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Go Pointers - Using the & and * operators

Go Pointers - Using the & and * operators

I'll be transparent. The purpose of this post is to help with my own understanding of the Go & and * operators. It's going to be a very short post, and I'm going to try to explain the concepts in a way that I can understand. I've used these operators in C previously, but whenever I'm using them - I always end up having to remember the syntax / which operator is which / what they do. For whatever reason, it doesn't always come intuitively to me.

App Development Developers Go Golang Pointers Programming Visual Studio Code
Enqueue and Dequeue messages locally with dapr, Azure Service Bus and Azure Storage Queues

Enqueue and Dequeue messages locally with dapr, Azure Service Bus and Azure Storage Queues

In a previous blog post, I provided an overview of the Distributed Application Runtime (dapr) and explained how it is a useful framework when building microservices. In this blog post, I will show you how to use dapr to enqueue and dequeue messages locally with Azure Service Bus and Azure Storage Queues.

Azure Azure Service Bus Cloud Containers Dapr Development Distributed Application Runtime Kubernetes Microservices Open Source Queue
Set up your Go development environment with Visual Studio Code and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Set up your Go development environment with Visual Studio Code and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a new set of pet projects. I've wanted to learn Go for a while, so I thought this could be a great opportunity to get hands on and try it out. It's fair to say that my development environment was 'functional', but I wanted to revisit it to make sure that I could get the best out of it. In this blog post, I'm going to walkthrough the process of setting up Go on my machine, and then the experience of using Visual Studio Code and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with Ubuntu.

Go Visual Studio Code VSCode Windows Subsystem for Linux WSL
Using GitHub Actions, Azure Functions, Azure API Management and Google Analytics to display top posts on a Hugo Static Site

Using GitHub Actions, Azure Functions, Azure API Management and Google Analytics to display top posts on a Hugo Static Site

In this post, I show how I use GitHub Actions to call an Azure Function (through Azure API Management) that interacts with Google Analytics as part of the process to build my Hugo Static Site. The end result is that top posts are pulled into the Static Site Generation build process, rather than calling the Google Analytics API through JavaScript at runtime.

APIs Automation Azure Azure API Management Azure Functions DevOps GitHub GitHub Actions Google Analytics Hugo Python SEO Static Content
Using GitHub Actions and OpenID Connect to deploy Static Web Apps to Azure

Using GitHub Actions and OpenID Connect to deploy Static Web Apps to Azure

Back in November, GitHub announced its OpenID Connect capability for cloud deployments was generally available. This has been on my list to try out, and I finally managed to get around to it! With scenarios like this, I prefer to do something real and hands-on, rather than mocked, or a proof of concept. I decided to refactor my GitHub Action workflows for cloudwithchris.com, removing the need for secrets stored in GitHub. In this post, I outline my journey through this.

Azure DevOps DevSecOps GitHub GitHub Actions Hugo Jam Stack Static Web Apps
Automate adding GitHub Issues to GitHub Projects (Beta) in a repository owned by a user

Automate adding GitHub Issues to GitHub Projects (Beta) in a repository owned by a user

I recently wrote a blog post about using GitHub Actions to automatically add a GitHub Issue to a GitHub project (Beta) when the issue is opened. I received a question from my colleague and maintainer of the promitor and KEDA Open Source (OSS) Projects, Tom Kerkhove on doing the same with a user-owned GitHub repository, rather than organisation-owned.

Agile Automation DevOps GitHub GitHub Actions GitHub Issues GitHub Projects Project Management
Using RegEx and VSCode's Find/Replace capability to add captions to markdown images

Using RegEx and VSCode's Find/Replace capability to add captions to markdown images

If there's an easy way to achieve something, then I'm all for it! You may have noticed that I've been putting a lot of effort into refactoring my site and open sourcing the original Cloud With Chris theme. I've now released that as the Hugo Creator theme for Hugo. As part of the refactoring process into a reusable theme, I had to make several breaking changes. This meant that I'd need to update the contents of my site. I want to share a quick tip that I discovered to add captions to my images in markdown.

Accessibility Automate Developer Tools Markdown Productivity Regular Expressions Visual Studio Code
Automate adding GitHub Issues to GitHub Projects (Beta) in a GitHub organisation

Automate adding GitHub Issues to GitHub Projects (Beta) in a GitHub organisation

I’ve been following the GitHub Projects beta for a while now, and have been fortunate to be accepted as an early adopter. I’m a big fan of the direction, and the flexibility. One of the limitations I’ve noticed is that there’s currently no built-in way to automatically add an issue to a project board. It’s on the backlog, but not yet available. Fortunately, GitHub Actions has us sorted. I’ll walk you through a sample I put together to do exactly that.

Agile Automation DevOps GitHub GitHub Actions GitHub Issues GitHub Projects Project Management
Introduction to The Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr)

Introduction to The Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr)

In this post, we're going to explore the Open Source project known as Dapr (The Distributed Application Runtime). This post is primarily aimed at those who already have an understanding of Containers, Kubernetes and Microservices. However, if you're not familiar with these topics - I'll do my best to set the right context and background without making the blog too lengthy!

Containers Development Kubernetes Microservices Open Source
Gaining insight into user behaviour with Microsoft Clarity

Gaining insight into user behaviour with Microsoft Clarity

I love learning. Especially when it's about brand new things that I wasn't aware of! For this post, I need to give a big shout out to my friend and colleague Sam Rowe for the tip. It wasn't a product/service that I was aware of, but felt like something that could be useful for me on Cloud With Chris. In this post, I'll dig into what it is and how it may be able to help you.

Monitoring Observability Web Development