
My Blog
My thoughts documented... be afraid!

Why every web developer should have k6 installed
Posted on Thursday, 18th November 2021 - 3 minute ReadDiscussing the benefits of local load testing, and how k6 can also be used for regression/integration testing

Running Optimizely 12 on a Mac
Posted on Wednesday, 13th October 2021 - 1 minute ReadNow that Optimizely 12 runs on .NET 5 it can be run on a Mac, and with most front enders using Macs, I thought it might be useful to demonstrate the steps on how to get it up and running on a Mac.

So what does a Technical Architect do?
Posted on Sunday, 19th September 2021 - 1 minute ReadThe role of a Technical Architect seems to be on of the more fluid roles in a Digital Agency, each Technical Architect has different skills, and each project has different requirements.

Default Values in Contentful
Posted on Wednesday, 8th September 2021 - 1 minute ReadFinally default values have been added as an option in Content Models in the Contentful CMS

New site for Wife of a Geek
Posted on Friday, 23rd July 2021 - 1 minute ReadAlso built on Contentful and Azure Cognitive Search

How to open rich text links in a new tab in Contentful.net
Posted on Thursday, 22nd July 2021 - 4 minute ReadContentful doesn't have an option to choose a target for links in a rich text field (yet), so for now I assume that external links should be opened in a new tab. This is achieved with an IContentRenderer.

Optimizely (Episerver) Content Cloud Exam - My Tips
Posted on Monday, 28th June 2021 - 1 minute ReadAfter sitting the exam, I thought I would document some of the ways I prepared for the exam, and what I found most useful out of the material.

Optimizely (Episerver) Content Cloud Certification
Posted on Thursday, 24th June 2021 - 1 minute ReadThis week I successfully passed my Optimizely (formerly Episerver) Content Cloud certifcation.

Improving Contentful Search with Azure Cognitive Search
Posted on Tuesday, 15th June 2021 - 3 minute ReadContentful does have some basic search functionality, but it is quite limited and quite difficult to implement (at least in .net). So leveraging Contentful webhooks I decided to index the data into Azure Cognitive Search service.

Tagging in Contentful
Posted on Tuesday, 20th April 2021 - 2 minute ReadContentful have recently introduced tagging, I think this is a really important step forward for the headless CMS.

Can you have emoji's in URLs?
Posted on Thursday, 8th April 2021 - 1 minute ReadCan emoji's be used in URLs, page titles and meta data? 🤔😂😂

Mediator Design Pattern for CMS builds
Posted on Friday, 19th February 2021 - 1 minute ReadMy approach to dynamic CMS content using Mediatr (and Automapper)

Generating testable content in Episerver
Posted on Monday, 4th January 2021 - 1 minute ReadA simple episerver project with a couple of basic page types to show how an Initializable Module can be used to generate pages that QA and UAT teams can use during their testing/sign off process. I have used Bogus and Waffle to generate realistic...

My go-to nuget packages
Posted on Saturday, 12th December 2020 - 3 minute ReadA categorised list of nuget packages that I tend to use in most projects. Covers data access, business logic, and presentation packages.

Episerver - Initial thoughts
Posted on Wednesday, 25th November 2020 - 2 minute ReadAfter primarily working with SDL Tridion for the past 5 years (along with Contentful) and prior to that Umbraco. I have recently started working with Episerver, and I wanted to give my initial thoughts on it. After starting the training/certification I...

C# 9.0 - Blurring the lines between object oriented programming and functional programming
Posted on Tuesday, 24th November 2020 - 3 minute ReadThere are two basic types of programming languages, object-oriented and functional, what happens with these worlds collide?

Sitemap Driven Load Test
Posted on Tuesday, 27th November 2018 - 1 minute ReadA nice script I put together to do load testing based on the contents of a sitemap.

SDL Topology Generator
Posted on Wednesday, 5th April 2017 - 1 minute ReadMy solution to the writing SDL Web Topology Powershell scripts