DevOps

Back in March I posted about Automated and repeatable Environment Setup. In that version of the environment setup, I used Chocolatey because it has always been my go-to Windows app installer. However, the latest versions of Windows 10 and 11 comes with winget pre-installed. In this post, I will show how to setup a similar developer environment but using winget instead of chocolatey. Similarly to the last post, I will focus on a typical .NET + Node developer environment. ...

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.io and replit.com. The goal is to setup my blog environment, write a blog post, and publish it. This post was completely written and published using Gitpod. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. What is typically called Environment per PR. Basically, you have a new, short-lived, environment dedicated for your changes. ...