Technical articles and personal musings.
A practical, modern guide to signing your git commits with GPG and a YubiKey. Why it matters, where the common advice is overkill, and how to set it up properly.
How a burnt-out AI skeptic became a believer. Comparing Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, why the collaborative agent experience — not the underlying model — made me 2x faster and brought back the joy of coding.
Since I worked as an architect in the compliant financial industry, I have been signing my git commits so that people cannot impersonate me in source code. I have always defaulted to a single GPG personal key that I could also use for both personal and work. But suddenly I needed to juggle two keys.
How can you extend working infrastructure as code templates to multiple environments, e.g. dev, staging and production? Let's walkthrough a monorepo approach that leverages abstracting templates as modules, and leveraging subpaths for configuration and versioning.
People love checklists because they give the illusion of an easy success. But DevOps is not straight-forward and looks different for each team and application. That is why I conduct reviews with Azure customers as an engineer at Microsoft in an interview-style discussion. And like an interview, I'm not challenging your answers, but your thought process.
A few years ago Pulumi introduced code-native programming language for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), bringing it closer to the developer and their existing skillset. Fast-forward to 2021 and Microsoft and HashiCorp are playing catch-up to Pulumi and to each other. To help you choose IaC technology, let's look at IaC programming languages for short-term developer happiness and code re-use for long-term productivity.
Azure Pipelines and Terraform make it easy to get started deploying infrastructure from templates. But how do you go from sample code to real life implementation, integrating git workflows with deployments and scaling across across multiple teams? Here are 5 Best Practices to get you started on the right foot.
Some software projects will use a monorepo for multiple components, especially projects migrating to the cloud. Let's create multiple Azure DevOps pipelines for a single git repository. But this is not without disadvantages.
A personal reflection on a decade in IT — how an American woman without an IT degree went from entry-level designer at Ancestry to Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, and the role hard work, circumstance, and luck each played along the way.
