Every organisation has to deal with this problem. It has been described in many different ways, including the famous quaductionism of “Urgent vs Important” to the simplicity of phrases like “firefighting”. Yes, it’s all those tasks that people seem to want now, which are stopping you from doing the real work. My analogy for this […]
There is a cool new feature in Microsoft Edge that pastes links with rich formatting. If you copy a link from the page or from the address bar, it will paste in a rich format, so instead of seeing https://www.example.com/ you’ll see Example Website (example.com) and it will already be linked to your selected destination. […]
When you start collecting data at scale, you need to decide when to invest in keeping “all the datas” and when to keep only a sample. When it comes to sampling, you need to ensure that the parts you discard and the parts that you keep are a truly representative sample. That means you need […]
The UK Government provides public datasets that can be used by the media or the public. One such dataset contains information collected for the Coronavirus pandemic and its impact on people living and working in the UK. The problem with this dataset, though, is that we weren’t able to record the data until after the […]
When importing a file full of data into a test system, I discovered that the CSV library I was using to do all the work was stopping when it reached a blank line. That makes sense, it thinks the data has ended. On inspection, I found quite a lot of blank lines, so there was […]
This is a short post, which assumes you are already familiar with the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Simply put, the Dunning-Kruger Snap is a double realisation; part direct and part meta. The first part of the realisation is driven by tipping your knowledge past a precipice that triggers an epiphany of how little you know. It’s when […]
Making a disk larger on Azure is a simple process in the Azure portal. You just stop the machine, edit the disk, enter a new size and hit “Save”. When you try to make a disk smaller, though, you’ll be told “new disk size should be greater than 1024 GiB. Disks can only be resized […]
Yesterday I had to look at a list of stuff on a third-party website and match it up to a list of stuff we control. It took quite a bit of time and some Excel shenanigans to complete the task and as I know it’s going to crop up again, I decided to employ PowerShell […]
If you uninstall the Application Insights package from a .NET Core MVC project, you might get a few errors as it can’t “remove all the references” that might have made it into your application. The changes to StartUp.cs will be pretty self-explantory, but elsewhere you will get something a bit more off-the-wall as it references […]
Although it has been abused with an enthusiasm that borders on the insane, there are good reasons to use the Notifications API in your web apps. For example, you write a mail client that allows the user to request notifications for key contacts… if they are browsing your web-based app, they should get notifications. To […]