Western Devs

Kyle Baley

Known throughout the land (for certain, fairly restrictive, definitions of “land”) as The Coding Hillbilly, Kyle’s career choices have hinged on a single criterium: to have fun. Luckily, he finds software development fun as opposed to, say, shark taunting. His travels have taken him from the jungles of the financial industry to the high-flying hospitality industry to the bowels of the telecommunications industry (which he refers to as his “goth phase”).

He has spoken at various conferences and user groups and co-written a book, Brownfield Application Development in .NET, with fellow Western Dev, Donald Belcham, an experience that required some stretching of the definition of “fun”. He is also a member of ASP Insiders.

In his downtime, Kyle is a classically-trained pianist who uses his training to play things like “Theme from The Muppet Show”, usually to the chagrin of the other musicians of the band he’s in. Canadian by birth, he and his wife and two children currently make their home in the Bahamas though, truth be told, he’s never really liked long walks on the beach. He does, however, enjoy writing bios about himself.

Blog posts

JUN

2024

An exploration of Azure Functions for a side project
Kyle Baley

This is a short PSA for people (or, more likely, just future me) to describe two issues I ran into while migrating a bash file to Azure Functions. Namely: How do I see the exceptions that happened? How do I configure an Azure Function app to save a PDF to a Google Drive folder This is from the perspective of someone who doesn't need their app to be highly available/scalable/reliable/tenable/affable/inscrutable/explicable, which the documentation for all cloud products seems to assume (and, it must be said, rightfully so).

JUN

2024

Truly syncing multiple calendars
Kyle Baley

For reasons that I really need to investigate, I'm apparently a busy fellow. Such that I now maintain a rather ungainly number of calendars. Three to be exact. That's one personal calendar and one for each of two clients.

MAY

2020

Go just big enough for your needs or go home
Kyle Baley

I love crossword puzzles. This post is only peripherally about crosswords specifically but I say it up front to filter my readership to those who might have a personal kinship with me and thus, are less likely to write angry comments.

MAY

2016

I regret nothing!
Kyle Baley

One of the Western Devs posted an article on our Slack channel on someone's regrets as a programmer. I fundamentally disagree with the sentiment of this article and the remainder of this post will be sixteen paragraphs and three quotes belabouring this point.

APR

2016

Prairie Dev Con 2016 Presentation Materials
Kyle Baley

Materials from Death to the Batch Job and Docker presentations

JAN

2016

Why can't you just communicate properly?
Kyle Baley

Simply follow a few rules to improve engagement

DEC

2015

Migrating from Jekyll to Hexo: Part 2
Kyle Baley

Specific issues we ran into during the migration from Jekyll to Hexo

DEC

2015

Migrating from Jekyll to Hexo
Kyle Baley

The Western Devs website has a sporty new look and a shiny new technology behind it. In this post, we'll look at the good and bad with migrating from Jekyll to Hexo

NOV

2015

Testing With Data
Kyle Baley

It's not a coincidence that this is coming off the heels of Dave Paquette's post on GenFu and Simon Timms' post on source control for databases in the same way it was probably not a coincidence that Hollywood released three body-swapping movies in the 1987-1988 period (four if you include Big).

OCT

2015

Running a .NET app against a Postgres database in Docker
Kyle Baley

Some days/weeks/time ago, I did a presentation at MeasureUP called "Docker For People Who Think Docker Is This Weird Linux Thing That Doesn't Impact Me". The slides for that presentation can be found here and the sample application here.

AUG

2015

Windows Server Containers Are Coming Whether You Like It or Not
Kyle Baley

UPDATE: April 27, 2017 Much of the information in this post is out-of-date and the links have been removed since they no longer exist. For the latest on the state of containers on Windows, check out the documentation.

AUG

2015

Docker on Western Devs
Kyle Baley

In a month, I'll be attempting to hound my share of glory at MeasureUP with a talk on using Docker for people who may not think it impacts them. In it, I'll demonstrate some uses of Docker today in a .NET application. As I prepare for this talk, there's one thing we Western Devs have forgotten to talk about. Namely, some of us are already using Docker regularly just to post on the site.

AUG

2015

PSA: Setting Up Containers in a VM in Windows Server 2016 Tech Preview 3
Kyle Baley

Windows Server 2016 Tech Preview 3 has just been released and it has container support! There's documentation on it already to do basic stuff and it's easy to follow. So I'm going to repeat it verbatim quickly mention the one and only major issue I ran into.

AUG

2015

Docker Is Coming Whether You Like It or Not
Kyle Baley

I'm excited about Docker. Unnaturally excited, one might say. So much so that I'll be talking about it at MeasureUp this September. In the meantime, I have to temper my enthusiasm for the time being because Docker is still a Linux-only concern. Yes, you can run Docker containers on Windows but only Linux-based ones. So no SQL Server and no IIS.

JUL

2015

Microservices, or "How to spread the love"
Kyle Baley

For some time, people have been talking about microservices. I say "some time" for two reasons: 1) It's a good opening line, and 2) I have no clue how long people have been talking about them. I just heard the term for the first time about four months ago. So if I start talking about them now, while I still know virtually nothing, I can get at least two more future posts on the subject talking about how I was doing it wrong in the beginning.

JUL

2015

Outside the shack, or "How to be a technology gigolo"
Kyle Baley

The world outside is just awesome.

JUN

2015

On UI Testing
Kyle Baley

What happens when 12 people gather to talk about UI testing?