Bienvenue! Welcome!
My goal is to help you work faster.
I must speak and teach until I hear 10 people say, "That thing you taught me? I used it! And it saved me time!"
(Ahem ... although maybe blogging slower than I'd hoped. Ugh, coders' repetitive stress injury.)
So check out the tutorials. Play with code. Tell me about your triumphs.
Parameterization best practices with Azure Data Factory
15 Dec 2025
If you want to make a “single” Azure Data Factory (“ADF”) git repository that can be seamlessly deployed into both nonproduction and production environments, you’ll have to carefully optimize its parameters and variables, moving hardcoded values as far to the “outside of the onion” as you can.
- (Note: Almost all of this article more or less also applies to Azure Synapse Analytics workspaces – the main concept that doens’t transfer is that Synapse doesn’t have an equivalent to Global Variables, at least not as of late 2025.)
OIDC issuers: passwordless isn't trustless
12 Dec 2025
Right now, I’m a little stuck deliberating how much I trust the OpenID Connect (“OIDC”) secretless authentication (“authN”) protocol when the OIDC “issuer” isn’t, at the scale of, say, a hyperscaler cloud service provider.
Continue ReadingMake automated software test results visible
11 Dec 2025
I’m a big fan of developers proving to QA exactly what happened during automated test execution, by publishing the results into something associated with the Kanban board / work tracking system that the whole team is already using.
Continue ReadingBrowser-based test automation: collaboration tips
11 Dec 2025
Hot take: developers, not QAs, should implement browser-based end-to-end test automations. Hello Playwright / Cypress / Selenium / Puppeteer / etc. Goodbye BrowserStack Low-Code Automation / etc.
Continue ReadingMicrosoft-hosted public CI/CD runtimes
24 Nov 2025
I drafted an architectural building block and network diagram to better communicate how publicly-networked Microsoft-hosted CI/CD runtimes work.
Continue ReadingAdding Vitest and Playwright tests to Astro
22 Nov 2025
I’ve been kicking out demo codebases faster than I can keep up with blogging them. Here are a few Astro-related codebases to share from my GitHub:
Continue ReadingVendor support shapes how we learn IaC
19 Nov 2025
Hot take / shower thought: for any given IT resource configurator/administrator, the ease of grasping the point of idempotently declarative approaches to managing the current state of the resource’s configuration is largely dependent upon their good/bad luck with vendor support. Vendors set the tone for learning journeys.
Continue ReadingLicensing E2E Testing Frameworks
18 Nov 2025
If you’re in an enterprise setting, you might need to ask for permission, not forgiveness, when it comes to importing third-party programming language libraries and software development kits (SDKs) into your codebases.
Continue ReadingChoosing Terraform vs. Ansible
12 Nov 2025
In my Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool types article, I listed Terraform as a “resource provisioning (day 0)” tool example, and Ansible as a “configuration management (day 1)” tool example.
I don’t hate it … but it hasn’t stopped people from asking me to clarify the difference when…
Honestly, yeah, there’s a lot of overlap.
Continue ReadingAzure Blob Storage SAS reasoning via PowerShell Pester
12 Nov 2025
It turns out that once you’ve got PowerShell’s “Pester” module up and running on your computer, you don’t actually need to call Invoke-Pester to run code that includes syntax like Describe and It and | Should -Be. You can just run a normal .ps1 file and those commands simply … work … as if you’d run Invoke-Pester.
