V001 - Weekly Technology Vlog #1 (Blog, Hugo, Azure, GitHub & Azure DevOps)
Chris kicks off the weekly vlog format with a look back at December 2020. On the open source front, he contributed pull requests to Matt Stratton’s Hugo Castanet theme — adding blog functionality and fixing episode number bugs — and began building a new Hugo theme designed for community groups, meetups, and conference platforms with multiple group and event structures. He was recognised as a new user of the month on the Hugo community forum for his support contributions there.
From the Azure blog, key highlights include the Azure Enablement Show hosted by Sarah Lean covering the Azure Well-Architected Framework, new cost optimisation guidance for .NET app migrations to Azure, Microsoft’s improvements to BGP internet routing security using public key infrastructure and route object validation, and the general availability of Azure Synapse Analytics. The GitHub blog featured a post on securing open source projects using CodeQL and Dependabot, an explainer on how Git stores data as blob and tree objects with commit pointers, and GitHub’s contribution of view component functionality to Ruby on Rails to enable isolated view testing.
On the Azure DevOps side, Chris spotlights the new Azure DevOps service tag for Azure network security groups — noting the critical caveat that it does not apply to Microsoft-hosted agents — alongside a guide for running Azure Machine Learning workflows from GitHub Actions as data engineering and DevOps continue to converge.
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