Locks

Getting started with Ephemeral environments

Ephemeral developer environments are short-lived and typically serve a single purpose. Perhaps you are away from your development computer or you are working on completely different projects and don’t want to “polute” one or the other. For instance, I have a policy of not mixing up work and personal projects. If I am not at home, I typically don’t have my blog code or environment setup. I spent some time working with both gitpod....

August 17, 2022 · 3 min · LPains
Locks

Convert PFX to PEM for AWS Certificate Manager

When adding a certificate to AWS Certificate Manager, you need to have the certificate’s PEM encoded body, private key, and certificate chain. Note that unless you have a self signed certificate, you will need the certificate chain. If your cert has a chain but you don’t include it AWS will tell you an error occurred but it won’t tell you what’s wrong. I had to try and fail a few times before it worked....

March 9, 2022 · 2 min · LPains
Developer Environment

Automated and repeatable Developer Environment setup

First post of 2022 in March? Sorry for that, it took a while to get traction this year. I have a habit of “starting over” with my development environment once a year at a minimum. That means that I reinstall the OS from scratch and all my tools. This is actually fun and not hard to do at all, but can it be automated? Yes, powershell + chocolatey is a good answer to this....

March 7, 2022 · 4 min · LPains
alt test

Environment per PR the old fashioned way

The expectations surrounding app releases have changed greatly in the last several years. From months-long release cycles to release many times in a day. In part, this is made possible by smaller applications powered by micro services and some of the typical technologies employed with these applications. In particular, Containers bring a lot of new capabilities including easier deployments via orchestration tools such as Kubernetes. As a developer and team lead, one of the best added benefits of containers is how easy it is to spin up an environment for each change....

September 23, 2021 · 5 min · LPains

Automatic release notes on Azure DevOps - an update

6 months ago I posted about Automatic release notes on Azure DevOps. Since then, I was able to make the process a little more centric to Pull Requests and avoid the occasional incorrect work item showing up in the release notes. The primary difference is that we will use the new Cross Platform Generate Release Notes task instead of the original Powershell based task. This updated version offers a little more control via handlebars extensions that can help us filter out the undesired work items....

October 27, 2020 · 2 min · LPains