How the pomodoro technique has changed the way I work

Posted on | by George Dyrrachitis | Leave a Comment on How the pomodoro technique has changed the way I work

For many years I thought that working hard was the way to go. Just make some TO-DO lists, pick work items in order, carry the task on and move to the next. This was my style and I thought this was the proper way. However this proved to be not that great plan, as I had a hard time tracking my progress, maintain focus on tasks at hand, while burnouts occurred more often than usual. On top of that, health issues risen to make things worse, degrading my focus even more. There were times that I was at terrible shape and my performance at work and at personal time decreased, spanning for periods of 3-4 weeks. So working that hard was not the way to go, apparently. Until I found out about the Pomodoro technique.

This is my story about the Pomodoro technique and how it helped me.

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ASP.NET Core API authentication using JWT bearer tokens

Posted on | by George Dyrrachitis | Leave a Comment on ASP.NET Core API authentication using JWT bearer tokens

What is OAuth 2.0 and how its flows can be applied for securing my applications? What does a token do and how it is useful in securing API’s? Is there any way to implement all these nice and easy in ASP.NET Core? In this post I will cover these topics, by first discussing about why token based security is so successful in security scenarios, and the OAuth protocol play in this. We’ll see more closely one of OAuth flows, the client credentials flow and implement it to secure an ASP.NET Web API application.

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Structs and the in keyword in C#

Posted on | by George Dyrrachitis | Leave a Comment on Structs and the in keyword in C#

Since the release of 7.0 version for C#, we’ve seen many small, yet useful features added to the language, aiming to aid developers, directly or indirectly. A new keyword was added in version 7.2, the in keyword, which makes the reference semantics of the language richer. In this post, I will explore this new keyword, along with readonly structs and the ref readonly modifier.

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Learning data structures – Arrays in C#

Posted on | by George Dyrrachitis | Leave a Comment on Learning data structures – Arrays in C#

This is the first post in the series on Learning data structures. What this series aims is to provide basic knowledge on some popular data structures and their algorithms, their use cases and how such knowledge can unleash your potential into thinking and solving problems. In this series I’ll focus primarily in the C# language but I might discuss some topics in the F# language as well, for the most part though I will materialize theory in C# code.

In this post I will discuss about the most fundamental data structure in computer science, arrays.

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ASP.NET Core 2.0 Authentication with Azure Active Directory B2C

Posted on | by George Dyrrachitis | Leave a Comment on ASP.NET Core 2.0 Authentication with Azure Active Directory B2C

In today’s post of ASP.NET Core 2.0 Authentication series, I am going to discuss about Azure Active Directory B2C, a service provided by Microsoft Azure for identity access and management.
In previous post, I talked about Azure Active Directory and how useful it is in corporate scenarios, however B2C is a better option for external user access and identity management, with powerful features such as support for various identity providers, policies and many more.

I will first briefly discuss about Azure AD B2C, what is it and how it is different from standard Azure AD. Then I am going to show you how to setup a tenant on Azure Portal, how to configure an identity provider, GitHub in this scenario, and how to setup policies. In the last part, I will show you how to configure your application to authenticate users using Azure AD B2C and how to handle failure events.

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ASP.NET Core 2.0 Authentication with Azure Active Directory

Posted on | by George Dyrrachitis | Leave a Comment on ASP.NET Core 2.0 Authentication with Azure Active Directory

In previous posts of this series, ASP.NET Core 2.0 Authentication, I talked about local logins, where you have your own identity management solution and also social logins, where you work with social media or third party providers to sign in users in your application. In this one, I am going to talk about Azure Active Directory, which is a cloud based solution for identity management and how you can make this work with your ASP.NET Core 2.0 application.

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Learning React – Managing state with React Redux

Posted on | by George Dyrrachitis | Leave a Comment on Learning React – Managing state with React Redux

Designing your application using a component-based architecture is a first step towards a nice decoupled design. But with great power comes great complexity! Components might need to interact in different ways in order to achieve some common goals. How can components communicate with each other? In this post, I am going to show how to make components communicate by using the redux pattern.

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Learning React – Components and state

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Components are small, isolated and reusable units of work that make up a piece of a user interface. Each component is independent, with emphasis in separation of concerns, having it’s own business & presentation logic.

In this post, I am going to show you how to create a single component, as well as how to mutate state within that component by either passing variables, one way in the component or by changing an input value which changes the component’s state.

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Learning React – Hello World

Posted on | by George Dyrrachitis | Leave a Comment on Learning React – Hello World

Care to learn some React, build your own application and become from zero to hero in just some few steps? Well, you are in the right place, this blog post is all about learning how to setup your environment and get you up and running with React. In just 7 easy steps you will be able to run your hello world app, no sweat.

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