Matt Button

Compound Interest Calculator

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Mortgage Repayment Calculator

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Jetbrains Rider vs Webstorm

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For the last five or so years, I’ve been using Jetbrains Rider as my primary IDE for C# work, and Webstorm for any Javascript, Typescript, and NodeJS work.

Since Rider has most of the Webstorm features built in, along with Datagrip features, and much more, it initially seemed perfect to consolidate all my work into Rider, since my work is a fairly even mix of C#, Typescript, and Javascript.

For C#, Rider is fantastic.

However for Javascript and Typescript, Rider is mostly great, but with some key annoyances that aren’t present in Webstorm.

How to use Minimal APIs in .NET 8 without cluttering Program.cs

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Minimal APIs were first introduced in ASP.NET Core 6.0 and have been around for some time now. At a high level, Minimal APIs are a simplified way of building HTTP APIs with ASP.NET Core.

But why use Minimal APIs over the classic MVC / Controller workflow that we’re all familiar with?

ASP.NET MVC is useful if you want to organise your code based on layers. Minimal APIs are useful if you would rather organise your code by features/slice, keeping related things together… but you can still keep a layered architecture with Minimal APIs if you prefer.
MVC is opt-out, running an entire filter pipeline for each request, even if you don’t actually need all of it. When using Minimal APIs, you need to explicitly opt-in to validation, model binding, and any filters that you’d like to run on each request. Minimal API filters are also simpler, with the capability to do everything that MVC can.
ASP.NET MVC’s convention based model can be difficult to understand and debug - it isn’t always clear exactly which routes would be discovered and configured via reflection, and getting this right can be error-prone especially early in the project. With Minimal API, routes are explicitly mapped, making Minimal API routes easier to understand and debug.
Controllers can be harder to test, and tend to grow in complexity over time - I’ve seen controllers become a massive file with a equally massive constructor (upwards of 20 parameters); you’ll need to inject all those parameters when instantiating the class in a unit test, even if method you’re testing only uses one of those parameters…. leading to controllers sometimes not having test coverage.
ASP.NET Core is moving toward native AOT compilation, which is not compatible with ASP.NET MVC.

Read on to find out how mitigate the most common concerns with adopting Minimal APIs.

How to fix Balena Etcher errors 5@0101000F and 1B1@0101000F / Balena Etcher killed my USB stick

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I recently purchased a USB stick so that I could try out a few different Linux Live images. Most of the tutorials recommend Balena Etcher to create the bootable USB stick.

The first and second flash (Fedora 14, then PopOS 22.04) with Balena Etcher worked well. I then tried Ubuntu 24.04 and received a “Flash Failed” error:

I tried re-flashing the two previous images, and now they fail too.

This didn’t make any sense. Was my USB stick faulty? Did the repeated flashing somehow damage it? Did Balena Etcher kill my USB stick? Is my USB stick bricked?

There is an easy way to fix this. Read on to find out.

Self hosting for freelancers

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Are you wondering whether it’s worth cutting costs on cloud providers, and setting up servers yourself for your freelancing?

Please don’t do it! Here’s why:

Ten programming books that can be read passively

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve all got busy lives, and it can sometimes be difficult to find time to sit down and read a chunky and dense programming book. (I’m looking at you, SICP!!)

A reader recently asked which programing books can be more casually read, without having to commit to a long reading session.

Here are ten of my favorites:

Top useEffect mistakes made by React Developers

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

useEffect is a kind of “escape hatch” which lets you perform side effects in functional components.

Effects let you step outside of React, giving you the ability to synchronise your components with systems that aren’t controlled by React such as a non-react widget, an external system (such as a browser API), a third party library, or a network connection.

Effects aren’t always necessary; if there is no external system involved, you shouldn’t need useEffect.

But it isn’t always clear when effects are necessary, and how to use them. Which leads to some common mistakes.

