Weekly Notes 2021-W5

When your career spans over 20 years there are a lot of bridges in your past. They always say never to burn a bridge and I never have however there are times when someone else might light the match on purpose or perhaps due to inaction/indifference and you have a few options: throw gasoline on it, try to put the fire out so you can cross, or just exit the bridge and look for another path. The latter two actions are acceptable solutions as we may have the bandwidth and energy to firefight or we may not and will need to prioritize other activities and leave the bridge. This has been rolling around in my head over the last couple weeks.

Last non worklog note, like many others, 2020 was a year of accelerated changes for us. I managed an outsourced software development office in Peru and we had to close due to Covid. I had many people work for me over the years and sometimes reflect on what we did right and what needed improvement. In future posts I will go into more details but for now I will leave this poster we made for the office as an example of some soft skills that don't require programming experience/skills but make a huge difference. I'd like to think that I try to embody these but sometimes it is a work in progress, I am only human.

Logs start here:

Github build action was failing on the Nuget install. Seems that Github made some changes to the build environment and the version needed to be upgraded on the step. Need to research if we can always use the most up to date version.

As a consultant I built a large energy industry management system many years ago and it has a lot of very old references to libraries like jQuery (1.x) amongst others. A lot of the new requirements were implemented in Vue (after a brief stint with Angular) and it seems that all is good except for a few small things popping up. There is an old adage of if it works don't touch it but sometimes that's not always something you can do. Worked on this project mostly this week so not a lot of variety.

Continued research into Big Commerce's Javascript Api to see how to use it to prevent products from being ordered together. UPDATE: We were emailing back and forth on this over the last couple weeks and I thought I knew WHY they were asking for it. When I started to query a little deeper, the issue wasn't the cart or product restrictions but their email was filtering emails differently for these products on orders so they were losing site of them. Now, don't get me started on using email for this process but at least the solution was something simple and not costly for the client.

Research into Squarespace's Ecommerce API webhooks to build a gift card integration program. I built several of these into BigCommerce.

Attended an Umbraco meetup.

I built several integrations to various accounting and point of sale systems. One of them has some items not being coded correctly and need to research this. Mental note for next week.

Thinking about migrating this blog to Umbraco Core once it becomes more stable and the Articulate package is migrated.

Had a nice chat with a fellow Umbraco developer, Tim Geyssens, who is the author of the UI-O-matic package. Highly recommend this package assuming you aren't on Umbraco Cloud nor a Gold Partner.

Constant battle with Azure support about our subscriptions and billing methods.

Evaluating a major Azure Cloud migration effort.

By the way all the blog post photos are licensed via elements.envato.com.