems

It is pretty easy to write your AWS ALB access logs to S3, but if you want to do something with them, you might want to add them to AWS Athena, so you could query them using plain old SQL. Let’s investigate how we can see which upstreams / targets are misbehaving.

.NET API: capture original message body

Sometimes you just need to record the original message that was submitted to your API. My colleague Onno Pierik and I encountered such an event. We needed to record the original submitted SOAP message (body) and submit it (under certain conditions) to another service. To be honest: most of the scenarios I’ve seen so far end up with memory problems, so use with caution!

Python utility function: retry with exponential backoff

To make a setup more resilient we could allow for actions to be retried when they fail. We should not “hammer” our underlaying systems, so it is wise to wait a bit before retrying (exponential backoff). Let’s see how something like this could be done in Python. Note: this only works if actions are idempotent and you can afford to wait.

Thoughts on AWS Vault config on Windows

I’ve installed and configured AWS Vault in Windows. In this blog I’ll show how to setup MFA, automate token rotation, share AWS Vault with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and how to do an ECR login on Docker.

A To-do List with Redis commands and Lua scripts

There are a myriad of tutorials on Redis in almost every programming language. Many will cover how to make a to-do list, so why write another one? Well, I want to write a tutorial that is language agnostic and only uses Redis commands and Lua scripts (the build-in scripting language of Redis).

A Table of Contents shortcode for WordPress articles

A Table of Contents helps users navigate (long) blog posts. I use them on both posts and post. The desktop version always shows the table on the right side in the sidebar (using a text-widget with a shortcode). On mobile, I’ll only show it on long articles, using a shortcode under the first paragraph.

Submenu navigation for category pages

In WordPress you have two main taxonomies: categories and tags. I use categories as a taxonomy tree. That is why I want to show the submenu on the category page. It does not come out of the box, so I created something that renders the submenu items for me.

Shortcodes for simple post lists in WordPress

Recently, I worked on my theme for KeesTalksTech. To gain performance, I need to rely less on plugins, that’s why I needed a simple way to show small lists of posts in my sidebar.

I’ve created 2 short codes: one that shows recent posts, used in the new section and one that shows specific posts, used in the highlights section.

A Stack data structure in TypeScript

The JavaScript Array has everything to acts as a nice Stack structure, the only thing is missing is a peek() method. In this blog I’ll discuss two ways of implementing a stack based on the array.