I don't use Python much anymore

19 Mar 2025 💬 EN

It just occurred to me that I don’t use Python much these days for scripting odd jobs.

Azure Managed DevOps Pools make life easier

07 Mar 2025 🔖 azure devops security 💬 EN

Azure Managed DevOps Pools is a new service that allows Azure customers to provision privately networked Azure Pipelines agents that Microsoft automatically keeps at feature/fix parity with their public equivalents.

This is awesome, because you used to have to be a server administration and containerization expert to run privately networked CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps (“ADO”)!

Buy then build

05 Feb 2025 🔖 devops prompt engineering 💬 EN

I finally gave up on saving the planet by abstaining from LLMs and took a peek at Google NotebookLM. I have to admit, it’s done an amazing job helping me organize my thoughts about DevOps and SaaS (software as a service).

Hot take: there’s almost no such thing as “buy vs. build.” It’s “buy and also build” or “build and build more.”

Use Git in the browser if you can

17 Dec 2024 🔖 git 💬 EN

Opinionated hot take: don’t bother downloading copies of Git repositories onto your desktop computer. Just edit them in your web browser.

Configuring multiple Git accounts on my computer

17 Dec 2024 🔖 git 💬 EN

For the most part, when I contribute to a Git repository from my work computer, it’s a private repository owned by my employer.

However, occasionally the work I do makes me think, “this should be easy to Google,” so I blog it here or post an example in the associated GitHub account, and I don’t want to commit with the wrong Git username or Git email address.

Add the Sitecore CLI to the Windows Software Center

20 Nov 2024 🔖 web development windows tutorials 💬 EN

Enterprises with a Sitecore CMS subscription will likely employ developers who need to invoke the Sitecore CLI (a .NET CLI tool) from their own workstations.

Where are Sitecore's paper plates?

07 Nov 2024 🔖 web development 💬 EN

I’m used to Sanity CMS, which inherently treats the structure/schema in which you store content and present it to authors as an immutable consensus that you implement by hand-authoring code and tracking your changes with source code version control.

I know Sitecore CMS predates it a lot. Still, my understanding is that Sitecore is moving away from being a Wordpress-like “headful” CMS that also serves traffic to your web site, and into being a “headless” CMS that only stores your data and makes it easy for authors to edit.

• They started the journey to “headless” backends well over half a decade ago, it seems.
• They’ve finished that journey with the “XM Cloud” edition of Sitecore CMS (it only runs as a “headless” CMS backend).

So … where are all the blog posts helping people think about configuring Sitecore the way you configure Sanity?!

Front of the frontend web development

14 Oct 2024 🔖 beginner web development 💬 EN

The purpose of this series is to come up with phrases that don’t involve the word “framework,” yet explain the purpose of various tools involved in front-end web design and development.

Low-Code Generation Z

02 May 2024 💬 EN

I’ve seen a lot of handwringing about Generation Z not grokking hierarchichal file folders and directories.

At the other end of the spectrum, software engineering professor Dimitris Kolovos wrote:

“a growing proportion of the workforce are digital native and, while they may lack a background in programming, they are well-versed computer and web users and skilled with non-trivial software (e.g. office/mobile applications). Low-code software engineering aspires to leverage this increasingly computer-savvy workforce”

So which is it as the old PC-raised software application implementers retire and youth replace them? A bunch of technologically helpless fresh faces or “well-versed and skilled computer users?”

Entra RBAC Role Assignment FAQ

04 Feb 2024 🔖 security tutorials 💬 EN

Below are a few frequently asked questions about Entra RBAC Role Assignments.