Aggressively tuning Cosmos DB (the long way round)

How many ways are there to tune Cosmos DB? In our (eventually pretty desperate) attempts to coax it into scaling nicely, we tried 9 approaches. As they became more arcane, we saw diminishing returns. Some were flat-out counter-productive! The eventual solution in our case was a single-line fix (how embarrassing!), but the journey was really interesting. It’s this journey that I want to share today.

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Retrofitting code analysis to legacy projects – my 4 step strategy for long-term success

In my last post, I talked about why I love code analysers. Towards the end, I mentioned how easy it is to get started, but I glossed over the fact that flipping the switch on an existing application can be a pretty harrowing experience. In today’s post, I hope to make the jump a little easier by walking you through a 4 step strategy that I’ve found helpful on a couple of projects.

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Anglocentrism broke my tests – ignore localisation at your peril!

An issue was recently raised on the ConTabs project that sent me down a bit of a localisation rabbit hole. You see, I’d written a load of conformance tests that included example output. What I hadn’t factored in was how many of these were dependent on my locale. These would potentially fail on computers with different locales. In today’s post, I’d like to explore exactly what went wrong and how we put it right.

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