I've spent the last ten years building Velaptor, a 2D game framework for .NET, and like every open source maintainer, I've had my moments of asking the community for support; "If you find this useful, consider sponsoring." You know the line. I've written it more times than I can count.

Then a few weeks ago, it hit me. I was looking at the csproj file for Velaptor — really looking at it — and I saw the dependency graph staring back at me. ImageSharp. Silk.net. xUnit. Shouldly. Every single one of these projects is open source. Every single one is maintained by people who, like me, wrestle with issues at midnight and answer questions on weekends. Here I was, asking people to support my work while quietly depending on theirs — without ever having contributed anything back.

So I decided to fix that. This post is about five foundational .NET and gamedev open source projects I'm donating to, why they matter, and why you might want to do the same. Not out of guilt — out of recognition that open source is a team sport, and we're all on the same field. 🤘🏻

So you've set up your CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, and everything is running smoothly. It feels great to push code and watch those green checkmarks light up. But there's a hidden, often overlooked security risk lurking in most of our workflow files: version tags.

Today we're going to dive into why pinning your GitHub Actions to a commit SHA is arguably one of the most effective and simplest security upgrades you can make to your pipelines. Let's get into it! 🚀

The Deno and Cliffy Marriage: A Match Made in Heaven​

Creating a robust command-line interface (CLI) used to be a daunting task, fraught with the complexities of bundling, dependency management, and distribution. Today, using the Deno runtime/platform, you can simplify this process by using the powerful combination of Deno and Cliffy.

Deno, the secure JavaScript/TypeScript runtime, brings a modern, permission-based approach to the table. Cliffy, a powerful command-line framework for Deno, provides an elegant and intuitive way to build sophisticated CLIs. Together, they create a development environment that is not only productive but also highly secure and easy to manage.

Intro​

A lot of us just want to work on our core project and not have to worry about things like documentation, workflows, status checks, and a readme file, right? I can empathize with that!! Though I'm passionate about making sure those things get done and done well, I also understand that everybody's time is limited and you just want to work on your core project.