I come across plenty of interesting, blog-worthy bits and pieces while working my day job, but it wouldn’t be right to stop and write up a blog post on the company dime, so I tend to just jot down an (often cryptic) note when I come across something and then proceed on with whatever story or project brought the tidbit to my attention.
Then, when I have a bunch of items that need blogged about, I’ll take an hour or two after work or on a weekend, write up a bunch of blog posts, and then schedule them to go live at a rate of one per week.
That means that the stuff hitting my blog is unfortunately generally weeks or even months old, which is unfortunate because it’s not as representative of my current skill level, but that’s a trade-off I have to make in order to avoid missing large chunks of time where I’m supposed to be posting blog entries, but am tied up on some consulting project that is eating up all of my non-work time.
Currently I’m doing some consulting after hours which has meant blogging time has been non-existent for several months now, and some of my cryptic entries are even older and therefore more cryptic than normal.
One of my notes is something to the effect that when an outbound API call from ServiceNow fails, it will trigger a catch (from a try/catch), which means that you can log that it failed, but that whatever is failing is lower-level than the script calling the API, and that something doesn’t pass the normal error message, which means that it’s a lot harder to debug that particular issue than it otherwise would be.
I don’t remember the exact circumstance around this note though, so I haven’t done my normal testing before writing this blog post. All of which means that you’ll want to take this particular find with an extra grain or two of salt.