Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I wasn't at SUGCON**1 this year, but I followed the event on Twitter and have read a few of the write-ups that have been posted since the event. A popular topic this year has been applying machine learning to Sitecore in the quest for ever cleverer personalised experiences. It's fascinating stuff to read about, and I'm sure it has great potential for the future, but what I didn't see much discussion of was the possible down-sides of using "AI" for these tasks rather than people making choices. So allow me to put on some comedy horns and play devil's advocate for a bit...
If you spend your life working with software, you can't help but collect a few stories of issues that defied your understanding – and I came across a great example with Sitecore recently. I haven't managed to decide if this is an issue that can happen to others, or whether it was completely specific to the setup of this particular site. But since I got few useful results from Google when I was trying to solve this, I figure it's worth writing about it just in case someone else sees a similar problem in the future...
A colleague of mine recently hit upon an odd issue with the Sitecore integration for the 51Degrees browser detection service. It worked fine for most of his testing, but raised an exception in some circumstances. Trying to dig into this and create a test to demonstrate the bug kept us amused for a few hours – maybe it will help you to?
