Why use Ansible for infrastructure as code?

04 Jun 2025 🔖 devops 💬 EN

Q: Why use frameworks like Ansible for infrastructure as code (“IaC”) efforts? Why are there ever situations when people use it instead of just writing shell scripts like Bash or PowerShell?

Windows Firewall and BrowserStack Local

03 Jun 2025 🔖 selenium tips web development windows 💬 EN

For some weird reason, Windows (at least on my computer) doesn’t like to let the BrowserStackLocal.exe “binary” file doesn’t like to do its job unless I explicitly add a rule to Windows Defender Firewall letting that .exe file make outbound TCP connections over port 443.

Securing authenticated agentic AI

15 May 2025 🔖 security 💬 EN

I found 3 excellent blog posts by Stytch about the intersection of traditional IT concerns and AI agents:

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?!