Welcome to Day 5 of the Festive Tech Calendar! Usually at this time of year I like to take the opportunity to look back on the last 12 months, highlight some of my achievements and make a few goals for the new year. Like many of you 2021 has been a difficult year, but it has also been a year of change, and I am in a...

We are over halfway through 2021, let’s have a quick look at some things I have done this year: Deployed a new version of the Pre Qualification questionnaire website for my employers Passed Azure Fundamentals Exam Mongo DB Atlas - experimented with using it for auditing my application SonarCloud - tried to...

So today I sat the Azure Fundamentals Certification Exam and passed! Really pleased with myself at achieving this. It was one of my goals for 2021 so I can tick that off. Back in January I booked my first exam, however due to technical problems I didn’t get as far as the Exam. In order to be able to sit an exam like...

I have had a Raspberry Pi for a few years and recently I connected it up again, I plugged in the camera and everything worked. To start off you can view photos from the camera with the raspistill command. With a bit of clever scripting and the crontab I got the Pi taking pictures every 60 seconds. Even managed to take...

Back when I was a kid, I used to record our weekly gas and electricity meter readings in a little notebook. We then typed these reading into a spreadsheet (this was in the pre-Excel days), which allowed plotting as a line graph. How would I go about doing a similar thing today? First off, I have a smart meter that...

Azure DevOps release pipelines have lots of options to do things how you want. One of my favourites is the option for approval. There are two ways you can do approvals Pre and Post deployment. Lets look at both. Pre Deployment Approval Lets imagine you have a simple deployment pipeline that deploys to a...

I didn’t make any goals for 2020, or if I did, I didn’t officially announce them. 2020 has been a hard year for all of us, 2021 is going to be better. Here are a few ideas for my goals for the year ahead. Azure certification Mentoring F# Cosmos db/Mongo db Give a talk Mandlebrot Generator Pwned Pass Mobile App More...

I saw a tweet about building a twitter clone being harder than you would think. So this of course started me thinking how I would go about building something like that. Ok so where would I start? First a few assumptions. Development by a lone developer ie me Tech stack will be dotnet and other tech I am familiar with...

It has been a bit of a mad week this week. I joined a new team so lots of time learning what’s what and also being pulled in two directions as usual demands come through on top of that. My blog runs on Blazor and I have been making use of JavaScript interop to update the html headers and update the page title to match...

I use sp_send_dbmail to send results of sql queries by email to business users. Recently an issue was raised that data was being cut off after 255 characters. To fix this I added @query_no_truncate = 1, however this stopped the column headings from being included. No idea why you can’t have all the data and column...