Here are some of the top mistakes that I’ve seen people make with useEffect:

Scaling yourself by Scott Hanselman

Mon, 11 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I recently watched a presentation by Scott Hanselman about scaling yourself and it was enlightening; the key message was that you can’t keep up with everything, and in the presentation, Scott talked about ways of taming the torrent of information and lists of things to do that sometimes leave us feeling ineffective and overwhelmed.

In the presentation, Scott combines ideas from Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People with ideas from David Allen’s system, Getting Things Done, and also Scott’s own life experiences.

In this article, I’ve summarised some of the highlights of Scott’s presentation, reorganised them a little, and added more context with links and quotes. At the end, there’s a link to the entire hour long presentation, which is absolutely worth a watch.

Using Docker for local web development

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re new to Docker, it’s hard figuring out even what to search for, and how the concepts tie together, let alone what to pay attention to for your use case.

To make things more difficult, there has been a lot of change over time, and stuff that was once recommended is now not recommended. For example, a lot of older video tutorials recommend using container links which have since been deprecated in favor of user-defined bridge networks .. in case you’re unfamiliar with this, I’ll cover what this means, and why you’d use it later in the blog post.

Once you learn the basics, using Docker in practice is fairly straightforward, and if you’re using Docker at home or at work, the time you spend learning now will save you a massive amount of time and effort in the future.

If you’ve used Docker a bit, are familiar with some of the concepts, how dabbled here and there, but sometimes struggle with connecting some of the concepts, or how to get things set up end-to-end, then this blog post is for you.

In this blog post, I’ll guide you through step by step on:

The distinction between docker image and containers
Best practices on how to persist data within containers, and how to control where data is persisted
How to continue developing on your local machine as usual, while your app is running within a docker container on your local machine
How to connect your containerised web app to a containerised Microsoft SQL Server

Redux made easy with Redux Toolkit and Typescript

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Using Redux with React can be incredibly challenging for people to get their head around; while the core principles of Redux itself are fairly straightforward and don’t take too long to grasp, a lot of people struggle with using Redux in React apps. Partly because there are so many damn things to integrate:

Redux
React Redux
Redux Thunk
Typescript (getting more common in recent years)
Redux Saga / Redux Observable (in more complex apps)

I spotted this quote which summed it up for me:

Redux was such a mental overhead for me when I started out with it. The amount of boilerplate code that I had to write for the project I worked on was very frustrating.

I struggled with that stuff too, even after I became familiar with the concepts, I often found it difficult to understand the flow of data and events within React Redux apps. This is not uncommon, even the original author of Redux had this to say:

Yup. Can totally relate.

Then I found Redux Toolkit, written by the maintainers of Redux, and recommended by the Redux style guide.

How to scrape stock upgrades and downgrades from Yahoo Finance

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post I’ll show you how to scrape stock upgrade and downgrade data from Yahoo Finance using Python, Beautiful Soup, json, and a bit of regular expression magic.

This technique can be applied to any stock symbol on Yahoo Finance, but for this blog post we’ll be scraping data for Apple (AAPL).

I’ll be guiding you through the process, describing my thought processes and techiques, and if you follow along, by the end of this blog post, you’ll have extracted stock upgrade and downgrade data in a Pandas dataframe which will look something like this:

From there, you can easily export the data into an Excel file, or if you’re a more advanced Python user, host the code in a Web API which can be accessed by Google Sheets, or your own custom code.

Accelerate - Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organisations

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I first read Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim back in 2018 when it was a hot topic in the office; only an hour or two would go by between overhearing somebody talk about it, internal blog posts were being written, and we’d receive emails about following the findings.

One of the goals behind the book was to run a series of surveys, gathering 23000 responses across 2000 organizations, then using statistical methods on the results in order to find a way to measure software delivery performance, and to find out what drives it. One of the most impressive things about the book is that it not only presents the research findings, but also goes into detail about why the findings are trustworthy, meaning that they not only tell us what they learned, but how they learned it.

I recently read through the book again and took a bunch of notes which cover the main points.

