I recently came across an interesting side effect with the Azure DevOps cache task if its settings are not correctly configured. One that caused me to get somewhat confused before I realised what had occurred.

The Problem

I had a working pipeline that as part of its build process ran the OWASP Dependency Checker task. …

Updated 30-Oct-2025 Added more details on Screen Refresh Rate and Teams Room App

The Problem

We have owned a Surface Hub v1 for a number of years, and it has served us well. However, with Microsoft ending support for Windows 10 it was in danger of becoming a large piece of sculpture in the office. This is not just …

The Issue

I have previously posted about settings up Snipe IT on Azure using a Docker container running in an Azure WebApp with a MySQL DB.

I recently had to revisit my setup as the site was failing to load with a DB connection failure. The issue was that the SSL certificate chain used by Microsoft for their hosted …

Introduction

The recent addition to Azure DevOps of the StringList parameter type can be really useful to dynamically create parallel stages or jobs in an Azure DevOps YAML pipeline.

A StringList parameter can be used to present a list of values to the user queuing a pipeline run, thus allowing the selection of one or …

A while ago I posted about starting to use Home Assistant. This has been working well for monitoring our SolarEdge PV and Battery system, controlling if we should charge the battery with cheap overnight power if there has not been enough sun to fully charge the battery.

Bitten by the Home Assistant bug, I decided I …

Note that this is a repost of my LinkedIn article of the same name

The changing face of DevOps

Over the years the style of DevOps consultancy I have done has changed, along with its name. Changing from the simple ‘source control’, to SDLC, then ALM to now DevOps.

Back in the days of Team Foundation Server …