An interesting diversion into procedural generation…

Outside of work I’ve been looking for non-Sitecore things to experiement with recently, and my eye was caught by a bit of interesting game development technology. I came across a discussion of using code to generate game data with a technique called “Wavefunction Collapse”. It’s a simple concept, but it has some interesting results, so I thought I’d have a go at an implementation myself.

I got asked how I do the demos in my presentations…

After I presented at a couple of user groups recently, some people asked me about how I organised the video demos in my deck. It’s a question I’ve been asked a few times over the years, so I figured this might be a good time to answer it…

That Solr presentation I did…

Symposium 2019 seems a loooong time ago now – but it was only last November. Back then, I did a session on understanding the basics of Solr and SolrCloud to help Sitecore developers with their production deployments.

Usergroup: Developing Sitecore code under Docker

I presented a session at the London and Manchester user groups recently, where I talked about what I needed to do in order to get started developing Sitecore code under Docker.

Numbered lists in Word

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:

Symposium Slides: O’ Solr Mio!

This year, my talk at Sitecore Symposium was an introduction to deploying Solr for production use. It covered why you want SolrCloud, what you need to plan for it, and how you can go about installing it. Enough for a beginner to get from a blank Windows Server to running SolrCloud, and Sitecore configured to match.

If you missed my talk, or if you saw it and want to study it further, then you are in luck!

Two gotchas installing a Java Runtime manually

Having spent some time deploying instances of Java for Solr servers recently, I came across two things that wasted my time. So…

Clearing up a little confusion with Let’s Encrypt’s DNS challenges

I love Let’s Encrypt. I’ve been using SSL for all my personal projects for years. Until they came along I was using self-signed certificates and manually adding my own root certificate to all the machines I was using my sites from. And 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 😉

A little PowerShell hack for sending files to a remote machine

I was asked to do some configuration on a remote computer recently, and discovered that the security-concious network admins had locked down the ability for me to share my local computer’s files with the server via RDP and the ability to get to services like OneDrive. I had a collection of config files I had been asked to deploy, and manually creating each file on the server and copying over its contents seemed like a lot of hassle. So I tried a trick with PowerShell to make my life easier…

Dealing with .tar.gz files on Windows Server

A couple of times recently, I’ve found myself needing to deploy files that come wrapped in a .tar.gz archive onto servers. On your desktop that’s not too much of a problem – you just run the installer for your preferred 3rd party tool, or maybe use the new Unixy shell and you get on with it. But on client servers security can be higher and you don’t always get the option to run any old installer. So I needed an alternative…