// Hugo

Chris recaps his AzureIsh Live guest appearance and the messaging patterns episode with Will Eastbury covering pub-sub, priority queues, and pipes-and-filters. He showcases the Cloud with Chris v2 website prototype built in Hugo with AI-generated transcripts via Podscribe for accessibility, covers the npm dependency confusion attack vector affecting Azure Artifacts and GitHub packages, and highlights Azure's deployment to the International Space Station in partnership with HPE.

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.

Serving static HTML, CSS, images, and JavaScript from a general-purpose web server wastes compute and money. The Static Content Hosting pattern offloads these assets to cloud storage—Azure Blob Storage, AWS S3, or GCP Storage—optionally fronted by a CDN for global performance and storage-tier scalability. This episode walks through the pattern, a real-world implementation with Hugo and Azure CDN, and the trade-offs to consider.

Chris covers channel updates for Cloud with Chris, including a new video on GitHub Codespaces and a blog series on open source contributions to Hugo themes. He highlights the Azure Updates RSS feed as an essential resource for tracking Azure service changes, and spotlights community contributors JonnyChipz, Sarah Lean (TechieLass), CloudFamily.info, and Richard Hooper (PixelRobots).

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.

Chris launches the weekly vlog format with a recap of December 2020, including open source contributions to the Hugo Castanet theme and the start of a new community-focused Hugo theme project. He reviews Azure updates covering Azure Synapse Analytics GA and Microsoft BGP routing security improvements, highlights GitHub's DevSecOps tooling with CodeQL and Dependabot, and explains the new Azure DevOps service tag for network security groups.

Ever wondered what goes into building a technical podcast from scratch? In this behind-the-scenes episode, the tables are turned as colleague Fletcher Kelly interviews Chris Reddington about the creation of Cloud with Chris. Topics include choosing a podcast theme, microphone selection, post-production with Audacity, using Azure Cognitive Services for automated transcription, designing for accessibility from day one, and automating the Hugo-based website with CI/CD pipelines. A candid look at the content creation journey behind a technical podcast.