Justin Beckwith Blog
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets you give AI assistants superpowers. I built linkinator-mcp to teach Claude Code how to scan websites for broken links interactively. Spoiler alert: it turns out AI is really good at finding 404s.
The package-lock.json file is useful in some cases, but a problem in others. This blog post examines how package-lock.json works, the situations where it creates problems, and reccomendations on when to use them and when not to use them.
As someone who works on developer tooling - GitHub is the holy grail of data sets. There's just so much code out there, written by so many people, for so many reasons. I've often wished I could just clone all of the data on GitHub and analyze it. Well... now you can.
In March I had the chance to talk at GCP Next on Node.js @ Google . This is a fun little tour of what Google Cloud has to offer Node.js developers.
Most programming languages have a story for dependency management. Go does as well. Sort of. The differences between the dependency management story of node.js | .net | ruby | python is interesting.
Revel is an easy to use web application framework for Go. Recently I wrapped up a Revel app inside of a docker container, and published it to Google App Engine.
A few years ago, I put together a fun little app that used node.js, service bus, cloud services, and the Instagram realtime API to build a realtime visualization of images posted to Instagram. In 2 years time, a lot has changed on the Azure platform. I decided to go back into that code, and retool it to take advantage of some new technology and platform features. And for fun.
A few weeks ago I got pulled into a meeting. There's another team at Microsoft that's using our SDK to build their UI, and they had a few questions. Their devs had a chance to get their hands on our SDK, and like most product guys, I was interested in getting some unfiltered feedback from an internal team. Before getting into details, someone dropped the phrase "Please don't take this personally,…
I like to use the holiday break as a time to hang out with the family, disconnect from work, and learn about something new. I've been writing a lot of JavaScript lately, so I wanted to try something different. I decided to check out golang. I found myself wanting to understand Go in terms of what I already know about .NET and nodejs, and wishing there was a guide to bridge those gaps. My goal is…
While attending the developer conference Øredev last week, I had the pleasure of giving a talk on es6 . Many of the new features I covered touch on challenges we've faced building the Azure Portal . Instead of covering each new feature one by one ( Luke Hoban already does a nice job of that ) I decided to cover a few high level features that fundamentally affect the way teams build large scale…
Last week I had the amazing opportunity to give a talk on ASP.NET vNext at the Øredev developer conference. I had a blast - especially the part where I got to show off the new bits to a few hundred people on the big stage. It's especially fun showing off the new features that open up ASP.NET development with Mono on OSX. There's a lot of great stuff in this release - the new request pipeline, bin…
For the last year and a half, I've been part of the team that's building the new Azure portal - and it's been quite an experience. A lot has been said about the end to end experience, the integration of Visual Studio Online, and even some of the new services that have been released lately. All of that's awesome, but it's not what I want to talk about today. As much as those things are great (and I…
Over the last few weeks, I've been slowly moving my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. The change has been a long time coming, and so far I couldn't be happier with the results. I thought it may be interesting to make the ultimate meta post, and write a blog post about my blog. You can take a look at the source code on GitHub. Jekyll takes a bit of a different approach to serving up a blog. Instead of…
Wazstagram is a fun experiment with node.js on Windows Azure and the Instagram Realtime API. The project uses various services in Windows Azure to create a scalable window into Instagram traffic across multiple cities. The application is written in node.js, using cloud services in Windows Azure. A scalable set of backend nodes receive messages from the Instagram Realtime API. Those messages are…
I spend a lot of time at the command line. As someone who likes to code on OSX and Windows, I've always been annoyed by the Windows command line experience. Do I use cmd, or PowerShell? Where are my tabs? What about package management? What about little frivolous things like being able to resize the window. I've finally got my Windows command line experience running smoothly, and wanted to share…
A few months ago, we introduced the new node.js features we've added to WebMatrix 2. One of the missing pieces from that experience was a way to manage npm (Node Package Manager) from within the IDE. This week we shipped the final release of WebMatrix 2, and one of the fun things that comes with it is a new extension for managing npm.
After releasing WebMatrix 2 RC this week, I'm excited to head out to NYC for WordCamp 2012. While I get ready to present tomorrow, I figured I would share some of the amazing work the WebMatrix team has done to create a great experience for WordPress developers.
After months of hard work by the WebMatrix team, it's exciting to introduce the release candidate of WebMatrix 2. WebMatrix 2 includes tons of new features, but today I want to give an overview of the work we've done to enable building applications with Node.js
Building asynchronous real time apps with bidirectional communication has traditionally been a very difficult thing to do. HTTP was originally designed to speak in terms of requests and responses, long before concepts of rich media, social integration, and real time communication were considered staples of modern web development. Over the years, various solutions have been hacked together to solve…
As the hosting of applications moves from our local staging environments to the cloud, one of the areas that needs to improve is the ability to include deployment in our automated build processes. Using the June CTP AppFabric bits, Visual Studio does an excellent job of enabling developers to design, build, and deploy AppFabric applications. However, the current tools do not provide a way to…