Azure DevOps - Publish code as wiki

Azure DevOps - Publish code as wiki–Advanced features

One of the features I really like in Azure DevOps is to publish your code as a wiki. This allows you to choose a Git repository, branch and folder that contain Markdown files. The markdown files are then published as pages inside the wiki.

Unfortunately when we take a look at the table of contents(TOC) we see all the markdown files listed in alphabetical order. Every subfolder is also shown as a wiki page even when it doesn’t contain any markdown files.

This is probably not what we want. Let’s improve the TOC…

Change the page order

To change the order of the files in the TOC, you can add a .order file to the repository.

Each .order file defines the sequence of pages contained within a folder. The root .order file specifies the sequence of pages defined at the root level. And for each folder, a .order file defines the sequence of sub-pages added to a parent page.

Inside the .order file you can specify each file name without the .md extension. An example:

README page-2 page-3

By default, the first file that appears at the root within alphabetical order is set as the wiki home page.

Promote folder to page

Another annoying thing is that every subfolder is shown as a TOC item in the wiki although no page exists. It would be logical to have a wiki page for every folder. Therefore we need to create a markdown file with the same name as the folder as a sibling to the folder (meaning both the folder and the md file of the same name should lie next to each other). See the screenshot below:

Promote a folder to a page

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...

The art of simplicity

Search This Blog