Weekly Log: August 27, 2025

👋 Hey,

Every Wednesday I share a quick recap of what I was up to last week — the projects I worked on, things I’m learning, what I’m reading/watching, and a few reflections. Last week’s theme: repair or replace.

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🔧 What I’ve Been Working On

• Discovered that Spritmonitor (the tool I’ve used for 13 years to track car costs) now has a public API. Used it to develop a .NET 9 Azure Function to fetch my car expenses and calculate yearly averages, broken down by repairs vs. maintenance.

• Deployed this mini-project to Azure — a great opportunity to explore more of the Azure ecosystem.

• Added more unit tests (NUnit + Moq) to a legacy project, which also required a fair amount of refactoring.

📚 What I’m Learning

• Still diving into WCF. Picked up Learning WCF: A Hands-on Guide by Michele Leroux Bustamante, planning to skim through it and pull the most relevant insights.

• Slowly getting into Azure.

🧠 Reflections

• Trying to solve my own problems is the best way to find project ideas that I’ll feel motivated enough to finish.

📖 What I’m Reading / Watching / Listening To

• “The Pragmatic Programmer” by Andy Hunt e Dave Thomas — still working my way through it.

• Found out about this article The 50 Percent Rule: Repair Or Replace, from The Art of Troubleshooting which I really enjoyed. There’s lots of other interesting articles I want to read on this blog.

🎯 Next Week’s Focus

• Build a nice-looking widget to use the processed data from my Spritmonitor Azure function.

• Start reading the WCF book.

Ongoing from Last Week:

• Continue chipping away at Pragmatic Programmer.

• Clean the new PAYTICK environment (I need to rotate a few secrets and document a few things).