Backend | Scott Miner

Jackets Store

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

Jackets Store is a full-stack e-commerce proof of concept. A Vue.js storefront talks to a Django REST API that handles products, carts, orders, and user accounts.

Features

Product catalog with product detail pages.
Shopping cart and checkout flow from browsing to order confirmation.
User accounts for sign-up, login, and order history.
Payments as donations: the checkout processes a payment flow for demonstration purposes only. No physical items are shipped.

What it demonstrates

Designing a REST API with Django REST Framework, authenticating users between a decoupled front end and back end, and modeling the core entities of an online store.

to walk through the store.

Dev Blog (ASP.NET MVC)

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

A developer blog I built from scratch on ASP.NET MVC. A RESTful C# backend manages posts and image uploads, and the application is deployed to Azure App Service.

Features

Post management: create, edit, and publish articles with a clean URL handle per post.
Image uploads handled server-side through a REST endpoint.
Server-rendered views with ASP.NET MVC for fast, indexable pages.
Cloud hosting on Azure App Service.

What it demonstrates

Server-side .NET skills: MVC architecture, REST API design in C#, file handling, and deploying a .NET web app to Azure. The blog is also where I write about ASP.NET Core topics such as setting up a development environment.

to read the latest posts.

eCommerce Microservices

Fri, 23 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An e-commerce platform decomposed into independently deployable microservices. Each service lives in its own repository (wired in as Git submodules), owns its data store, and communicates through an API gateway and a message broker.

Architecture

Service	Responsibility	Storage & messaging
Products	CRUD API for the catalog with business-logic and data-access layers (EF Core) and xUnit tests	MySQL, publishes events to RabbitMQ
Orders	Order creation and querying, RabbitMQ consumers, Ocelot API gateway for cross-service calls	MongoDB, Redis cache
Users	Authentication and user retrieval with a Dapper data layer	PostgreSQL
Frontend	Angular 17 single-page app that talks to the services through the gateway	—

Deployment

docker compose -f docker-compose-build.yaml up --build builds and starts the whole stack with seeded databases for local development.
Kubernetes manifests under aks/ run every service in Azure Kubernetes Service or any other cluster.

What it demonstrates

Service boundaries and polyglot persistence, asynchronous communication with RabbitMQ, API gateway patterns with Ocelot, containerization, and orchestrating a multi-service system with Docker Compose and Kubernetes.

Resume Creator Word Add-in

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Applying for jobs means producing many near-identical documents. Resume Creator turns that into a Ribbon button inside Microsoft Word.

What it does

Database-backed content: companies, master experiences, per-role bullet points, qualifications, core competencies, and every job application live in a SQL Server database, so a resume is assembled from data rather than copied from the last one.
Template-driven output: a Word template (.dotm) is filled with the selected role, focus areas, and bullets; a matching cover-letter template reuses the same application record.
AI-assisted drafting: forms call the OpenAI API with per-request settings (model, temperature, length) to propose bullet points, competencies, key interests, and hidden keywords that are then edited by hand.
Application tracking: recruiters, addresses, salary ranges, work arrangement, and status are recorded per application, with saved queries for recent activity.

Engineering

The solution is split into a presentation layer (the VSTO add-in), document services, validations, and contract projects, with xUnit and Moq tests and a SQL database project with post-deployment seed scripts. Secrets are stored encrypted outside the repository. The code is private because it holds personal job-search data; ask me about it if you’re curious.

EnhancedTextWriter COM Library

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

EnhancedTextWriterCOM shows how to extend Microsoft Office with .NET: a C# class library is exposed as a COM object, registered with regasm, and then called from VBA inside a Word document.

What’s in the repository

EnhancedTextWriterLib (C#): the COM-visible class with a SaveToFile method that writes text from a VBA form to disk.
EnhancedTextWriter.docm: a macro-enabled Word document with a form that calls the COM object.
VBA/EnhancedTextWriterVBA.bas: the VBA module demonstrating both binding styles.

Early vs. late binding

Early binding references the type library directly, giving IntelliSense and compile-time type checking.
Late binding creates the object at runtime with CreateObject, trading tooling support for deployment flexibility.

The step-by-step walkthrough, including project settings, assembly signing, and registration troubleshooting, is in the .

LeetCode Practice in C#

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A growing collection of algorithm and data-structure solutions written the way production code should be: documented, tested, and measured.

Structure

Project	Purpose
`Problems`	Solutions with XML documentation, often with more than one approach per problem
`Tests`	xUnit tests covering every solution (`dotnet test`)
`Runner`	Console app for ad-hoc experiments
`Benchmarks`	BenchmarkDotNet comparisons of alternative implementations

Problems covered so far focus on arrays and strings, including Two Sum, Remove Duplicates from Sorted Array, Merge Sorted Array, Product of Array Except Self, and Increasing Triplet Subsequence.

What it demonstrates

Algorithmic problem solving in C#, test-first habits, and using benchmarks rather than intuition to compare approaches.