PMCVTM

Today is my last day at Accenture, fka Headspring. I’ve worked here for 11 years; near a third of my life, near the length of a primary and secondary schooling. And what a schooling it was.

I am currently working on my “home server” which is more or less a couple hard drives in an old gaming computer. Some of the parts have fun RGB (red, green, blue) lights which can be seen through the case. They have a nice rainbow default but can be controlled to show colors or patterns, most robustly through using the OpenRGB application. This is very cool, but my server is just a ProxMox hypervisor: a host for virtual machines (VMs) that do specific jobs, so there’s no desktop to run OpenRGB on. Also, since the VMs are virtual they aren’t aware of the lights on the physical hardware. Sheesh! Thankfully the solution wasn’t too difficult to set up, and maybe you need this, too.

A recent exchange between coworkers revealed a confusing but important distinction in .NET runtime nomenclature. These folks were looking to reproduce the same behavior on their individual machines, but just couldn’t stick it. One of them was running the application “in Production mode” and the other “with Release build.” The terms “Release” and “Production” seem to go together naturally, similarly with “Debug” and “Development,” but in practice these keywords refer to distinct elements of a running application.

One of my favorite features in Azure DevOps is the Service Container, which allows spinning up infrastructure dependencies for build process as Docker containers. They are also available in GitHub Actions, which comes as no surprise since Microsoft runs both those shows. GitHub provides some great tutorials for PostgreSQL and Redis Service Containers, but recently when needing to run Microsoft SQL Server we ran into some hiccups, so I thought I’d share what ended up working.