2026-04-07T10:33:52-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/ Brad Westness brad@westness.cc 2026-04-02T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2026/04/02/testing-software-at-the-right-focal-length When it comes to discussing what types of tests should be in place for a software project to ensure bugs are not shipped to production, communication often breaks down when weighing the alternatives of the different types of automated tests. Everyone agrees that tests are good and that we should have them, but nobody agrees on what exactly “unit test” means versus “integration test,” which tests should use mocked dependencies, and which should talk to real databases, external APIs, etc. 2025-07-31T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2025/07/31/build-software-like-a-sitcom-writers-room In 2007, the Writers Guild of America went on strike for 99 days, from November 5, 2007 to February 12th, 2008. The strike had the effect of interrupting the production of TV series midway through their seasons. The writers were on strike over their lack of residuals from DVD sales, but actors and crews (being represented by separate unions) were not. Many shows were required by contract to continue filming any already-scripted episodes, but without input from the striking writers. 2024-04-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2024/04/19/genuine-human-content-guarantee In the closing credits of his 2007 movie RATATOUILLE, director Brad Bird included a little easter egg for animators - a “Quality Assurance Guarantee” badge in the credits which informs the viewer that “no motion capture or other performance shortcuts were used in the production of the film.” 2024-04-16T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2024/04/16/on-air-light-with-home-assistant-part-2 In part 1, I covered setting up Home Assistant and HASS.Agent, so that I could trigger automations based on Zoom calls starting and ending on my PC. But for now, I just have the automation sending a notification to the Home Assistant app on my phone. In this part, I’ll cover actually connecting it to an IoT-connected smart bulb. 2024-04-15T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2024/04/15/on-air-light-with-home-assistant-part-1 I’ve been working from home full time since March of 2020 (before that I was working from home two days a week for about a decade). Personally, I love not having to commute for half an hour just to sit at a computer somewhere else, along the flexibility being remote gives me to let the dog out, throw in a load of laundry over my lunch break, and pick up and drop off my kids from school. 2024-04-09T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2024/04/09/projects-are-interfaces In addition to the great info about limiting the “blast radius” of your code, there was a segment in Steve Smith’s recent appearance on the .NET Rocks podcast where he discussed a pattern I really like when it comes to structuring .NET code: heavily using the internal keyword. 2024-04-07T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2024/04/07/organizing-your-code-to-minimize-the-blast-radius I was recently listening to an episode of the .NET Rocks podcast with guest Steve “Ardalis” Smith and Steve articulated an issue I’ve tried to highlight in code reviews many times in the past in a very succinct way that I loved: you want to organize your code in such a way as to minimize the “blast radius” when you inevitably make a change. 2024-02-05T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2024/02/05/software-engineering-classes Much like a role-playing game, software engineers come in a variety of types, or “builds.” In gaming, these are referred to as “character classes.” Which are you? 2024-01-05T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2024/01/05/dynamically-compiling-protobuf We’re using Kafka in the Confluent Cloud platform with Protobuf schemas a lot at work, and a recent need that came up was for a testing tool which would enable our QA engineers to produce messages to our topics at will, without needing to write a bunch of code first. 2023-12-06T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2023/12/06/nic-team-fixed-ip Ever since setting up a Lack Rack Plex NAS a few years ago (which I have since upgraded to a “real” rack), I’ve had trouble with the fixed IP address I assigned to the server in my Unifi network setup. 2023-09-13T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2023/09/13/load-bearing-spreadsheet Daniel Holmes, a developer at Bluesky (my favorite of the emerging Twitter alternatives in the wake of the Musk-pocalypse) recently made a post referencing the idea of a “load-bearing bug”: 2023-07-17T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2023/07/17/of-daylight-and-savings The “right” way to persist and transmit dates and times seems like it should be a solved problem, yet ask any three software engineers how it should be done, and you’ll get three separate answers. 2023-03-17T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2023/03/17/generating-pdfs-with-asp-net-core It’s the bane of every web developer’s existence (perhaps I’m projecting there?), but if you work on web applications long enough - eventually, you’re going to be asked to dynamically generate some PDFs. 2023-03-10T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2023/03/10/behold-the-perfect-switch-controller On this Mar10 Day, I’d like to take a moment to celebrate the conclusion of an epic quest that I’ve been on. Namely, to find the “perfect” Nintendo Switch controller. 