// Developer Experience

Chris sits down with John Lunn (aka jonnychipz) — technical architect at BT Enterprise, co-organiser of the Welsh Azure User Group, and creator of johnnychips.com. John shares his journey from M365 and unified comms into Azure cloud architecture, what sparked his commitment to the #100DaysOfCloud challenge, and his practical advice on navigating certifications, managing the overwhelming breadth of the cloud ecosystem, and why getting involved in the community is one of the fastest ways to grow. Whether you're just starting out with Azure or thinking about launching a blog or YouTube channel, there's plenty to take away here.

Mental health and career development are more closely intertwined than people often appreciate. Chris and long-time colleague Glenn Small (Analytics Manager at AWS) share personal experiences of burnout, severe anxiety, and pandemic isolation — and draw out practical lessons for setting expectations, building healthy boundaries at work, and knowing when to ask for help.

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.

Spring, Spring Boot, and Azure Spring Cloud demystified. Chris is joined by Gitte Vermeiren (Microsoft FastTrack Engineer) to explore what Spring and Spring Boot offer Java developers, how Azure Spring Cloud provides a fully managed platform for running microservice workloads without managing underlying infrastructure, and how it compares to Azure App Service and AKS. Whether you're a Java developer evaluating Azure or a .NET developer curious about the Java ecosystem, this episode bridges the gap with clear analogies and live demos.

For some time now, I've been using Windows Terminal as my local terminal for interacting with my command-line tools for quite some time now. Whenever I'm demonstrating Kubernetes concepts or working with the Azure CLI, I'll likely have had the Windows Terminal open at some point. I always get questioned about which terminal that is, and how people can get access to it. I recently put together a Cloud Drop on How Windows Terminal can make YOU productive with Azure, so I figured it's time to also write up a blog post on the same! Whether you're a Developer, DevOps Engineer, Infrastructure Operations or Data Scientist, you've probably had to interact with a command-line terminal / shell at some point, so I hope this will be useful for you!

Microsoft Learn is a gamified education hub on docs.microsoft.com covering Azure, GitHub, Microsoft 365, and more through modules, learning paths, and the LearnTV video platform. Browse the catalogue by role, level, or product, earn XP to level up, and use renewal assessments to recertify without retaking full exams.

Windows Terminal is a modern multi-shell application available via the Microsoft Store or winget, supporting Windows Command Prompt, PowerShell, PowerShell Core, WSL distributions, and Azure Cloud Shell in a single window. This Cloud Drop demonstrates installing Windows Terminal, connecting to Azure Cloud Shell via device code login, and creating custom SSH profiles to connect directly to Azure virtual machines from both Windows OpenSSH and WSL.

Git is a distributed version control system where every developer holds a complete copy of the repository and its history locally, enabling offline work and fast branching. This Cloud Drop covers git init, git add, git commit, git status, git log, git push, git pull, and git clone, plus VS Code's built-in Git integration and the Git Credential Manager for authenticating against GitHub and other remote hosts.

Git stores all version history as compressed objects — commits, trees, and blobs — inside the .git folder. This Cloud Drop walks through the .git directory structure, uses git cat-file -p to inspect commit, tree, and blob objects, and shows how refs map human-readable branch names to commit hashes, including remote-tracking refs created when pushing to GitHub.

Git LFS (Large File Storage) is a Git extension that replaces large binary files in your repository with lightweight text pointers, storing the actual data on a remote server. This Cloud Drop demonstrates git lfs install, git lfs track "*.mp3", staging and committing with LFS active, and using git clone --config lfs.fetchExclude to selectively skip large files when cloning.