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Yes, Tracy and co. from My Huong Kitchen on “Eat Street” in Minneapolis (Nicollet Ave) are actually as thoughtful and friendly as in the videos going around social media.

Most of us in tech have probably befriended someone from work who was not born in America, but who is so good at their job that American companies went out of their way to apply for an H1-B work visa, and then perhaps even an employer-sponsored permanent residency (green card), to keep them specifically on the payroll.

I recently had to troubleshoot an Entra issue that led me down a rabbit-hole crash course in OAuth / Microsoft Entra App Registrations (and their corresponding Entra Service Principals, a.k.a. Entra Enterprise Applications).

So, you think set up your firewall correctly? Want to double-check? Below I wrote 2 little PowerShell/Pester scripts to help validate actual lines of sight, once you know what you intended to implement.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I drafted an architectural building block and network diagram to better communicate how publicly-networked Microsoft-hosted CI/CD runtimes work.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is not exhaustive, but here’re a few coding hygiene tidbits for making sure that when you need to use a secret in your infrastructure as code (IaC), it doesn’t leak into its execution runtime’s system logs.

Much as I’m hooked on it, I’ll admit test-driven development (TDD) has a reputation for being a bit intimidating to adopt in traditional software application development.

Lately, I’ve been studying industry-standard taxonomies for categorizing the many types of tool that a company needs if its wants to modernize delivering and managing servers using “infrastructure as code.”

I work in tech. That means that for friends and family, I sometimes find myself fixing printers and making business web sites. Greg Dunlap’s new book “Designing Content Authoring Experiences” is a resource I wish I’d had available to me over the last two decades.

I shared yesterday’s LLM prompts for requirements analysis and project scoping post with a friend, and they said:

I consulted with a company where some sysadmins would like to start automating their overnight and weekend upgrade processes, so that they can reclaim their time and improve reliability.