2022-04-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2022/04/12/record-collection-equality I’ve seen this come up a few times at work, so I figured I’d dig in a bit and expound on how equality does and does not work with C# 9 record types and collections. 2022-02-11T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2022/02/11/dark-mode Like so many other debates on the internet, we seem to be doomed to forever relitigate the question of whether “Dark Mode” color schemes are actually easier on the eyes than their “Light Mode” counterparts. 2021-01-11T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2021/01/11/wildcard-domain-hosting Despite an overflowing number of options for hosting your own blog or website these days, I still feel like the best bang for your buck is GitHub Pages (if you’re a developer, that is). It’s free and does SSL and you can set it up to work with a custom domain name, something that’s a “premiere” option requiring paid service at most other blogging/website platforms. 2020-08-08T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2020/08/08/switching-to-unifi I recently switched over my home network to all UniFi based gear, and I’ve had several co-workers and friends ask about it, there’s a bit of a learning curve to figure out what exactly you actually need to get a network put together with UniFi, so I figured I’d write up my thoughts in the form of a blog post so I can refer folks to it in the future. 2020-05-26T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2020/05/26/paper-mario-party I bought Super Mario Party for the Nintendo Switch for my kids as an Easter present (although, honestly, it was more of a “something to do during the Covid-19 safer-at-home order” present), and it’s been a big hit. 2020-05-04T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2020/05/04/efqueryscript Persistence, Neglected 2020-02-24T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2020/02/24/smart-thermostat-home-away-with-ifttt In 2018 I put in a smart thermostat, a Honeywell T5+, specifically. The thermostat works with an app called Honeywell Home that supports geofencing to detect when one or more users are home or away based on their device’s location services data. 2020-02-03T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2020/02/03/lack-rack-plex-nas-part-2 In part 1 of this blog series, I talked about the reasoning behind my decision to build a Plex server out of a refurbished Dell PowerEdge R710 server. In this second part, I will cover the process of getting the OS and GPU installed. 2020-02-01T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2020/02/01/lack-rack-plex-nas-part-1 Last year, I invested in a Plex Premium lifetime subscription, and I really like it. Previously, I had been relying on my Roku player’s built-in Media Player app to play video files stored on a network share on my PC, which it was a pain to navigate. 2019-07-22T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2019/07/22/things-i-wish-i-had-known-before-painting-my-house Over the course of the five years I lived in it, I painted every room of my first house. I moved a couple years ago to a new place, but have only just recently started painting again. 2019-02-05T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2019/02/05/in-praise-of-small-market-teams One of my clearest memories of going to games there as a kid. The Brewers were really not very good for most of my childhood, and games were sparsely attended. My folks would always get the cheapest tickets possible, so our ticketed seats were always in basically the last row of the highest nosebleed section. 2018-12-30T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2018/12/30/syncing-your-music-library-with-resilio I’m a little bit of a luddite when it comes to my media library. I still buy all my music on compact disc, and rip them into my MP3 library myself using Exact Audio Copy. 2018-03-13T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2018/03/13/collate-dot-net Here’s a new project I finally got put up on NuGet which is a more generalized version of a set of extension methods that I helped write for a project at work (note: this is all new code as the stuff for work was highly coupled to our code base). 2018-03-12T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2018/03/12/the-gravity-well Confession time. My whole adult life, I’ve had problems with binge drinking. For whatever reason, I have the predisposition for it, and once I have one or two drinks, I can’t stop until I’ve had ten and blacked out and ultimately passed out. It’s been this way pretty much since I turned 21. 2017-11-08T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2017/11/08/mixing-and-matching-csproj-formats The Visual Studio Build Tools 15.x installers do not include all the necessary dependencies to build a solution containing projects using both the classic “Full Framework” .csproj format and the new “VS 2017” .csproj format out of the box. 2017-11-07T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2017/11/07/the-pit-of-poor-performance-part-2 In the first part of this post, I laid out the problem at hand and the code for some of the more high-level business logic. I left off by mentioning that the calls to the “repository” classes were hiding complexity which resulted in disastrously poor performance. In this post, I’ll dig into those methods and how I ultimately refactored them to increase the performance by over an order of magnitude. 