Learning by building

Over the past few years, I’ve had to measure website load times across the world. To date, that’s meant spinning up virtual machines, logging in, and executing scripts or using performance testing applications like JMeter to get the response times of applications. That’s a cumbersome process...

This blog post is about experimenting with hosting PMTiles as static assets on Cloudflare Pages. I'm working on a simple pmtiles styling project (pmtiles-styling.pages.dev), and I wanted to be able to host the entire project on Cloudflare Pages (without having to rely on server-side compute)... 

Open-source projects for mapping have gotten really, really good. Recently, some of the folks on Cloudflare's community Discord recommended using Protomaps for hosting and displaying maps. While I'm no expert in the web maps ecosystem...

Many static sites are built using content from content management systems (CMS) into static assets and then deployed to Azure Static Web Apps. In this article, we take a look at using Wordpress on App Service as a headless CMS for a static site hosted on Azure Static Web Apps.

2023 was a year of deep technical learning and incremental progress in my role as product manager, as well as some launches of a few key projects. I'm looking back on all the milestones and lessons learned of 2023.

Azure Static Web Apps is the ideal service for hosting modern frontend web apps and static sites on Azure. At times though, these frontend websites rely on downstream services that are isolated within a virtual network. This article explains how we can configure our Static Web Apps to support such access by leveraging Static Web Apps’ linked backends feature.

I'm launching Penmark, an embeddable CMS for Markdown-based, GitHub-backed static sites. Penmark is the fruit of months of work coming up with a better editing experience for my own blog, and I decided to package it into a product that anyone can easily use with their own blogs and content sites!

React and NextJS provide a quick user experience with client-side navigation. However, this can break injected scripts that don't rerun on page navigation. To resolve these, we can consider a few alternatives that help work around the client-side navigation limitation.

In the previous blog post, I discussed hosting a React application on Static Web Apps with a subpath. In this post, we explore hosting a Blazor app with a subpath as well!

When hosting a React application, you may be interested in hosting it with a subpath, such that you app is hosted at /. In this article, we cover how to host a React application on Azure Static Web Apps with a subpath.

With Static Web Apps’ database connections feature, and its underlying open-source project Data API Builder, you now have more options to build out database-backed web applications. In this blog article, we cover the considerations of choosing between these various options.

Azure Static Web Apps' built-in support for APIs requires your API to be accessible by Static Web Apps' distributed runtime. But what if you have an existing backend API deployed in a virtual network? In this article, we consider different approaches to integrating a Static Web Apps instance with a network isolated backend and weigh the pros and cons of each.

Recently, I read about the utility of SQLite for web servers and was intrigued by the possibility of using SQLite and an Azure Function to host an effectively free web application. Since an Azure Functions app comes along with an Azure Files storage account by default, the Azure Function should be able to store and read an SQLite file.

I often come back to guides to create new React and Express applications, so in this blog post I document how to create a simple React frontend and Express backend application.

Bindings are a powerful Azure Functions feature which provide native integrations to other resources or services, such as databases or storage accounts. While bindings are usually static, it is possible to have dynamic binding in C#. This is how.

In this blog post, we are going to build a Python web application from scratch, using the Flask framework and using Azure Blob Storage to store our pictures.