// Videos

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced game studios worldwide to rethink how developers, artists, designers, and audio engineers collaborate remotely on titles with massive file sizes and unforgiving release schedules. In this episode of Cloud Gaming Notes, Chris is joined by Lee Williams to explore how the gaming industry adapted using cloud services — from cloud-hosted design environments and Azure infrastructure to source control workflows with GitHub and Azure DevOps, video collaboration tooling, and the emerging paradigm of building entire games in the cloud. They also touch on how live game streaming is creating an entirely new entertainment industry built on the same cloud foundations.

Weekly Vlog #22 is a dedicated Microsoft Build 2021 recap led by the landmark announcement of Azure Arc for Application Services, enabling App Service, Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Event Grid, and API Management to run on any Kubernetes cluster across Azure, AWS, GCP, or on-premises. Chris also presented at Build alongside Dean Brian and Carol Logan, demonstrating friction-free development with Blazor, GitHub Codespaces, and GitHub Actions while spotlighting UK developer communities. Additional highlights include a wave of AKS improvements, the Durable Functions Netherite storage provider preview, Azure Cosmos DB integrated cache, Azure Applied AI Services, and Security Center integration with GitHub Actions.

Chris is joined by Matt Bradley, who helped establish the Public Cloud division at UKFast, to discuss four years of hands-on Azure experience. From migration and consultancy through DevOps automation, container orchestration, and hybrid cloud management with Azure Arc, Matt shares practical lessons, infrastructure as code trade-offs, compliance benefits, and why you must always design for failure in cloud workloads.

Weekly Vlog #21 builds anticipation for Microsoft Build, previewing Chris's upcoming presentation on friction-free developer workflows using GitHub Codespaces, GitHub Actions, and Azure Static Web Apps. Azure highlights include the Key Vault SLA raised to 99.99%, a preview of native Elastic integration, and Azure reaching its 100th compliance offering. Chris also recaps a hands-on Application Insights deep dive with Isaac Levin and covers a Helm explainer from the Azure DevOps blog alongside a Kubernetes Open Hack coaching week.

Understanding how our applications function in the wild is essential for developers when issues arise. With the power of knowledge, we can enable ourselves to provide the best experience to our fellow developers, and our stakeholders. One of the solutions that supplies this power is Application Insights. Application Insights is a service provided by Microsoft allowing you to monitor your application live, detect performance anomalies, and observe this data with powerful analytics. Together we will see how easy it is to add Application Insights to our applications, whether we have access to the codebase or not. Once instrumented, we will dive deeper into the capabilities of Application Insights and show how to leverage all the rich data collected from our application. Finally, as developers the last thing we want to do is troubleshoot an issue in Production, with everyone watching and the stakes are high. Watch as we monitor a live application that is throwing exceptions and how Application Insights can be used to help us solve the problem faster. When we are done, attendees will be empowered with the knowledge to leverage Application Insights to be more productive with their work.

Weekly Vlog #20 celebrates hitting 500 YouTube subscribers ahead of schedule, then reviews one of Chris's most content-heavy weeks: Azure Pipelines-as-code tutorials, an event-driven architecture walkthrough using Azure Event Grid and Azure Functions, and a candid mental health live stream. The headline Azure announcement is Azure Static Web Apps reaching general availability with built-in CI/CD, serverless API integration, and free SSL. GitHub rounds out the episode with new hardware security key support for SSH operations and native video uploads to issues and pull requests.

Azure Event Grid routes blob-created events from Azure Storage to downstream handlers, enabling scalable event-driven pipelines where producers and consumers are fully decoupled. This Cloud Drop builds an end-to-end workflow using an Event Grid system topic, subject filtering, an Azure Storage Queue as the event handler, a system-managed identity with the Storage Queue Data Message Sender role, and an Azure Function queue trigger to process and remove each message.

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.