Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
While developers would love to avoid ever writing documentation or reports, it happens to us all. One of the most frustrating bits of this can be getting the formatting to work as you'd like in Word – and I got bitten by this recently. So, as a memory jogger for my future self, here's how to deal with misbehaving heading numbers:
Having spent some time deploying instances of Java for Solr servers recently, I came across two things that wasted my time. So...
I love that lead to some fun... So I moved eagerly to Let's Encrypt when the tooling supported Windows reasonably well, and set myself up with a certificate with multiple SANs authenticated via their "HTTP proofs" mechanism, and it all worked fine, despite it being a bit of a pain that I had to expose port 80 for sites I only wanted accessible via port 443.
But I realised recently that they now offer wildcard certs that would make my life simpler, and that there is now decent support for DNS-based proof-of-ownership. So recently I tried moving my server over to this model – and there was a bit of friction. Entirely PEBCAK though – so I'm writing this down for the next time I forget how DNS works 😉
When I wrote my first blog post here
**
in February 2014 I
definitely
did not imagine still being at it 200 posts and five-and-a-bit years later. Originally I set myself a challenge of writing something once a week for a year, just to see if I could motivate myself to do it.
Honestly, I didn't really think I'd manage to keep it up for the entire twelve months, let alone still be here now – but somehow it's become part of my routine. I may have scaled down to a post every fortnight, as kids and other responsibilities took over more of my time, but the process of making myself notes about issues I encounter as I'm working, and then writing them up when I have free moments has become part of my working life now...
It struck me the other day, that I've now been a full-time remote worker for more than ten years. As the technology for working away from company offices slowly gets better, I'd like to hope this approach to work was getting more common. After all, it has the potential to save companies money and it has the potential to give you back a couple of hours of your day that you don't need to spend commuting.
So just in case anyone else is thinking about trying working this way, I thought I'd have a go at setting out some of the challenges I've had to address over the last decade.
I don't have anything technical to write about this week, as all my time has been taken up with a trip to New Orleans for the Sitecore MVP Summit**1 and the SUGCON NA user group conference**2 . So instead of the usual code, there are a few things about these events I'd like to discuss...
Having upgraded my computer to Windows 10, I found myself unable to install updates to VirtualBox. After downloading the 4.3.40 (build 101610) release, clicking the installer immediately gave the error:
Recently I looked at removing aliases when their owning items were deleted. I noted at the end of the post that the code ended up with some duplication in it. Duplication is generally a bad thing in code – copy/pastes of code tends to diverge over time and introduce bugs. So ideally we'd work out a way to get rid of the duplication, and reduce the set of methods our class needs.
Having been reading a bit on functional languages and F# in particular, I was thinking about how it can be done by passing code as parameters to more generic methods.
This blog is a challenge to myself to try and write something technical once a week for a year.
