>> Moving to a new website! <<

Hey reader!
After many years, I’ve finally decided to start moving my blog off WordPress and onto a site I host myself. After quite a bit of work, all the content has now been migrated, and I’ll be pubishing future content on the new site only. Eventually this site will be retired so please update links on any sites you control, to avoid 404s in the future.

Symposium’s vision for SaaS

There was a lot of interesting information releases during Sitecore Symposium last week. Since I had to summarise this for a work event, I figured I should reuse those thoughts, and write up a brief summary of some of the announcements that caught my attention, and (importantly) Sitecore’s vision their future SaaS product:

The power of implicit conversions

There are bits of the C# language that we don’t think about too much when writing websites – and implicit conversions are one of those things. But while I’ve been messing about with some ray-tracing code in evenings recently, I found a couple of examples they patterns they can be a help with…

Repeatable delays from data

I had an interesting discussion recently, about how some code could calculate a “random” but deterministic numeric value based on some data. This made me think of the classic old concept of “checksums” as a possible solution. Here’s what I was thinking about:

So, are you an Infinidash expert yet?

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…

Network upgrades…

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.

Revising that old Solr install script

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 Corey Smith pointed out that my old “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…

It’s nearly Symposium time!

It’s October – which means we’ve only got a few weeks until this year’s Sitecore Symposium. Are you signed up? I am, and here are some of my reasons why:

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…