2017-10-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2017/10/19/the-pit-of-poor-performance-part-1 This is a story about some code I recently refactored at work, which resulted in a process that previously took double-digit numbers of hours down to about 20 minutes. I think it’s an interesting case because it was such a dramatic performance increase, and the root cause for the performance problem was something I think software developers run into a lot. 2017-03-22T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2017/03/22/nintendo-switch-first-impressions-part-4 In Part 1 of this series, I talked about my overall impressions of the Switch and its place in the spectrum of “home console” versus “handheld” gaming system. Part 2 covered some more detail about the ingenious Joy Con controllers as well as the Pro Controller, and the different modes of play that the system supports. Part 3 covered the software end of things, including the system software, Snipperclips, and 1-2-Switch. This post will focus on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. 2017-03-21T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2017/03/21/nintendo-switch-first-impressions-part-3 In Part 1 of this series, I talked about my overall impressions of the Switch and its place in the spectrum of “home console” versus “handheld” gaming system. Part 2 covered some more detail about the ingenious Joy Con controllers as well as the Pro Controller, and the different modes of play that the system supports. In this part I will focus on the software, both the main system software as well as some games. I will leave discussion of the flagship Zelda game for its own post. 2017-03-20T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2017/03/20/nintendo-switch-first-impressions-part-2 In Part 1 of this series, I talked about my overall impressions of the Switch and its place in the spectrum of “home console” versus “handheld” gaming system. In this part I will focus more on the hardware and different “modes” of play, including the various ways the Joy Con can be used and the Pro Controller. 2017-03-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2017/03/19/nintendo-switch-first-impressions-part-1 For the past decade at least, I’ve been a “gamer” in so much as I always play the new Zelda and Mario games when they are released, but that’s pretty much it. So the release of a new AAA game in either of those franchises is a pretty seismic event as far as I’m concerned. 2016-11-12T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2016/11/12/delete-your-facebook-account In addition to being a huge time-sink, since allowing anyone to join (versus only college students), Facebook has turned into an echo chamber for right-wing misinformation. Misinformation isn’t really the right word, it’s more like slander and libel, with often racist or misogynist motivations. 2016-10-06T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2016/10/06/mod-5-ping-pong Mod 5 is a game for 3 or more people that can be played using standard table tennis equipment. It is a variant of Cutthroat, but with different scoring. 2016-07-07T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2016/07/07/build-time-minificiation-asp-net For a recent project, I wanted to do build-time minification of the CSS and JavaScript files that are part of an ASP.NET web application, so that I could deploy pre-minified files rather than doing the work to minify files at AppStart or during page load. 2016-06-25T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2016/06/25/dossier-dot-net Here’s a new project I just started over the weekend that I’m pretty excited about: it’s called Dossier.NET and it’s a transactional file management library for the .NET Framework. 2016-01-15T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2016/01/15/living-in-the-problem-domain There’s a general guideline in software development that states you should always work at the highest level of abstraction you can, so that as much of your time is spent as possible “living in the problem domain.” I wanted to look at how this could be applied in life as well as software. 2015-11-28T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2015/11/28/defense-phantom-menace I’ve been working my way through the Star Wars films in a modified Machete Order to prepare for the release of Episode VII next month. The true Machete Order dictates to skip Episode I entirely, but my modified version retains the order but keeps all six films, because I’m a completist. I also think Episode I gets an unfairly bad reputation and has a lot of good to offer. 2015-09-23T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2015/09/23/the-muppets-tv-series-reaction Time for a new installment in my series of Muppets-related reviews and reactions! To sum up: I liked the 2011 The Muppets film, and I loved the 2014 Muppets Most Wanted follow-up. Yesterday saw the premiere episode of the new The Muppets TV series on ABC. 2015-05-29T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2015/05/29/the-incredibles-isnt-randian Popular consensus seems to have settled on the idea that The Incredibles (along with most of Brad Bird’s other films) espouses Ayn Rand-ian politics, by depicting the protagonists as inherently special (and therefore “greater than” everyone else) and decrying “participation trophy” culture and “everyone is special” philosophising. 