Julie Ng

Blog

Technical articles and personal musings.

Latest Articles

15 min read

Securing Git Commits with GPG and YubiKeys: Best Practices for 2026

After ca. 6 years with my previous setup, leaving Microsoft was a good opportunity to update my system for 2026. In addition to modern cryptography, I wanted more redundancy and even more security in the age of AI.
While researching and designing for this current setup, I was dissatisfied with guides that were either too complex, or simplified but had security flaws. In this article and accompanying in-depth guide on GitHub, I wanted to explain the security design principles so you can learn, not just copy and paste.
My 2026 Setup: Two YubiKeys and an offline USB Backup
8 min read

How Claude Code made me an AI Believer

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.

8 min read

Setup git commits and authentication with multiple GPG keys and YubiKeys

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.

8 min read

Infrastructure as Code and Monorepos - a Pragmatic Approach

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.

10 min read

CI/CD Review - How DevOps in Real Life & Mature Organizations works

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.

11 min read

ARM Templates vs Terraform vs Pulumi - Infrastructure as Code in 2021

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.

14 min read

Terraform on Azure Pipelines Best Practices

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.

6 min read

Creating Monorepo Pipelines in Azure DevOps

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.

8 min read

Looking Back on a Decade, My Career and Luck

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.

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