Posts

When I first designed Sharp Cooking, my goal was to provide smart features that other cooking apps lacked. Features like unit conversion (e.g., cups to grams) and recipe suggestions based on the ingredients you have at home were at the core of my vision. Over time, some of these features have been gradually implemented, but it’s been a challenging journey. Before large language models (LLMs) became widely accessible, using AI for these features was a significant challenge....

In my previous post, I announced that the Sharp Cooking Companion Chrome Extension was under review in the Chrome Web Store. I’m happy to say that it’s now available for download! The extension allows users to browse recipe websites normally in Chrome or Edge. When a recipe is desired, the user can click the extension icon and it will scrape the recipe data and generate a share code. Users can then paste or scan the share code in the app to import the recipe....

One of the coolest features in Sharp Cooking is its ability to import recipes from a website. See a recipe you like? Just paste the URL into Sharp Cooking, and voilà! The recipe is imported and ready to use. But have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes? And why sometimes it doesn’t work as expected? Unfortunately, the process isn’t always straightforward. The CORS Problem When I transitioned Sharp Cooking into a Progressive Web App (PWA)—blame Apple for that—a CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) issue emerged....

If you’re deploying a Windows x86 (32-bit) .NET app, you’re probably used to hosting it on a VM with IIS. While deploying the same app as a container is possible, it’s not straightforward. This post will walk you through deploying a 32-bit .NET 8 app as a container in Azure using Azure App Service. TLDR; Find the code here: github. Creating the Dockerfile The first step is to create a Docker image for the app....

Few things are worse than discovering a TLS certificate has expired without warning. Expired certificates can lead to unexpected downtime, loss of customer trust, and plenty of frustration. To avoid these problems, it’s essential to keep track of your certificates and renew them ahead of time. While many rely on calendar reminders to manage this, manual tracking often isn’t enough. Automating the process is a far more reliable solution. In this post, I’ll show you how to automate TLS certificate monitoring using sharp-cert-manager with Azure Container App Jobs....