// Content Creation

Have you ever wondered what it takes to build a production SaaS platform in your own time? In this Tales from the Real World episode, Chris is joined by Jamie Maguire — Developer, Microsoft MVP (AI), and Pluralsight Author — who shares the full story behind Social Opinion, a Twitter analytics and productivity platform built with .NET and Azure. Jamie walks through the evolution from a custom Bayesian text analytics API (built during his master's degree) to a full SaaS powered by Azure Cognitive Services, covering social listening, sentiment analysis, content scheduling, and audience insights. He also shares practical advice for anyone looking to build their own product: pick something you're genuinely passionate about, validate demand before writing code, and ship early.

Mental health affects us all, yet stigma and misunderstanding remain barriers to open conversation. In this candid livestream recorded during Mental Health Awareness Week, Chris Reddington is joined by Andrew Nathan (Microsoft FastTrack for Azure) and Will Owen (formerly Microsoft, now Maersk) to share their personal mental health journeys — covering depression, anxiety, COVID-19 isolation, CBT therapy, medication, and the pressures of high-performance tech careers.

Following on from my recent post where I discussed using schema.org for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), I wanted to stick with a similar theme, but a slightly different angle or topic. This time, we'll be covering the topic of crossposting content.

One of my recent tasks for Cloud with Chris was to investigate some additional areas for SEO optimisation. If you're unaware, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization; a set of practices to improve your ranking in search engines such as Google, Bing and others when they crawl and index your site. I was already in a good position, but there were some things that were frustrating me, we'll explore those in this blog post.

Many years ago, I wrote a blog post which introduced Logic Apps at a very high level when they were initially released. Ahead of a blog post that I want to write on Logic Apps v2, I thought that it may be worth writing a more thorough recap of Logic Apps as a platform. Logic Apps is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, which allows you to easily build visual workflow integrations. Whether that's plumbing several microservices together, entirely different solutions within an enterprise, or some of the repetitive backend administrative tasks for a podcast or blog site, Logic Apps may be worth exploring.

In my blog post earlier this week, I mentioned that I recently spoke at the Northern Azure User Group. The other speaker for the evening was Scott Hanselman, who talked about his journey moving a 17 year old .NET App into Azure. This was his blog. Along the way, he called out some of the tools that he used along the way. One was a tool called securityheaders.com. As any engaged listener does, I took note of the tools that he used, and added them to my cloudwithchris.com backlog during the talk. When I later investigated the initial rating of the site, I received a score of an F - which appears to be the lowest possible score that you can receive! Given that I only allow HTTPS traffic to my site, I was surprised by this - so I begun looking into the recommendations further.

In case you missed it, Shannon Kuehn, Jamie Maguire, John Lunn and I joined Sarah Lean for a panel livestream on her channel talking about our experiences getting started with blogging, and our experiences with blogging platforms. In this post, I want to focus on the first aspect - how you can get started with blogging, and some of the common themes / recommendations I've heard, not just from this session, but from other active community contributors.

Chatting to some colleagues about blogging and sharing our success stories and failures!

Three months and 350+ subscribers in, with content shipping every day of the past week: a GitHub Codespaces Cloud Drop, the final GPG commit-signing instalment covering YubiKey hardware key storage, a Welsh Azure User Group lightning talk on GitHub Actions, and a Terraform Cloud deep-dive on Azure state management. Azure news centres on Microsoft's commitment to bring Availability Zones to every region by end of 2021, new forecasted cost alerts for Azure Budgets, and the Start Small & Expand landing zone guidance from Sarah Lean and Thomas Maurer. GitHub updates include Dependabot gaining private registry support, CodeQL scanning for Solarigate traces, and a detailed post-mortem on the recent GitHub.com security incident.

Vlog #11 debuts a refreshed brand and on-screen layout, then covers a busy week: the third instalment of Chris's GPG commit-signing series (linking keys to Git and GitHub), the Cache Aside cloud design pattern episode, and a preview of the upcoming YubiKey-focused Part 4. Azure news centres on the preview of Trusted Launch VMs (defending against bootkits and rootkits), Azure Defender for Storage's new malware-upload detection, and Naraya — the ML system Microsoft uses to predict and proactively mitigate infrastructure failures at scale. On the security operations side, GitHub and Azure DevOps announce automated token revocation for leaked PATs found on public GitHub repositories.