Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
It seems everyone is suddenly an expert in this exciting new tech. And if you weren't paying attention, you may have missed the joke behind all of this – that it's an entirely made-up technology. Funny as the twitter shenangans were, I think there's a point hiding here for us as developers. What is it? Well...
Last time out I was looking at applying async/await patterns to some pipeline patterns for C#. After I came up with the initial solution I outlined in that post, there was some more back-and-forth in the discussion thread that prompted all this. And that discussion made me realise there was an interesting side effect of the code I wrote, which might lead to some confusing bugs. So back to the drawing board...
Ages ago I wrote some posts about an approach to pipeline-style code patterns for C# code. Recently I got a question on a gist I'd written to go with that article, because someone was having issues adding async code into pipeline components. Async patterns are much more common now, but this wasn't something I'd actually tried. Cue some interesting experiments...
My previous post talked about the interesting technical changes that Sitecore is achieving through acquisitions. While talking about that with assorted developers, one worry I've heard a few times is "how does all that technical change affect my career?". There seems to be a common thread of worry about how this change might devalue people's experience.
So does it?
If you're paying any attention, you can't have helped noticing that Sitecore have been on a bit of a spending spree recently. They've acquired three new companies, and hence there's a lot of talk in the community about what this might mean for the future of "being a Sitecore developer". This topic came up on the US Sitecore Lunch recently, and that prompted me to think about it a bit more...
It's been a while since I wrote about home networking stuff – but I've been doing some upgrades recently, to improve my home-working situation... So I have product thoughts, and there are a few things I wanted to remember if I ever have to re-do any of this.
With all the excitement about containers and SaaS and the like, it's been a while since I've spent time worrying about local Solr installs. But recently my good pal low-effort Solr Installs" script doesn't work with recent Solr releases. So I figured I should fix that, because it's clearly still useful for some people...
Deploying Sitecore (or anything else) in containers has been a big learning curve for me. Every so often I come across a new aspect of the whole business that I've not seen before. This week, another agency's work showed me a new thing which might help with making changes to Kubernetes config. The approaches I'd seen to deployments involved pushing all of the Kubernetes config each time you want to release, but it turns out you may not need to do that...
I've been slowly improving the release process for the container-based project I'm working on. There's a lot to learn about the ways to configure the Azure Devops pipelines for this work, because targeting Kubernetes is quite different from the old IaaS and PaaS approaches I was used to.
One of the interesting things that's arrived with Sitecore v10.1 is a new approach to how items get updated when you change versions. This change is aimed at containerised deployments, and I'm in the middle of a containerised project. So I figured I should take a look...
