I’m pleased to announce that my employer, SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment, has graciously granted me permission to open-source a research and development project that I wrote on their dime called TarPit: a proof-of-work-based API rate limiting .NET Core middleware.

https://github.com/seaworld-parks-and-entertainment/TarPit

It’s not a protocol, it’s not a library (technically it’s a library in the sense of the source code being open for use and reuse, but I don’t really encourage that at all), it’s a notion that’s been floating around for some time in several different contexts that I finally scraped down the cycles to actually implement. I’m not a .NET guy (I’m barely qualified to call myself a software guy), so when I found myself with some breathing room, I undertook to boot up on the CLR in earnest, and C# in particular. Some goals, in no particular order: write a load of C#, write tests, work on something intellectually stimulating, do something that had never been done before, solve a real problem, familiarize myself with the .NET Core HTTP stack, familiarize myself with .NET Core middleware nuances, lean into Dependency Injection, and wrap my head around the popular (in .NET-land) Clean architecture. I also wanted to get to a point where I could load test the same application with both a Redis and Postgres data store, but decided to park and publish this code before I got to the load testing. Continue reading TarPit – a Proof-of-Work HTTP Ratelimiting Scheme →