I have recently been on the lookout for a way to automate the process by which my Docker containers are pushed to Docker Hub. In the past I would have used Travis or Azure Pipelines; however, GitHub made its Actions available some time ago, and I wanted to make use of this new feature. I thought it would be worth sharing my experiences with this new GitHub feature and giving you some insights into how I used it to build and publish my containers. »
For quite some time now, my go-to tool for testing REST API requests has been Postman. Each development team that builds an API service manages their own Postman Collection, which they subsequently share with me on a regular basis. One of my biggest issues with this approach is that every time a team changes the API, I need to import the updated collection. While Postman offers a service through which teams can share collections, this operates by placing a given collection outside the project’s version control system. »
These days, I spend a lot of time working with Microsoft Azure. I also make a conscious effort to use the Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell module when managing my Azure resources. These resources help me get a better understanding of the platform and allow me to move freely between devices. If we add Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates on top of these tools, we can make provisioning and managing resources a much better experience. »
Last January I switched jobs from Inuits to Valtech after almost three years of consultancy assignments. Although I really liked my consultancy job at Inuits, it was almost always focused on the same thing: training client teams in the use of provisioning tools and guiding them in the best practices around continuous integration and deployment. These were awesome projects to work on, but I found myself looking for more of a challenge, something that would require me to innovate more. »
I spent the majority of my week in Berlin attending Monitorama EU 2013. It was an enjoyable, well-organized event and the talks were generally of a good quality. All the presentations were recorded, you can watch the recordings if you’re interested. The conference was centered on one common goal: to improve monitoring. A nice community is forming and the people who are involved are generally polite and respectful and share a common focus on co-operation and open sourcing with open platforms. »