2015-05-28T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2015/05/28/the-roodian-transformation It’s easy to wind up with redundant address data when operating institutional systems: people register more than once with different e-mail addresses, they register for other users and don’t have all their information correct, they make a typo or use an abbreviation in their billing address but spell their home address out completely. 2015-02-05T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2015/02/05/epplusenumerable Let’s say you’re working on an ASP.NET web app and want to create a report of all users and orders. I created a little utility built on top of the excellent (and open source) EPPlus to make this as easy as possible. 2014-12-05T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2014/12/05/not-invented-here-mechanic Here’s a little thought experiment: What if industries other than software development suffered from ‘Not Invented Here’ as much as we do*? 2014-10-13T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2014/10/13/peach-driven-development There’s a virtually infinite number of ways to structure projects when working in an IDE like Visual Studio. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how I structure my solutions, and I’d like to establish a convention that I can use when beginning a new project that helps do the following: 2014-09-24T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2014/09/24/client-side-file-upload-validation Here’s a little ASP.NET MVC validation attribute you might find useful: file size validation, complete with client-side validation using the HTML5 File API. We’re using bytes for the file size, just for simplicity’s sake. 2014-09-03T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2014/09/03/commute-rpg-review-volume-one Earlier this year, I purchased my first real smartphone, a Lumia 928. It’s a solid phone and takes great photos, and I really like the Windows Phone 8 operating system. It’s nice that by enrolling in the Preview for Developers program, I can get new versions of the OS as Microsoft releases them, rather than whenever Verizon feels like releasing them (which they have very little motivation to do for devices that are already sold). 2014-06-25T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2014/06/25/engineering-versus-research-and-development While listening to an episode of the .NET Rocks podcast on my commute, as is my wont, something that guest Doc Norton said really resonated with me. 2014-05-09T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2014/05/09/angularjs-and-the-post-graceful-degradation-era The term “graceful degradation” refers to the idea of fault tolerance, that a system continues to function in the event that one or more of its component parts fails. In web development, this concept is most commonly applied to the usage of JavaScript. 2014-03-22T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2014/03/22/muppets-most-wanted-now-we-re-here-and-there-s Compare the poster for the newly released Muppets Most Wanted to the poster for 2011’s The Muppets and you may notice something telling: while similar in design, the former features Muppets front and center with the human characters in the rear, and the latter is the opposite. This is just one indicator that the focus of the movie is back where it should be in any Muppet vehicle: on the Muppets themselves. 2014-01-05T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2014/01/05/the-gift-of-honesty Does not Dionysius seem to have made it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms? -Cicero 2013-03-19T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2013/03/19/why-i-program-game-genie You can ask anyone who knew me when I was little, I was very obsessed with the NES. My childhood reaction to receiving one for Christmas is the sort of thing that your family likes to bring up to embarrass you in front of girls. 2012-05-16T00:00:00-05:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2012/05/16/please-learn-to-do-it-yourself There’s been a recent spate of controversial articles online lately suggesting that everyone should learn to program (“Please Learn to Code”), or that no-one should learn to program (“Please Don’t Learn to Code”), or that everyone should learn to be a plumber, or a writer, or something (“Please Learn to Write”), or nobody should learn anything (“Please Don’t Become Anything, Especially Not A Programmer”), or what have you. 2011-11-30T00:00:00-06:00 https://brad.westness.cc/2011/11/30/the-muppets-the-greatest-work-of-fan-fiction I was excited, but also trepidatious, when I heard they were making a new Muppet movie. I love the first two movies, The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper – the former has been my answer to “What’s your favorite movie?” for a couple decades now, and the latter has the distinction of being perhaps the most worn-out VHS tape in my parents’ basement. Additionally, the Muppet Christmas Carol is still my favorite (and, if you ask me, the most true to the novel) version of A Christmas Carol, and I own all the (released) DVDs of The Muppet Show.