Blog

Occasional writing on field work and the experience of studying things that most institutions would prefer you not study. Non peer-reviewed opinions only.

15 January 2026

On the Measurability of Fluff: A Field Note

A methodological reflection on why fluff-density is a physical parameter and not a punchline — and what it cost to establish that distinction.

methodologyreflections
20 August 2025

The Liquid Cat Paper, Four Years On

My most-cited work is a paper about cats fitting into containers. I have complicated feelings about this, which I will now express at length.

reflectionspublications
3 November 2024

Field Notes: Unicorn Migration Season 2024

Three weeks in the sub-alpine during peak Equus monoceros migration. What we measured, what we failed to measure, and what measured us instead.

field-notesmethodologymonoceros
20 September 2023

Running PowerShell Core in Kubernetes as diagnostic container

I am a big fan of KUDU. Being able to run PowerShell commands where my code runs helps me to diagnose issues otherwise, it will be hard to handle. This power (Powershell) can be used the wrong way to manipulate the …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
30 July 2023

Unexpected identifier on async Error on Azure DevOps Custom pipelines task

if you have followed Microsoft’s “Add a custom pipelines task extension” it does a great Job on giving you the basics of how you can create a new NodeJS custom pipelines task, and it gives a very good starting point …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
12 October 2022

Common Libraries for Automation Tasks

Automation is to DevOps as a telescope is to astronomy. Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization. Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), Spanish poet and playwright I created Azure DevOps Custom Pipeline Tasks for a while. In time environment …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
9 September 2022

Creating .NET CLI tool

I spend some of my time on Console. Frequently I use several CLI tools dotnet, kubectl, git, gh, and docker are just a few examples.Net Cli tool helps us to create our cli executables, but you can simply ask, “why …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
23 September 2019

Collect and Shape your Build with Test Coverage numbers in Azure DevOps (VSTS)

I have many builds, and not all use the same tasks (tools) to run the tests. I will try to cover collecting code coverage numbers inside of a build, and failing the build if percentages are lower than expected dotnet …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
6 September 2019

ASP.NET Core Health Checks and How to extend it.

10 Years ago I was working on Hospital Information Systems (HIS) with 1000s of clients and Applications dependencies are Oracle Database, and 2 Web Services Provided by Government, Laboratory Information System (LIS) has some serial port and USB connection requirements, …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
2 September 2019

Docker for Windows Time Sync and “The token is not valid yet”

Last night I spent a few hours trying to figure out what is wrong with my JWT token as I was getting 401 Error when I try to access my Apis when I run them locally in Docker for Windows …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
18 August 2019

Authorize with Multiple schemes in ASP.NET Core

This is going to be a long post as I discover the process step by step and the pitfalls I fell along the way.My APIs had a single schema to authenticate Azure AD users this worked well for a long …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
15 August 2019

Angular Unit Test and Code Coverage in Sonarqube

I am trying to get better at testing, on .NET Core I was getting better, but angular projects in SonarQube had always %0 test coverage. even angular has a built-in testing environment, I have never used it before.I use CI-CD …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
15 August 2019

.Net Core Unit Test and Code Coverage in Sonarqube

While I was working on my side project Sentinel(https://github.com/mmercan/sentinel) I have several Dotnet Core projects, I have separate docker images for testing and I used dotnet test as below. They worked quite nicely and having no problem until there are …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
15 August 2019

Work Item Rules in Azure Devops (VSTS)

VSTS has very highly customizable structure, every team project has a process (default Scrum or Agile) which can be changed. Especially if you have multiple projects with different requirements on project management wants to have different fields in their work …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
15 August 2019

Creating Azure WebSites Site Extensions

What is Site Extensions Site extensions are web apps with a metadata file. Hosts with your Azure web apps and can be written with any language Azure web apps support. Site extensions share the same resources with your Azure Web …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript
15 August 2019

A Seat at the Table

If you are interested in DevOps, Agile and position of IT Management on this new agile world a Seat at the Table is a must read a few Quotes I really like Agile thinking simply says that we should empower …

DevOpsAzurepipelineasyncJavaScript