Author: jcianci12

There. It’s out Star Trek: Strange New Worlds isn’t just disappointing. It’s the most beautifully lit, meticulously costumed, aggressively marketed pile of horse manure ever beamed into orbit. And somehow that makes it worse. one of my favourite things used to be watching Star Trek- nope it’s writing about how bad this new series is.…

If you’ve ever set: ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT=Production …only to find your app still thinks it’s running in Development — welcome to the club. This has caused years of confusion in the .NET ecosystem, especially since .NET Core evolved into the “generic host” world. Let’s break it down properly. The Symptom You write something like: var runtimeEnvironment =…

If Windows Location Services is greyed out, disabled, or just not behaving properly, you usually need to dig into Group Policy or run PowerShell commands as Administrator. That works, but it is not ideal for everyone. To make this easier, I created a small Windows app that gives you a simple GUI button to enable,…

Setting up a fresh development machine should not take half a day. This project gives you a portable “developer desktop in a container” with: Repo: https://github.com/jcianci12/developer-webtop-docker-vm Why this setup is useful If you juggle multiple machines, client environments, or short-lived projects, this pattern is a big win: What is in the stack The Compose service builds…

Most of what I write here comes from real projects. Deployments that didn’t quite go to plan.Security models that needed rethinking.Automation pipelines that worked beautifully — or completely fell apart.Enterprise constraints that forced creative solutions. But the most valuable insights I’ve gained haven’t come from documentation or vendor guides. They’ve come from conversations. Conversations with…

If you build games in Godot long enough, you hit this question: How do I make one object behave like two different roles without ugly inheritance? A classic example is a turret that is still a ship actor, but can also be picked up like a physics prop. In GDScript, you cannot do this with…

How we removed a major editor slowdown caused by duplicate viewport rendering and always-on editor updates. Godot Version: 4.xArea: 3D UI / Health BarSymptoms: Editor hangs or becomes very slow when scenes/health_bar_3d.tscn is present/instanced The Problem The editor became sluggish as soon as scenes/health_bar_3d.tscn was used.Changing unrelated nodes could take a long time to reload. At first glance, the scene looked simple.…

Absolutely — here’s the fully updated blog article, rewritten cleanly end-to-end, and using the sanitized names consistently (no CDIS, no real server names, no identifiable paths beyond generic IIS defaults). From Polling Scripts to On-Box Azure DevOps Deployments for IIS (Without PATs) TL;DR: We replaced a custom polling script (using PAT + REST) with a…

Authentik is a powerful identity provider — but when you use it with WordPress via the miniOrange OAuth/OpenID Connect (OIDC) plugin, you can hit a couple of common issues: This guide walks through the exact steps to make Authentik talk cleanly to WordPress with the miniOrange plugin. 🚦 Background: What WordPress & miniOrange Expect The…

Sometimes the “proper” way to deploy an application in Azure DevOps is to use a Release pipeline, an environment, or a deployment agent. And sometimes… that simply isn’t an option. In our case, we needed a working solution where: This post explains the working pattern we ended up using. The Core Idea We broke deployment…