Forem: nebulae

Zstandard for .NET 8+

nebulae — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 16:21:11 +0000

I'm at it again- this time I needed a fully-featured wrapper for Meta's Zstandard library; the ones available on Nuget did not support streaming or dictionaries, so I took it to task and build a wrapper that supported both, and both together. Plus I built and packaged it up for Win-x64, Linux-x64, MacOS x64 & MacOS arm64.

Hopefully some folks can get some mileage out of this one: Github repo

I also put down some thoughts on why I've been wrapping so many libraries over the last few months in case anyone cares to read: Wrapping Libraries Redux.

Take care and happy coding!

Try the Hard Things

nebulae — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 11:38:03 +0000

Just a reminder to those out there trying to find their way in the world of software development- it's cool to try the hard things, even in failure the experience can be rewarding and educational to boot.

Check out my post regarding trying the hard things.

Maybe it'll inspire someone to roll their own crypto (kidding!).

Take care,

Native Cross-Platform .NET Libraries

nebulae — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 05:23:18 +0000

I have been doing quite a bit of native library wrapping lately, so I figure there are others out there who might be in the same boat.

Microsoft's guide is decent, but I wanted to throw together a quick-start guide for people like me who glaze over when I try to read Microsoft documentation.

Please check out my writeup here.

Happy coding!

Auth Rolling: Part Deux

nebulae — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 02:25:49 +0000

So it's been a week since I posted about rolling my own auth. I took a beating elsewhere on the web, but I also gained a follower and 20+ stars for my project (not to mention around 250 new cloners). I know there's a lot of cargo-culting on the web, so I didn't really let it bother me.

Honestly, I don't think that people understand that I'm actually writing a real Identity Provider and not some amateurish login system.

Anyway, I've been detailing my journey in my blog and through daily changelogs in the Github repo, so I wanted to share here on Dev.to as well (the most recent 5 days of changelogs are in the main repo's README.md).

If you missed the original blog post, it's here.

My follow up post has more technical detail and gives a solid progress update.

And of course, the Github repo is here.

Tell me what you think. This is the biggest mostly-solo project I've done, and it keeps growing. Tests are starting to round out and I'm getting very close to what I would consider feature complete for a v1.0 release.

Feedback and constructive criticisms are welcome. I can take it, lol.

Peace,

I rolled my own auth

nebulae — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 04:04:40 +0000

So against popular advice, I rolled my own auth and wanted to share. It still has a long way to go, and I absolutely do not want to compete with the SaaS providers, nor do I want to compete with big, professional packages like KeyCloak and Authentik. I just wanted to write something that was easy to use and covered most small use cases.

I put together a blog post detailing the journey that led me to do something so foolish, and I hope people can relate.

Github repo for microauthd.

Right now, it sports a dual-server, dual-key architecture, has web, cli & JSON/HTTP (faux REST) configuration/admin interfaces, and is written in C# (.NET 8) to allow for ahead-of-time compilation (AOT). The binary sits at 26MB, the memory commit @ rest is 57MB, and startup time is sub-50ms on Windows. Linux builds are similar, if not a bit snappier. I have not yet tested on MacOS, but expect it to run fine there too.

I have basic libraries for Python & Go (very basic), and testing is done via Python harness.

Remember, my goal isn't to compete with the big boys; I just wanted build something solid for my use cases. That went well, so I beefed it up a bit for more general usage. I just want to put something solid out there and iterate on it until it's ready for more general use.