Tag: Personal

At the start of 2025, I will be joining Duende Software to help drive customer success and advocate for IdentityServer and other tools and frameworks built by the company. For close to 12 years, I have been working at JetBrains as a Developer Advocate. Mainly for .NET, but also for other fantastic developer tools. In recent years, I have grown to lead the .NET Advocacy team, and later head the whole Developer Advocacy team at JetBrains.

Yes, it’s 2018, us IT folks have probably been working remote for quite a while (full-time or occasionally), but there are other industries where these things take time. Not to mention that in countries like Belgium, remote work also has to be arranged for in employment contracts or ancillary documents. But anyway, I digress.

Recently, someone asked me to look at their ASP.NET MVC application and help figure out why a certain request was taking 16 seconds to complete. It’s always fun to look at those things, so I could not pass on this nerd snipe. Much like with hunting serial killers, you have to become one with the scene at hand. Watch the crime scene. Look at the things that happen, and observe. How can you observe a web application? The browser is a good start. Since this specific call was returning JSON data, I thought it easier to look at it in Fiddler instead. A typical response looked like this:

At Microsoft Build 2018, a number of Azure App Service on Linux enhancements were announced. One that I was interested in was this one: Remote debugging, in public preview: You can now choose to remote debug your Node.JS applications running on App Service on Linux. Sweet! But… how? The blog post did not mention a lot of details on the debugging part, so let’s walk through it, shall we? Remote debugging of Node.js apps on Azure App Service from WebStorm! First of all, we will need a number of things on our machine: The latest version of the Azure CLI 2.0

I have decided to retire from the Microsoft MVP program. In the first week of April, an e-mail from Microsoft landed in my mailbox. I was given the choice to either remain an active MVP (but without access to NDA content) until my next renewal period, or retire from the program.

At the start of 2015, I checked out from JetBrains to join Microsoft. Today, after almost two years in the NuGet team, it’s time for change. Microsoft and NuGet have been a fun ride, and I got to complete my personal mission… I remember Paul Stack trolling me (“Hey Maarten, is NuGet down?”) on more than one occasion, and am really happy that I got the freedom and support for changing that. The quest towards server stability even got me a well-received conference talk, “Sherlock Homepage”. Thanks Jeff (x2), Yishai, Hari, Jun and team! Mission accomplished! And thanks for the great walks in wonderful Washington state when I was over there, I’ll sure miss stopping by that region every once in a while.

Twitter celebrated its 10th birthday this week, and those who have been on that social network long enough know that at least once a week there’s a massive outrage about something that, in the end, usually does not seem so bad. This week’s topic: someone broke the Internet!

December 9th, 2012., was my first day at JetBrains, after being in consultancy for a good 7 years. Hadi Hariri, my new boss, showed the world how new employees are treated. If you know Hadi, that was obviously just for laughs. Not one day have I considered him as a boss, yet as a friend who worked with me on great things. I had a great time in the past two years working with him and the many awesome people at JetBrains. I have traveled a lot, written many blog posts and tutorials (less on my own blog, I admit) and much, much more. Thanks, JetBrains, thanks, community I have worked with, and thanks, Hadi, for making this an awesome time! It’s been a great opportunity and a great adventure.

Earlier this week, a sad thing happened to the version control hosting service Code Spaces. A malicious person gained access to their Amazon control panel and after demanding a ransom to the owners of Code Spaces, that malicious person started deleting data and EC2 instances. After a couple of failed attempts from Code Spaces to stop this from happening, the impossible happened: the hacker rendered Code Spaces dead. Everything that was their business is gone. As they state themselves:

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me in several stages of anger at Java. After two weeks of learning, experimenting, coding and even getting it all to compile, I’m proud to announce an inital very early preview of my Microsoft Azure cloud plugin for TeamCity.