Blog

I've talked in the past about my Open Source journey, and some of the contributions that I have made in the community. In my current role, I've been leading on the global strategy for my team's DevOps practice, defining the areas of focus and initiatives that may be beneficial for the team. In this post, I'm going to talk through one of these initiatives, and how you can contribute towards the Azure GitHub Actions experience!

A few people have recently been asking about my setup, so I figured it may be a good time to start writing about it! This is the second part of the series, where I'll focus on the Lights, Recording Equipment and my overall setup. If you're interested in the PC setup, then take a look at my previous blog post!

A few people have recently been asking about my setup, so I figured it may be a good time to start writing about it! I'll break this into a few posts to keep it digestible. The first part will be focused on the main powerhouse behind it all - My PC!

When I mention the term JAMStack, I'm not pretending that I'm Paddington bear with a stack of Jam sandwiches! If you hadn't heard, JAMStack is a term that describes applications based on JavaScript, APIs and Markup. That means, we're referring to files that are content in nature. Think about files like HTML, CSS, Images, etc. Ok, now with that context - why has it risen in popularity? Surely this is something that could have been done for many years, so why now? My hypothesis... Cloud.

Contributing to Open Source Software. It sounds so formal, doesn't it? I thought that for quite a long time, and it put a bit of a mental barrier in place for me to begin my journey. I am a classic over thinker, but that's perhaps another blog in its own right! Contributing to Open Source isn't as scary as it may first initially seem. Let's start with a few thoughts.

During the 2020 Festive Break, I had a lot of time on my hands. I took 4 weeks of my Annual Leave, which meant I had the majority of December to personal time. Personal time / time off is great, but I also wanted to push myself and catch up on some pieces that were on my personal learning or achievement list for some time. I started refreshing my knowledge around Rails (having developed in it some years ago, it's progressed quite a bit!), NodeJS, GoLang and Rust. All interesting to learn, and I'm sure I'll be continuing on my journey with these throughout 2021. But that's not the point in this blog post. One of the activities that I kicked off was contributing into the Hugo Community. Read on to find out more.

You may have noticed there are some posts preceding this one. I've had a few attempts at putting my blog together, but then dwindle out on my cadence... Well, given the recent success with my Cloud with Chris podcast, I'm beginning to consolidate... Starting with my blog! Here's an update on what you have to look forward to!

A lot of people will take a round peg and try and push it into a square hole – or in this case, take their code and try and cram it into whatever service they happen to like at the time. There are specialised services on Azure, as well as some generic ones, but we’re going to talk about some of the more specialised compute services and what things you need to consider when using them.

There are a lot of established cloud design patterns. These don’t all apply specifically to Azure, either – some of them apply intrinsically to cloud services, and some to general services and architectures. If you’ve been to the Azure Architecture Center before, and you’ve seen what used to be the patterns and practices guidance, I’d advise you to take another look. We’re adding new ones all the time as we see them, all of which are common patterns that Azure customers are using to isolate and work around things they see in applications to make them work better.

In my spare time, I work on a pet project called Theatreers. The aim of this is a microservice based platform focused on Theatre / Musical Theatre (bringing a few of my passion areas together). I've recently re-architected the project to align to a multi-region serverless technology stack.