Home
Steve Fenton is an Octonaut at Octopus Deploy and four-time Microsoft MVP for developer technologies. He’s a Software Punk and writer. You can find out more about Steve Fenton here.
A Note From Steve
The primary audience for the writing found herein is me. It’s super-easy to forget stuff if you don’t write it down, as I did the second time I had to fix a really tricky certificate problem in .NET. If only I had written down the answer, I could have saved hours of irritating replays of all the same steps I had used to find the problem in the first instance. My goal in life is to start a punk revolution in software development. I am also secretly S. M. Fenton the author of The Vanishing Room.
Recent Thoughts
You can review my full archive of thoughts, but the most recent entries are listed below.
CMA Browsers and Cloud Gaming Response Posted in: Browsers - The Web is an amazing open platform, but a few times in the history of The Web we have faced challenges keeping it in great shape. When Microsoft had a browser monopoly with Internet Explorer, they were required not only to allow competing browsers but to actively prompt users to select from competitor browsers. We […]
Run a Bash Script with Arguments in GitHub Actions Posted in: Programming - This is just a quick not on how to run a bash script with parameters in GitHub actions, and how to use the passed argument in the script. GitHub Action Here’s the jobs section of the GitHub action, but the last line is the interesting bit as this calls the script. The argument is simply […]
Defer YouTube Videos Posted in: Programming - This is just a quick note on an adaptation of a great idea from Go Make Things (a site FILLED with great stuff, by the way). This defers loading all the YouTube stuff (the iframe and all it’s assets) until the user clicks to play it – basically avoiding loading the assets unless the user […]
Upload all files in a folder to FTP Posted in: Programming - This is the second old-school post this week. Hey, I’m clearing the decks of some odd stuff that I had to do. Today, it’s uploading all files in a folder (but not sub-folders) to FTP, if they have been updated in the past 24 hours. There’s not much to explain here. It’s a simple System.Net.WebClient […]
SQL Filestream thoughts Posted in: Programming - In a previous life, I used FILESTREAM to store images for product listings in a multi-tenant SaaS platform running about 1,000 websites. The sites listed “in stock” items along with a bunch of images showing pictures of the item to show all the features and any wear and tear. At the time we were running […]
Extreme Programming practices Posted in: Programming - I created this Extreme Programming practices diagram to try and represented Kent Beck’s hand-sketched diagram as honestly as possible with a bit more structure. Hopefully this is a useful version that can help you visualise all the interactions between practices that were observed by Kent, which he wrote about in Extreme Programming Explained (definitely worth […]
What is the optimal number of members for an agile team? Posted in: Process - This question is rather fascinating, in part because of the misunderstandings that have arisen in respect of the famous George Miller paper about the magical number seven (plus or minus two). Some people apply the findings of Miller to team size, and they are wrong to do so. So, what is the optimal number of […]
Title case text with MySql Posted in: Programming - I needed to update a WordPress taxonomy on a site with thousands of categories and tags. This is not a task for a human, so I created a bit of a gnarly SQL script to update the MySql table. As you can see from the script, it has limitations! Specifically, if you need it to […]
How to find installed text to speech voices on Windows Posted in: Programming - I’m using a Visual Studio Code extension that provides text-to-speech, which I use as part of my VS Code writing set up. It has a simple set of two options, speed (1.5x of course) and voice, which is a text field as different options exist on different operating systems. As I’m using Windows 11 on […]
Converting markdown files to PDF in GitHub actions Posted in: Programming - I needed to take a bunch of markdown files and convert them into a PDF, with all images present and correct, and using a CSS-based stylesheet. Behind the scenes, this is usually done using an intermediate HTML step. My attempts to solve this issue took me down a few different paths, so I thought I’d […]