DevOps

Have you ever had to setup a development environment from scratch? You have to install a ton of dependencies, probably a few tools along the way as well. It’s not fun, it takes a lot of time and it prevents you from being productive. This is where GitHub Codespaces comes in.

Okay, part 3! At this point, I’m assuming that you have already familiarised yourself with part 1 and part 2 of the series. As a quick recap, part 1 focused on why we would consider using GPG Keys in general. Part 2 focused on how to generate GPG keys along with some recommended practices on splitting out our master (Certification) key, from our specific purpose-driven keys. This post (part 3) focuses on using those keys as part of our usual development workflow using Git. We’ll be assuming that GitHub is our end target, as GitHub supports commit signature verification using GPG Keys.

Chris is a Senior Azure Engineer at Microsoft. He’ll explore how GitHub Actions can be used to deploy your own static sites (or other apps!) to Azure.

Hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to read part 1 of this series, which explains why you may be interested in using GPG keys to sign your commits. Congratulations on getting to the second part! In part two, we’re going to focus on how I worked through setting up GPG in my Windows environment, and generating a set of keys for use. There were some challenges/hurdles along the way, and we’ll talk through those too!

For a while now, I’ve been using GPG Keys to sign my Git Commits to prove that my commits on GitHub are genuine and from me. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been inspired by a couple of colleagues (Kudos to Adrian and Julie if you’re reading this) to dig out my YubiKey and use these for my key signing activities. While there are several blog posts on the topic already, I encountered a number of roadblocks along the way. The intent of this blog post is to be the first of a series, where we’ll explore what GPG is, why it may be valuable to you and how you can get going using them. We’ll then take this forwards an additional step, and show how you can use YubiKeys as a second factor of verification and the benefits of this approach. By no means am I the world’s expert in cryptography, and some of these topics, but I wanted to document my own understanding for posterity, as I’ll inevitably need to repeat/review the process in the future. I hope that this may be useful to you.

Mr Chris Reddington talks to us about his life as a Microsoft Azure Fast Track Engineer and some of the pain points he helps Customer navigate. We discuss DevOps and Infrastructure as Code as well as key skills needed for this modern IT world we now live in and more!

Azureish After Dark with Chris Reddington from Microsoft and some Among Us

In this video, Chris lays out his second weekly technology vlog update talking about updates on Cloud With Chris (Weekly Vlogs, Blogs, Podcast Series episodes, Sessionize), Azure Updates, Community Updates (John Lunn aka JonnyChipz, Sarah Lean aka TechieLass, CloudFamily.info and Richard Hooper aka PixelRobots).

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.

In this video, Chris sets off his weekly technology vlog updates talking about some of the things he worked on over his December break including OSS Contributions. He also talks through some updates from the month of December across Azure, GitHub and Azure DevOps.