Community advice for (conference) speakers

So Sitecore Sitecore Symposium is very nearly upon us again. And this year (for the first time!) I’ll be presenting a session. [Unless it gets moved again: Day 2 (Tuesday 9th), 16:15 in Swan 2 – “Measure if you want to go faster” – A developer’s introduction to improving performance by measuring your code]

When this year’s speakers first found out that their talk abstracts had been accepted, there was a bit of discussion on the Sitecore Slack about things speakers might want to know or do. And I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while, because there were quite a few things I saw that were worth sharing to help anyone else who’s looking forward to their first opportunity to speak…

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Bonus chatter: AMP pages and code snippet hyperlinks…

Here’s a quick memory jogger for me: If you try to validate the AMP versions of blog pages, you may get this error from Google: Invalid URL for HTML attribute 'href' in tag 'a'. What does it actually mean?

Disk problems with Windows Server Essentials

Ages ago I wrote myself some notes on setting up Windows Server Essentials on Intel NUC hardware. Recently I did an upgrade on one of these machines, and ended up in a world of pain. Google was very thin on information to help me try and sort this out, so I figured this needed writing up…

Minecraft launcher hangs on startup?

I’ve been reinstalling some PCs recently, and one of them is the machine I play games on in front of the TV. My eldest child still enjoys a bit of Minecraft every so often, so I needed to put that back on my freshly formatted machine – but this proved more difficult than I was expecting.

I’m pretty sure I must have encountered this issue before, but since googling failed to find my blog, I seem to have failed to write the solution down last time 😉 So, in order to save my future self working this out for third time…

Could there be performance pain in your future?

A few weeks back I wrote about spotting site performance challenges in the patterns you might see in trace data. But over the years I’ve noticed another set of repeating patterns that can be relevant here: Those of how a development team can find itself thinking and acting in the run up to a project hitting problems.

If any of these resonate with you and your team, maybe it’s time to take a step back and think about how you can improve things?

Issues with Invoke-Webrequest and IE on servers

I’ve been doing some work with Release Management in Visual Studio Online recently. Overall it’s been a pretty positive experience, but there was one face-palm inducing moment I came across which needs writing down so I don’t fall into the same trap next time I have to do this. When you’re working with local release agents, you mustn’t forget the security settings that your agent’s server is configured with…

That sound you can hear? It’s your log files weeping…

Every so often I get asked to look at existing Sitecore installs and write up reports on what’s good and what’s not so good about them. I spend time looking at lots of stuff, like the infrastructure, the databases, the code and security. But time after time I find myself writing up a similar issue…