Category: Guidance
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English as the New Programming Language
There is a growing belief that English is becoming the new programming language. At first glance it sounds like marketing hype, another inflated promise in a field already full of them. But look closely at how teams work today, and you start to see something real happening. Not because English…
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Don’t let AI Optimize the Wrong 30%
There’s a strange pattern emerging in the way companies talk about AI and software development. Almost every conversation focuses on how AI can help developers write code faster. That sounds compelling at first glance. After all, developers spend a lot of time writing code, so anything that speeds that up…
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The secret power of the “+” in live, outlook or hotmail addresses
I’m always looking for small tricks that make a difference. And recently, I stumbled on something that felt a bit like discovering an old Swiss army knife I forgot I had. It’s built into Outlook.com (and works with @outlook.com, @live.com, and even old @hotmail.com addresses). I actually learned from it…
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Dependency Reviews with GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps (GHAZDO)
Last month GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps (GHAZDO) was released at the Build conference . GHAZDO is the implementation of GitHub Advanced Security on the Azure DevOps platform. On GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) is already around for quite a while, but on Azure DevOps it is still in it’s…
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Azure DevOps Branch Policy does not trigger on push
Today I was working on a Git Repo in Azure DevOps that is used for a training that I am currently building. together with my colleague Randy. One of the things we want is to set a branch policy on the main branch so that a Pull Request build is…
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Knowledge Driven Culture
In my previous blogpost about building an Engineering Culture I briefly touched upon the pillar “Knowledge Driven”. This pillar is really about culture. About behaviour and about mindset. You can only have a knowledge driven culture if people are willing to share knowledge, and if people are open to receive…
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Remove the [External] Tag in Outlook
I am an outlook user. A heavy outlook user. And there is something that is bothering me. The [External Tag in front of every message I get from an external email address (which is almost all my email) Don’t get me wrong. I understand it. There is so much phishing…
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Aligned Autonomy in Practice
In my previous blog post I talked about Engineering Culture and how important it is to embrace the fact that you need to behave like a software company. In this blog post I want to dive a little bit deeper in to an aspect of the pillar “Empowering Operating Model”.…
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Creating an Azure Container Registry Service Connection in Azure DevOps with your own ServicePrincipal
A while ago, I blogged about creating an Azure Container Registry Service Connection in Azure DevOps, using the UI. In short, when you don’t have direct permission on the Azure subscription, the UI in Azure DevOps blocks you from creating a service connection, because there is no manual way of…
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Pushing to an Azure Container Registry from Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps is full of great wizards and helpers to make life of the developers easy. One of them is setting up a service connection to an Azure Container Registry. When you go to the Service Connections of your Azure DevOps project and create a new Docker Registry Connection, it…
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Distribute your blessed ARM templates with Universal Packages in Azure DevOps
There is a fine-grained balance between full autonomy of a team and arranging things on a more central level. One of the things I talk about, when I talk about shifting to Rugged DevOps, is the use of blessed libraries, scripts and templates. As an example, if all your teams write…
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Where to start with DevOps Metrics?
Now that more and more teams and organizations are moving towards a DevOps way of working, I get asked the question “What should we measure?” a lot. To be very honest, I find this a very hard question. The main reason is that metrics are always a point of discussion…
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Growing your DevOps Mindset
Practicing DevOps successfully requires knowledge on hard skill areas such as continuous delivery and automated testing. But the most important part is creating a culture where people show courage, work on teambuilding, practice DevOps leadership and have a continuous improvement mindset. Developing these soft skills is hard. One of the…
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VSTS Rest API – Hard to find methods
This post does not have a lot of text, only an introduction. I use the VSTS Rest API quite a lot and the documentation is great, but not everything is documented or hard to find. In this post, I list some snippets that you can use to get even more…
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Secure or Compliant? That is the question!
Compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Regulatory compliance describes the goal that organizations aspire to achieve in their efforts to ensure that they are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws, polices, and regulations. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_compliance) Within many organizations,…
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Setting up Sonatype Nexus 3 as your Windows Docker Container Registry
Currently I am working at Rabobank. Rabobank uses Sonatype Nexus as their artifact repository for all kinds of packages and also for Docker Containers. Since there are a few Microsoft .Net teams are moving towards Docker, the need for Docker containers arose as well. So we created a Windows Base…
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COPY failed when adding files to Docker container
This is a blogpost for myself. Because I don’t want to make the same stupid mistake again. And hopefully It might help you as well … I was preparing a demo to build a simple Docker Container. I used Visual Studio 2017 15.3 to create a new .NET Core Project,…
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Publish symbols to Azure File Storage with the VSTS Hosted Agent
A while ago I migrated a lot of builds to the Visual Studio Team Services Hosted Agents. This works great. We reduced the number of build servers and agent on-premises and can now easily scal up and down. But .. as it goes… there is always that next thing on…
The Road to ALM 