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Dean Hume's Blog

Dean Hume's Blog

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# Dean Hume's Blog

My name is Dean Hume, and I am an author, blogger and am passionate about making games!

Oauth

## A Modern Guide to Using OAuth 2.0 with C# and Visual Studio Code

Many years ago, I wrote an article on the basics of OAuth and while it was helpful, it is now quite outdated. A lot has changed in the past 14 years! OAuth 2.0 has become the de facto standard for securing APIs and authorizing users in modern applications. The

Nov 3, 2025 3 min read

Web Performance

## HTML Minifier: A 12-Year Journey Building and Maintaining an Open Source Tool

Back in 2013, I published a blog post about a simple HTML Minifier I'd built for web pages. At the time, web performance was becoming increasingly important, and I needed a straightforward way to reduce the size of HTML files in my projects. What started as a personal solution has

Oct 30, 2025 4 min read

Game Development

## Best Practices for Handheld Gaming Development

If you've ever played a game on a modern handheld device, you'll know how much fun it can be. I recently wrote an article on the Microsoft Game Dev Blog about some key recommendations to help you craft exceptional gaming experiences for handheld devices. Please head over to this link

Jun 16, 2025

Text-to-Speech

## Getting started with Azure's Hybrid and Embedded Text-to-Speech

Over the past few months, I've been experimenting with Azure's Text-to-Speech service. It is a super powerful API that enables fluid, natural-sounding text to speech that matches the tone and emotion of human voices. Whether you are building an app or a game, Text-to-Speech can be very useful. For example,

Feb 15, 2024 6 min read

## Azure Function Timer Trigger not firing - NCrontab

If you've recently ventured into the world of Azure Functions, you're likely familiar with the versatility they offer when it comes to scheduling tasks. In this guide, we'll delve into using Azure Functions' Time Trigger function with Node.js and Visual Studio Code, uncovering some important nuances along the way.

Oct 4, 2023 2 min read

Charts

## Using a Raspberry Pi to track the progress of your homebrew

In this article I go into detail about how I hooked up a Raspberry to continually track and monitor the progress of my beer all whilst graphing it out to another application. It gets a little geeky!

Aug 18, 2022 1 min read

Service Workers

## Has Service Worker usage increased on this website over the past four years?

It's been almost four years since I started collecting data on Service Worker usage and support on this website and in this article I show the details.

Apr 1, 2022 3 min read

Leadership

## Leading Virtual Teams - Book Review

I’m always on the lookout to improve both myself and my team's daily work, so when I came across a book entitled Leading Virtual Teams by the Harvard Business Review, it really caught my eye.

Mar 14, 2022 4 min read

Ghost

## Ghost CMS & Linux - Fixing "No Space Left on Device" Issue

I was quite surprised to found out that I was greeted with an annoying HTTP 503 error on my site over the Christmas period. After taking a closer look at the logs on Amazon, it turns out that I had actually run out of disk space on the instance.

Jan 7, 2021 4 min read

Book Review

## Book Review - Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops

During my morning coffee session, I came across the book - Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops, and the title of the book instantly drew me in.

Aug 3, 2020 2 min read

Book Review

## The People Manager: A Guide for the First Time Manager - has been published!

Behind the scenes, I have been working on a new book with my EA colleague Jo Root. I am super excited to announce that The People Manager: A Guide for the First Time Manager has been published! This is a personal project that has been a year in the making.

Mar 26, 2020 1 min read

## My Favourite Soft Skills Interview Questions

In my day to day role, a big part of what I do involves hiring and assessing Software Engineers. It might not be to everyone’s liking, but I really do enjoy the interview process. It’s a great chance to meet new people and I often learn new things

Jan 21, 2020 2 min read

JavaScript

## Experimenting with the Streams API

I am always looking for ways to build faster, slicker web pages. Where applicable, I’ll use great new browser features such as service workers, HTTP/2 and improved compression, just to name a few. But what if I told you there was a way to build even faster web

Mar 19, 2019 6 min read

Progressive Web Apps

## Brewfather - Progressive App Review

In my spare time I enjoy a little bit of homebrewing. What first started out as an experiment with a beer kit, soon turned into a geeky fascination with the science behind brewing beer. I am one of those annoying people that sniffs the beer and comments on the aroma

Feb 4, 2019 6 min read

Progressive Web Apps

## Determining Service Worker Support for your Site

Have you ever thought about building a Progressive Web App or even adding a service worker to your website? Perhaps you’ve considered it, but weren’t too sure about whether or not your users were on browsers that supported these features. Would they even benefit from their features? Speaking

Nov 8, 2018 3 min read

Ghost

## Tips for setting up a Ghost blog on Amazon AWS EC2

After a long overdue refresh, I have recently moved this blog to Ghost CMS. Overall, I have been very impressed.  Ghost is easy to use as an editor, quick to make updates, and the Ghost team are constantly pushing out updates - which is great considering that it is completely

Oct 26, 2018 7 min read

## Software Team Maturity Matrix

Whether you lead a small team of developers, a tech startup or a huge department, it’s important that you constantly strive to improve the processes and tools that you use. If things are going really well, it’s easy to become confident in your abilities and overlook the need

Oct 10, 2018 2 min read

Progressive Web Apps

## Dynamic resources using the Network Information API and service workers

The Network Information API allows developers to determine the connection types and the underlying connection technology that the user agent is using. In terms of web performance, this brings a whole new level to the way that we build web pages.

Jul 30, 2018 6 min read

JavaScript

## Getting started with the Ambient Light Sensor

The Ambient Light Sensor API provides developers with the means to determine ambient light levels as detected by the device’s main light detector. This information is available to developers in terms of lux units.

Jul 3, 2018 4 min read

## Progressive Web Apps - Book Giveaway - Results

Firstly, I'd like to say a massive thank you to everyone who retweeted and liked the tweet for this giveaway. Unfortunately, there can only be a few winners for this giveaway. I can reveal that the following people were chosen at random using random.org to generate the results: \* Kristian

Jun 5, 2018 1 min read

Progressive Web Apps

## How to display a "new version available" for a Progressive Web App

In this article, I will show you how to add a notification to your site and display it each time that there is a new version of the service worker available. You’ll also learn how to refresh the page, so that the user is up to date and has the latest version of any cached files.

May 16, 2018 7 min read

Progressive Web Apps

## Progressive Web Apps - Book Giveaway

"Progressive Web Apps" has recently been released, and if you haven't already gotten your hands on a copy, I have 5 free copies to give away to lucky readers.

Apr 30, 2018 1 min read

Progressive Web Apps

## Service Workers can save the environment!

Service workers allow you to cache resources on the user's device when they visit your site for the first time. Fewer HTTP requests mean less CPU usage and less energy consumed.

Apr 24, 2018 5 min read

Progressive Web Apps

## Converting a Ghost blog to a Progressive Web App

In this article, I am going to take you through the different steps required to get a Ghost blog up and running as a Progressive Web App (\*hint: it’s easier than you think!\*)

Mar 29, 2018 6 min read

Leadership

## Lessons learnt: Leaving an organisation

In my experience, leaving an organisation is a big deal. Given the amount of time we spend at work, we ultimately end up spending more time with our colleagues than our loved ones! If you’ve been with an organisation for a while, you’ve probably worked hard to establish

Mar 1, 2018 2 min read

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