Development

I’ve recently been on a journey. I’ve recently come across a number of accessibility issues on cloudwithchris.com. I’ve been working on making the site more accessible, and I’ve also been working on making it more inclusive. In this blog post, I’m going to outline some of my findings, the tools that I used to identify those, and how I’ve worked to fix them. This is an ongoing project, so I’ll provide further posts as it makes sense.

In this episode, Chris is joined by Mert Yeter, a software engineer with 16 years of experience in .NET and Microsoft technologies. We’ll be talking all things DevOps on Azure, including Azure Container Registry, Azure Container Instances and Azure Kubernetes Service. We’ll also get a chance to talk about Traefik and how it’s pluggable middleware can help you with your Kubernetes ingresses! Tune in to find out more!

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.

One of my recent tasks for Cloud with Chris was to investigate some additional areas for SEO optimisation. If you’re unaware, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization; a set of practices to improve your ranking in search engines such as Google, Bing and others when they crawl and index your site. I was already in a good position, but there were some things that were frustrating me, we’ll explore those in this blog post.

GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want. With .NET Core bringing a cross platform approach, getting your applications to the Cloud is easier than ever. In this session we will learn the different ways to deploy our .NET applications to the cloud and how we can use GitHub Actions to make it faster!

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.

Contributing to Open Source Software. It sounds so formal, doesn’t it? I thought that for quite a long time, and it put a bit of a mental barrier in place for me to begin my journey. I am a classic over thinker, but that’s perhaps another blog in its own right! Contributing to Open Source isn’t as scary as it may first initially seem. Let’s start with a few thoughts.

Imagine the scenario. You’re a developer and you need to go and build some code. You need to install a number of dependencies, a code editor and perhaps a number of frameworks, only to find the code still doesn’t compile on your machine. Probably because you’re missing some frameworks or libraries. We’ve all been there. But perhaps, we don’t have to be there. Stick around in this episode as we talk about Visual Studio Code, The Remote Containers Extension and GitHub Codespaces and how all of these can help solve that challenge.

Here we go - Episode #4! Have you ever had an idea, and you want to quickly prove it out? Or have you wanted to build out a scenario to expand your own skills, whether that is development, design or perhaps other skills? You’ve probably heard about Hackathon events in recent years, and that’’s what we’’ll focus on in this episode! I’m very excited to introduce my second guest of the show, Maria Vrabie, a very good friend, who has plenty of experience with Hackathons, both participating in them and organising or mentoring for them. It’s a very insightful session, so let’s go ahead and find out more about Maria’’s experience with Hackathons.