5 things that you need to consider before becoming a mentor

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As your career progresses, you’ll discover an increasing number of opportunities for mentoring others, and being an effective mentor will become increasingly important.

This blog post covers 5 things that you need to consider before becoming a mentor, along with some tips on how to select a mentee, and some pitfalls to watch out for.

This Week: Ryan Holiday's 32 Thoughts From a 32-Year-Old

Sat, 20 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

This week:

I’ve been amazed by: Photopea - an advanced image editor, which looks and behaves a lot like Photoshop, and runs entirely in your browser
I’ve been experimenting with: CSS Grid. It makes my layout life easier, and it’ll make yours easier too.
I’ve been watching: Keep Betting on Javascript by Kyle Simpson
I’ve been reading: Ryan Holiday’s 32 Thoughts From a 32-Year-Old
I’ve been thinking about: How important it is to write online

13 years ago we were rallying against nested HTML tables - Notes from Webstock 2019

Sat, 29 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure why it’s taken so long, but after 13 years of Webstock existing, this year was the first time that I attended.

While I haven’t attended Webstock until now, I have watched many of the recordings which are usually available a few months after each event was held, and it’s been interesting to see how the event, and the industry in general has changed over the years.

None of this year’s talks were technical, and all were about the human side of the industry - topics such as ethics, personal experiences, psychology, communication, and team health.

One of the original organisers stood up on stage at the end of the event, and said it best:

13 years ago we were rallying against nested HTML tables

How to fix font rendering in Chrome when using RDP

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Does the font in Chrome look really grainy in Windows when using RDP, even though fonts in all other apps look fine?

When you really want your fonts to be nice and clear like this:

There are a couple of ways that this can be fixed.

Chrome breakpoints don't work when using create-react-app

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Currently there’s a bug in recent versions of create-react-app where debug breakpoints aren’t working in Chrome.

This Week: I've been playing The Witness, and Webstock is back!

Sat, 13 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

This week:

I’ve been learning about: Single Sign-On and Sign-Out in .NET Core with OpenID Connect and IdentityServer4
I’ve been watching: Andrew Tokeley’s talk on High Performance Product Leadership
I’ve been happy to see that: Webstock is back on this year
I’ve been thinking about: Lambda School sounds great
I’ve been playing: The Witness

Using Git on Windows

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Using Git on Windows is way easier once you find a combination of tools that you’re comfortable with.

In this blog post you’ll learn about:

Using Git via the command line on Windows
A great Git GUI client for Windows and Mac
The tool that I use for diffs, and resolving any Git merge conflict that may occur (including 3-way merges)
Using Git with SSH authentication on Windows via .bashrc and Bash shell
My .gitconfig

Impromptu speaking techniques

Sat, 23 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Impromptu speaking in front of an audience is challenging for most of us. Even the famous author and public speaker, Mark Twain, has been quoted as saying “I never could make a good impromptu speech without several hours to prepare it.”

If you struggle with scattered thoughts, or mind blank when impromptu speaking, then this blog post will help you.

In this blog post, you’ll learn some techniques to structure your speech when you’re on the spot, and some ways to quickly generate ideas when your mind goes blank.

Enabling HTTPS on Elastic Beanstalk without a load balancer

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post, you’ll learn how to host a sample Python web app on Elastic Beanstalk, using HTTPS, without a load balancer.

After following the steps in this blog post, you should end up with something that looks like the following image:

This Week: Startups that are hiring remotely in 2019

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

This week:

The Competitive Advantage of Design (Philip Fierlinger)
How to get rich (without getting lucky)
Startups that are hiring remotely in 2019
15 Things You Should Know About Product Managers
How website builders can differentiate themselves in a heavily commoditised market

How to scrape Yahoo Finance and extract fundamental stock market data using Python, LXML, and Pandas

Thu, 24 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post I’ll show you how to scrape Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow data for companies from Yahoo Finance using Python, LXML, and Pandas.

