Infernal Code

Okay so, I know I said I'd cover continuous integration in Azure this week, but I've been putting off this 8-bit CPU project for too long, and today is the day. If you don't know, Ben Eater runs a fantastic YouTube channel on digital electronics. For me, spending most of my career doing high-level software engineering, this channel served as both an excellent intro into digital electronics, but also to demystify the topic entirely. Getting Started So, Ben Eater sells kits for his 8-bit CPU on his really well structured website. I'm a sucker for good documentation, and Ben Eater has aced it here. You can find his website here: https://eater.net/8bit Now, you don't need to actually buy the kit from Ben, you can see the parts list that he has kindly included for you. I'm not that ambitious, I'd rather save the time and effort and just get the kit. But if you're short on cash, you can pick up these parts on the cheap. Tools There's a number of tools you...

Since I started using Azure App Services in 2016, Microsoft has seriously pushed their cloud technology, there is an absolutely massive stack to get to know. There's everything from web servers, to SQL servers, to data science toolboxes (using Jupyter Notebooks), cloud based network infrastructure, and the list goes on and on. One of the most productive tools that we've been using over the last few years has been Azure Functions, which are Microsoft's answer to AWS serverless functions. You can write Azure functions in a number of language-frameworks, including Node.js in VS Code, but today we'll cover writing these in C# out of Visual Studio 2019. The Basics If you're unfamiliar with the concept of a 'severless' function, it's basically a way for you to rent a few minutes of computation time to perform a simple task. We use these to pull data from a software system, process it, and store it in our data warehouse. Conversely, we pull data out of the data...