Development Practices Application Logging Done Well - How To Help Your Future Self Have you ever had an application misbehave in production, and you've had to trawl through the logs to try and make sense of what's happened? Yep, we've all been there, and in some cases, it can be a real mission to figure out what
Home Automation Detecting water leaks with Shelly Flood I'm a strong advocate of how Shelly devices can be a useful addition to automating your home. I've written previously about how I've used Shelly's to make my existing light switches smart and how I've used Shelly's to
Continuous Integration Approving Builds and Workflows with GitHub Actions and Microsoft Teams Sometimes it can be useful to request a manual approval before a deploy is unleashed on production. GitHub supports manual approval when you use environments, but only on public repositories or private repositories for GitHub Enterprise. In this post, I look at how GitHub Actions and Microsoft Teams can be
Home Automation Energy Monitoring with Shelly EM and Home Assistant Over the last couple of years, I've been putting Shelly devices into my house as part of my home automation journey. Although I've mainly used Shelly devices for automating lighting, they produce other devices such as an Energy Monitory (Shelly EM). So, with the recent energy
Continuous Integration Testing dotfiles with Test Kitchen and InSpec Several years ago I built my own dotfiles repository [https://www.jamesridgway.co.uk/dotfiles-with-github-travis-ci-and-docker/] as a way of being able to easily transport the config for my desktop environment between computers. At the time, I put together a Travis CI process to run
Home Automation Using a Template Light to Control a Custom Light in Home Assistant Last year I made my own Raspberry PI powered LED strip for the desk in my home office, and since then, I've been using an integration I developed using AppDaemon to control the strip via Home Assistant. Whilst this approach does work, it does have several limitations. My
Development Practices Why Pull Requests Alone Won't Give you a Good Code Review Culture Using pull requests to accept changes into a codebase has become a reasonably well-understood concept, to the point where it is broadly considered a best practice. So how do you adopt pull requests and code review into your working practices? Surely you tick the checkbox that requires pull request
