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…

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…