Blog

CodeOps enables you to layer standards, automation, and governance to your source control repositories, decreasing manual effort and increasing productivity.

This blog is part of a series around design patterns. This post focuses on the facade pattern. The facade pattern provides an interface into a complex system, in order to simplify access to the functionality.

In this post I talk about custom Power BI themes and share some handy tips for styling Power BI reports.

Data insights are useless, and even dangerous (as we've seen recently at Public Health England) if they can't be trusted. So, the need to validate business rules and security boundaries within a data solution is critical. This post argues that if you're doing anything serious with data, then you should be taking this seriously.

This blog is part of a series around design patterns. This post focuses on the adapter pattern. The adapter pattern is used to enable you to use the functionality defined by a class which is not compatible with the interfaces/architecture of your solution.

This post describes the reasons for choosing specific & immutable dependency versions in your software.

Enabling C# 8's nullable references feature often produces a lot of warnings. Avoid the temptation to make some go away by initializing properties to empty strings.

Data Engineers/Developers want to get access to Azure Synapse Analytics as quickly as possible to start designing and creating their data solutions. Being denied access to Synapse Studio can be frustrating and slows matters down. This article will address the "You need permission to access workspace..." error, discuss what causes it, and describe how to fix it.

Azure Synapse Analytics developers need to be assigned a role within Synapse Studio in order to access the GUI. The Azure CLI provides one way of programmatically achieving this, which can be done by any Owner or Contributor of the Azure Synapse Analytics resource.

This blog is part of a series around design patterns. This post focuses on the decorator pattern. The decorator pattern is used to dynamically add additional properties to objects in order to extend functionality.

GitOps (sometimes known as 'operations by pull request') is most often discussed as being an approach for managing your Kubernetes platform, but in this post I will make the case for how it can benefit a much wider audience.

Despite the subsequent media reporting, the loss of 16,000 Covid-19 test results at Public Health England wasn't caused by Excel. This post argues that a lack of an appropriate risk and mitigation analysis left the process exposed to human error, which ultimately led to the loss of data and inaccurate reporting. It describes a simple process that could have been applied to prevent the error, and how it will help if you're worried about ensuring quality or reducing risk in your own business, technology or data programmes.

This post quickly runs through the steps for setting up a new Microsoft Authenticator App for a work or school account.