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 […]
Category: Automation
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 […]
This is a note-to-future-self as I just threw together a little script to test images on a web page. Specifically, it highlights: Images that are not lazy loaded Images that are much bigger than their display size As images sizes aren’t reliable until the image is displayed, you will need to run it if your […]
There are many reasons for manipulating variables in JMeter, especially when you are loading data from a CSV data set config element. You might want to trim a JMeter variable, or grab just a substring. In all of these cases, your existing knowledge of JavaScript can come to the rescue. Wherever you were about to […]
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Meet the Trello Butler
Most of my time is spent in technical-land, where we use tools such as Azure DevOps to manage the flow of work. There is, though, another side to our business and they love Trello. For at least part of my day, I’m looking at colourful lists of stuff that the business are pushing around in […]
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Humans vs Machines: Augmented AI
I recently attended an event in Manchester, organised by BJSS and Microsoft, on the subject of AI and ML. The schedule was jam packed with interesting insights and useful case studies that got my head buzzing. Having had some time to reflect on everything I absorbed on the day, I have realised that we are […]
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Datadog Notes
When you think about Datadog, you are very often thinking about charts. Which visualisations will bring forth insights from your metrics. What actionable information can you present on your wallboards. What you might not be thinking about is the humble subject of Datadog notes. You can add notes to your dashboard using the Edit Dashboard […]
If you are using Datadog, you know you can log to Datadog using the Windows event log, or by calling the DogStatsD interface on your local agent. When you are running in a non-machine context, such as an Azure App Service, it is likely you won’t be running an agent; so how do you log […]
I started writing this article and realised it was going to be epic, so I’ve tried to break it into sections to make it easier to read. You can skip past sections that you feel you are already comfortable with. I’m not going to cover the nuts-and-bolts process of adding the scripts to your website […]
I found this problem while investigating a marketing automation issue in Kentico. The problem reported was that the standard abandoned basket feature wasn’t sending the configured email. I must admit, my first checks were to ensure the SMTP configuration was correct – and that the scheduled task within Kentico was running. The actual fix was […]