I’ll use data from Mainfreight NZ (MFT.NZ) as an example, but the code will work for any stock symbol on Yahoo Finance.

The screenshot below shows a Pandas DataFrame with MFT.NZ balance sheet data, which you can expect to get by following the steps in this blog post:

After taking you step by step on how to fetch data from the balance sheet, I’ll show you how to generalise the code to also generate a DataFrame containing data from the Income Statement, and Cash Flow statement.

After creating the Pandas DataFrames, I’ll then show you how to scrape data for multiple symbols, and finally, export everything to an Excel file, so you’ll have output that looks something like this:

This post was last updated in April, 2020.

Prior to October, 2019, Yahoo Finance conveniently had all this data in a regular HTML table, which made extracting the data super easy. Since then, they’ve updated the page with a new structure, which was a wee bit tricker to get the data from. Fortunately, it’s still possible. Read on to find out how.

Are we there yet? Insights on how to lead by design - by Sam Bucolo

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

One of the books that I read over the summer break was “Are we there yet? Insights on How to Lead by Design” by Sam Bucolo.

For the first few years of Sam’s career, he worked as a design consultant. As he gained more design and problem solving experience, he came to realise that he was often getting the wrong brief from his clients.

Sam found that while companies could conceptualise new products or services, the sticking point was aligning this conceptualisation to their business models, which meant that time, and time again, projects significantly fell below expectation or failed completely.

These experiences led Sam to specialise in Design Led Innovation.

My notes:

There are three elements of Design Led Innovation:

Customer value: This is the starting point, and is about being clear on who the customer is, and the problem that the business is solving for them.
Management Mindset: The correct mindset to create a strategy which has been built around new insights about the customer.
Strategic alignment: Ensuring that all business processes and systems are aligned with the customer’s problem.

How to rename categories in Hugo

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Hugo for my blog for the last few years, and recently published my first theme - Silhouette Hugo.

I recently received an email with the following question:

What is the simplest way for me to rename the categories Development and Golang into other names, like Projects and Gallery? Is this in partials or template or theme or where?

I figured that this might be a common question, so decided to share it in a blog post.

Here’s how to rename categories in Hugo, in the context of my theme.

This Week: The Story of ConvertKit - From $0 to $968,000 in Monthly Revenue

Fri, 11 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

Google Authentication with Python and Flask

Sat, 05 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post, you will learn how to create a Python app using Flask and the Google API which will:

Support Google Authentication with Python and Flask
Restrict access via an OAuth scope, so that the app can only view and manage Google Drive files and folders which were created by the app
Read and write files on the user’s Google Drive with Python.

By the time you get to the end of this blog post, you’ll have built a basic Google Drive file browser which looks something like:

This blog post is divided up into sections which progressively build up an app which interacts with the user’s Google Drive. If you only want to find out about how to do user Authentication with Google and Python, feel free to stop there.

This week: management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

Tony Alexander Presentation Notes - things which affected the NZ housing market over the decades

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 12:00:22 +1300

I recently attended a presentation by BNZ’s Chief Economist, Tony Alexander.

One of the topics that really caught my attention was his perspective on the things that influenced the housing market over the decades, from the 1950’s until today.

I wrote up a bunch of notes to summarise his points.

If you’re interested in getting a bit of perspective on the NZ property market, and some of the things that caused it’s near-relentless movement upward over time, then read on.

InvalidCypherTextException when reading an encrypted DynamoDB table which has been restored from a backup

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 12:00:22 +1300

If you attempt to read encrypted data from a DynamoDB table which has been restored from a backup to a DynamoDB table which doesn’t match the original table name, you may see the following errors:

TL;DR the restored DynamoDB table must have the same name as the original DynamoDB table, and be restored to the same account that it was originally created in.

Enabling HTTPS on Elastic Beanstalk without a load balancer

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The recommended way to enable HTTPS in Elastic Beanstalk is to use one of AWS’s load balancers such as the Application Load Balancer (ALB) which supports autoscaling, fault tolerance, and other things.

