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Chris and Matt solve a recurring ToolUp Days pain point — inconsistent developer environments — by setting up GitHub Codespaces with a custom dev container. They extend a community .NET template to include Go, configure Dapr component files for local Azure Storage access, and leverage Codespaces secrets as injected environment variables to avoid storing credentials in source code. By the end of the session they have a fully reproducible, cloud-hosted development environment that spins up in seconds.

Go beyond knowing GitHub as the home of open source and explore how GitHub Enterprise can help you transform your software engineering organization and practices.

Being a developer is hard. From knowing the building blocks of programming, through to keeping on top of the latest languages and frameworks. That’s before we even think about running systems in production But at some point, we’ve all uttered those words ‘It works on my machine’. Or, may have looked up code snippets from our favourite search engine What if there was a better way for both? In this demo-led session, Chris will introduce GitHub Codespaces and GitHub Copilot, explaining how they can improve your developer experience and make you even more productive!!

Chris and Matt spend this episode tracking down why the World Events Engine keeps crashing on startup in Azure Container Apps — tracing the root cause to a missing GitHub Container Registry credentials block in the Infrastructure as Code and a GitHub Actions token permissions gap. The session also covers Dapr component naming conventions, storage queue message formatting, container app log analysis, and planning a dedicated GitHub Codespaces episode.

Chris Nesbitt-Smith traces how governance policies are typically born — emotionally, reactively, and as one-shot documents — then shows how applying software engineering principles transforms policy into a living, versioned artefact. The talk covers iterative policy management, Kubernetes admission control, open-source policy tooling, and the cultural shift required to make policy genuinely effective rather than just technically compliant.

GitHub is just that tool which developers use on Open Source projects, right? Not quite! You could be using Github in your day-to-day work. Have you thought about storing your SQL scripts, or machine learning workbooks in Git repositories? How about checking the quality of the content that you've version controlled? Or thinking about the security of your project? These are all things that GitHub can help with! Join Chris in this session as he provides a holistic overview for data professionals on GitHub, GitHub Enterprise and GitHub Advanced Security.

Software architecture is not just the domain of dedicated architects — the tools, practices, and communication patterns it relies on apply to every engineer on every team. In this episode, Chris is joined by John Kilminster, a software architect and Azure MVP, who walks through the essential toolbox he has built up over years in the role. Covering C4 diagrams, Architecture Decision Records, Tech Radars, Docs as Code, and Spotify's Backstage developer portal, this episode delivers practical guidance for any team looking to improve how they document, communicate, and align on technical decisions.

You've heard of GitHub. You've heard of GitHub Actions. You've heard of Azure. But how can GitHub Actions help you deploy your workloads to Azure? In this demo-filled, action-packed session, we will Introduce GitHub and GitHub Actions, Cover the fundamentals on what you need to know to build a GitHub Action Workflow, Identify resources that you can use to continue your journey in using GitHub Actions to deploy to Azure

Chris and Matt deploy the World Events Engine to Azure Container Apps — encountering and fixing a real-world GitHub Actions deployment bug caused by parallel runs generating duplicate container names. The episode covers Dapr storage queue bindings, service invocation between microservices, random bar-type modifier logic, and a viewer-prompted conversation about using GitHub Codespaces to standardise the development environment.

Communication between microservices is one of the trickiest challenges in distributed systems — especially when things go wrong. In this episode, Chris is joined by Francesco, a software engineer building a real-world payment gateway, to explore microservices communication patterns. They dive deep into the Saga pattern for managing multi-step distributed transactions, covering orchestration-based Sagas with AWS Step Functions, compensating transactions for graceful rollbacks, and event-driven messaging via EventBridge. The conversation also covers observability in distributed systems and applying Occam's Razor to architecture decisions.