Revamping my blog in a changing world

The world we live in is changing at a rapid pace. Not only technologically, but also geopolitically. As a kid, I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s — a time when tensions between the West and the East were high, with both sides threatening to obliterate each other using nuclear missiles. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, East and West found more common ground, and the fear of mutual destruction began to fade. Continue reading

The Art of Conversation

In the 1990’s when I did my bachelor in computer science, teachers told us that we would be replaced by 4GL languages. Languages in which end-users would describe how applications should work. At that time we laughed at them, saying we saw the exact opposite. Oh dear, we were right. Code became complexer, new concepts arrived on the horizon and software development matured. Fast forward to the 2020’s… Over the last year, I’ve been giving a lot of GitHub Copilot training sessions world wide. Continue reading

Quick tip: Get in control by using your GitHub context

GitHib actions and workflows are very powerful by nature. They help me to build and deploy my Azure environments, without having me to do all the tedious and errorprone work. I create a pull request, have it peer reviewed and once approved my environments are provisoned the way I envisioned it. This is also the case at my current assignment for a large organization. Last year the organization decided that a new change management system (which name I refuse to pronounce) should handle all changes. Continue reading

Quick tip: Find permissions in RBAC roles easily

When building infrastructures in Azure, you sometimes come to a point in which you need to add an additional action to a RBAC role in order to access certain Azure resources. In our case we needed to add read permissions on the Front Door activity logs to an internal security administrator role. The way I used to do it, was browing MS-learn to can find a comprehensive list of built-in roles. Continue reading

Where is that documentation? A tale on setting up diagnostic settings...

I’m a big fan of Azure and building infrastructure on it using IaC (Infrastructure as Code) and deploy it through pipelines (Azure DevOps) or workflows (Github). The last two years, I primarily used Bicep to build the infrastructure. This is often a very satisfying experience but in some cases it can be quite frustrating. Frustrating because I can’t find the information that I need in the MS Learn documentation at the location where I would expect it to be. Continue reading

A nightmare on FrontDoor in Bicep...

For some reason I seem to attract the most exotic scenarios when it comes to building Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This time it was no different. For a client I’m working on building an environment in which disaster recovery is a top priority. Besides being zone redundant, the client requires region redundancy as well, in case a complete Azure region gets wiped out by a disaster or a combination of disasters… My imagination gets triggered and I envision all kinds of apocalyptic movie scenarios. Continue reading

Note to self: fix invalid GitHub credentials in VSCode

From time to time I start working on projects for new customers. As soon as I start I receive an invitation from Github to join the customer’s Github organization. Most of the organization have a SAML based single sign on (SSO). After joining the organization using my personal Github account, I’m able to work on the repositories on which I have access. So far so good… Then the moment comes that I need to clone the repository, which can be a hassle from time-to-time. Continue reading