I haven’t done a lot with jekyll in the past, but I’m a big fan of Markdown everything. For me that usually means I’m taking notes in Markdown Obsidian, doing diagrams in mermaid in Azure DevOps or https://mermaid.live/. I’ve even started turning my talk slides into Markdown with a tool called MARP.
Understanding when I use standard Markdown or some sort of templating language (jekyll uses Liquid) has been fun. I’ll do something in HTML or Markdown, then find out that Jekyll or my theme already has helpers to render that (like gists, videos, and figures). Sometimes rendering more advanced things takes a little tweaking of Jekyll and the theme.
I’ve been hosting on WordPress for a while. I wanted something that worked pretty well and was easy to work with. I picked a decent theme, added some plugins, pointed my domains and was up and running. I would work on blogs in Markdown, and then paste the txt into a Markdown. I could upload a few images and move them around in a wysiwyg.
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot more in Markdown. All my conference talks were in PowerPoint but I’ve started switching over to Markdown slides using MARP. I should probably do a post on MARP sometime (I did :-) ). I wanted to reduce my overhead of WordPress Hosting and get back into more direct styling and coding of my theme. I decided to switch my hosting to Jekyll on GitHub Pages.
This blog was posted as part of the C# Advent Calendar 2022. I really want to thank Matthew D. Groves and Calvin Allen for helping set this up! Look for #csadvent on Twitter! Make sure to check out everyone else’s work when you’re done here
One of the great things about the configuration system in .NET is the type safety, dependency injection, and model binding. Something we can take advantage of is to validate our configuration on startup and fail if it doesn’t pass validation. Having that fast failure is awesome when working with containers and applications that have liveness and readiness probes.
I’ve been in a number of internal and external calls where tooling to help work with Kubernetes keeps coming up. I thought I would share some of these cool tools in case you weren’t aware of them.
Tools # K9S kubectx and kubens fzf K9S # K9S is a terminal based UI for interacting and managing Kubernetes Clusters. You can find k9s at https://github.com/derailed/k9s or their site https://k9scli.io/.
Presenting and speaking are skills that require practice to hone. I was a consultant for many years presenting to clients and customers of all levels and sizes. In addition, I started speaking and presenting at meetups, user groups, and conferences. Over the years, I practiced, I read, and I gave a lot of presentations. I’d like to share some of the learnings and best practices I’ve found in that time. I plan multiple posts, starting with Preparation. I’ll have more on slide design, and presentation tips.
I’m so excited to announce that I’m joining Microsoft! I’ll be joining the Fast Track for Azure - Apps team as a Senior Customer Engineer. My first day will be October 25th, the 20th anniversary of the release of Windows XP. It’s been quite a journey to get here.
