Posts

The third ABRMS grade 1 piece I’ve been learning is a peice titled Fresh Air by Andrew Eales. Again another unpolished performance but getting the notes and rythmn mostly right. As with all grade 1 peices I’ve learnt so far, I know I still have work to do. The biggest issue being my dynamics and articulation. The Journey At first glance this looks like an easy peice (and of course, it is as it’s a grade 1) but there are a few things that kept catching me out....

I’m sharing my second recording of a ABRMS grade 1 piece 😱 titled Sneaky Business by Martha Mier. My tutor gave me this as my second piece to learn. This is from Jazz, Rags & Blues, Book 1 and is part of the ABRSM 2023 & 2024 Piano Grade 1 syllabus. Again it’s by no means a polished performance but happy with the progress and will continue to work on it but also move on to other piece....

I’m sharing my first recording of a ABRMS grade 1 piece 😱 titled Allegretto in C by Anton Diabelli. My tutor gave me this as my first piece. This is “No. 3 from Die ersten 12 Lectionen, Op. 125” and is part of the ABRSM 2023 & 2024 Piano Grade 1 syllabus. I’m not sure if it’s in this years 2025 syllabus? It’s by no means a polished performance but I felt it’s good enough to move on to other pieces now....

Too many redirects?! Why I spent far too long troubleshooting why a perfectly good, HTTPS enabled Web Application hosted on an Azure App Service failed after moving the DNS (proxied) over to Cloudflare. The App Service wasn’t doing anything I would consider non-standard. Simple site with a custom domain, correct SSL bindings and just a free “App Service Managed Certificate”. Symptom was simply ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS like so: I’ve since learnt this typically happens because both Cloudflare and Azure are trying to handle SSL/TLS termination and redirects....

I’ve been a life long consumer of music and I love pretty much all genres. Music really hits me emotionally. I love live music, blessed with the Isle of Wight Festival and the local music scene here, and visited many orchestras and music venues over the years. Despite this, as a kid, I never really explored music. I just consumed it. I had a school borrowed acoustic guitar for a few weeks but that was it....

Unit Testing Newbie When I first started taking unit testing more seriously (it was 13+ years ago, don’t fight me!) I didn’t understand how to test something when I was using DateTime.UtcNow. My tests worked then failed a while later. I asked, on reflection, an embarrassing question on Stack Overflow. What made it embarrassing was that it showed my lack of understanding of non-deterministic values and testing code that used them....

Squishing Everything Back to a Single Commit in Git Ever wanted your Git history to go back to the initial commit while preserving the content you have today? For example, maybe you’re making a private repository public and want to remove the commit history but keep the current state. While a better option might be to create a new repository and commit everything fresh, if you really need to do this, here are the steps I took recently....

This post was taken from a rough gist I created whilst strategising a GitFlow branching strategy in a new team setting. Views may have likely changed since then and no on-size fits all. Introduction However you and your team manages branches; it’s important to have at least some kind of strategy that everyone adheres to. Rules and process should be designed to keep things consistent within the team and changes flowing to avoid complex merges and other such issues with multiple work steams on a single code repository....

This post was taken from a rough gist I created whilst battling bundling and minification back in Nov ‘23. Things have likely changed since then. What is it? Bundling and minification are optimisation techniques used to improve the performance of web applications. Mainly by reducing the number of HTTP requests and decreasing the overall payload transmitted over the wite. We would typically do this for as many of our site-wide CSS and JavaScript files....