This blog is about hosting a web app prototype on a single EC2 instance, using HTTPS via Let’s Encrypt, without a load balancer.

Using an AWS ALB costs a minimum of about $18 per month, on top of any other charges you currently have, such as $5 for the t2.micro instance that you may be running your prototype on.

So, if you’ve only got one EC2 instance in Elastic Beanstalk for your prototype, and don’t currently want the benefits of an ALB (fault tolerance, auto-scaling, etc), but do want the benefits of HTTPS (protection from interception, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, etc), read on.

Using CKEditor 5 with React via create-react-app

Sun, 20 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When I first started using CKEditor 5 with create-react-app, I installed CKEditor as an npm module, and imported the ClassicEditor build as recommended by the quickstart.

Development mode (via npm start) worked well, and I was happily integrating CKEditor with React, but as soon as I ran npm run build (which generates the create-react-app production build), I ended up with the following error:

> ckeditor-integration@0.1.0 build c:\Dev\scratch\ckeditor-integration
> node scripts/build.js

Creating an optimized production build...
Failed to compile.

Failed to minify the code from this file:

        ./node_modules/@ckeditor/ckeditor5-build-classic/build/ckeditor.js:5:7350

Read more here: http://bit.ly/2tRViJ9

npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! ckeditor-integration@0.1.0 build: `node scripts/build.js`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Failed at the ckeditor-integration@0.1.0 build script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.

Ruh-roh. What to do next? How can I solve this? Is this solvable? Is there another way?

Book Recommendations

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 04:37:23 +0000

Life and Mindset

The New Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Principles by Ray Dalio
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss

Business and Startups

The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Turn The Ship Around!: A True Story of Building Leaders by Breaking the Rules by L. David Marquet
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Managing Humans by Michael Lopp
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Getting Your Shit Together by John Carlton
Turn The Ship Around!: A True Story of Building Leaders by Breaking the Rules by L. David Marquet
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
Zero to One by Blake Masters and Peter Theil

Finance, Money, and Investment

Products that I recommend

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 04:37:23 +0000

Software development

Visual Studio Code for HTML/CSS/JS/Python/Markdown/Text editing.
Notepad++ for quickly making any edits to a text file, or when I want to see hidden characters
Visual Studio for any .NET Core, and general C# work.
Beyond Compare for file diffs.
Git Bash for any command line work with Git, and as a general Windows command prompt.
Sourcetree as an interactive Git browser, and for when I want to stage or diff files in a Git repo.

Privacy related products

AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam Notes

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I completed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam in November 2017, after about eight weeks study, with a score of 85%.

Below are a series links to blog posts containing all my study notes, and finally, another blog post containing my thoughts on the exam, as well as some exam feedback and tips for those who will sit the exam after me.

How I host and update www.mattbutton.com on AWS with CloudFlare and Amazon S3 Static Website Hosting

Sat, 04 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been hosting this blog on Amazon S3 for a few months now, and thought it would be a good idea to write about how it’s set up, in case future me needs to refer to it, and to give pointers to anybody else who is interested in setting up their own website using Amazon S3, HTTPS, and the CloudFlare CDN.

Hosting this website costs cents per month, and avoids security risks of other blog platforms such as Wordpress by being purely static, consisting just regular HTML files, JavaScript, and images; which means no PHP, .NET, etc. This works well with what I need in a blog.

AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate Exam Tips

Thu, 02 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

After heaps of study, I passed AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam, with an overall score of 85%.

Here are my notes on how I studied for the exam, and tips for preparing based on my experience in the actual exam.

Wellington Spearfishing

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A collection of links, with a Wellington focus, which I frequently use to work out if it’s worth going for a dive or not.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any links worth adding.

AWS Solution Architect Associate Exam Study Notes: Application Services

Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

These notes were written while working through the A Cloud Guru AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate online course. These notes are partly from the videos, and also from various other online sources. Primarily, they’re notes for me, but you might find them useful too.