Developers in the age of AI

I just got back from Bucharest, where one of my sessions at GoTech.World was about what I believe is going to happen to developers in the age of AI. Excitement Excitement is really up there....

14 Nov 2024

Brainstorming with Copilot Workspace

AI assistance for developers is not just for executing well-defined tasks - you can get a lot of value out of tools like Copilot by rubberducking or simply by asking explanatory questions to the assistant....

09 Nov 2024

GitHub Copilot Workspace is the true next step in the SDLC

Supercharging GitHub Copilot Copilot here, Copilot there… yes, GitHub (and others!) Copilot is brilliant, but it only acts as a sidecar support to the developer experience. You will see a lot of productivity improvement, and...

17 Oct 2024

Measuring the impact of your GitHub Copilot rollout

GitHub Copilot is amazing… but you can’t just roll it out all of a sudden with no planin a large engineering organisation! Flipping the switch on without a proper configuration would be plain dangerous (think...

27 Sep 2024

Simplifying Build Farms with Managed DevOps Pools for Azure DevOps

Over the course of my career I spent a lot of time optimising and automating Build Farms, since Team Foundation Server 2008. I remember the first time I saw the first bits of what are...

11 Sep 2024

Abstraction is acceleration

Something I see far too often is a simple yet foundational mistake: chasing innovation at all costs, for the sake of it, rather than thinking about the key fundamental issues we are yet to solve...

17 Aug 2024

Retry logic in Azure DevOps tasks

Large yet quiet update a couple of months ago in Azure DevOps! One of the most requested features finally hit availability - retry logic in all server tasks. Every task that runs in a job...

14 Aug 2024

Recent improvements in GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps

Over the past few months a number of good updates were released on GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps, I felt they went a touch under the radar! Let’s see what these are, there are...

28 Jul 2024

Continuous assurance, why are you not doing it?

Baffling conversation today, and a bit of a blast from the past. Mega-massive client has issues with their immutable environments - technical and regulatory. The regulatory stuff is relatively easily to fix once the technology...

20 Jun 2024

Engineering ingenuity will always prevail

More a thought rather than anything else… however, if you are still trying to unnecessarily restrict your developers, think again. But governance! Compliance! Regulators! All valid points, which will inhevitably lead to the same conclusion...

22 Apr 2024

What is the difference between Defender for DevOps and GitHub Advanced Security?

Very interesting question the other day: What is the difference between Defender for DevOps and GitHub Advanced Security? The answer is simple yet not clear-cut. Let me get there. Defender for DevOps Defender for DevOps...

19 Jan 2024

Redeployments should not be difficult

It’s a topic that comes up fairly frequently with many of my clients - why are redeployments unexpectedly difficult? Now that DevOps is as pervasive as it’s ever been, people are (rightly so if you...

07 Jan 2024

The role of the Double Diamond in a modern engineering organisation

I had this in draft for a very long time, especially after a conversation with one of my clients… did you ever notice how the Double Diamond process principle applies perfectly to modern engineering organisations?...

25 Oct 2023

Inner Source in an enterprise, measurement is king

Back on the topic of inner source, we now need to look at how we define success. Measurement and the right metrics will tell you if you are going in the right direction, and given...

03 Oct 2023

Improve your environments with Azure Deployment Stacks

Are you doing anything like this? If so, you should try Azure Deployment Stacks. The feature was released in Public Preview a few days ago, and it is definitely worth looking at it as soon...

26 Jul 2023

Linked workflows with GitHub Actions

This is literally the simplest possible thing, however… I wanted a workflow to be triggered only on successful execution of another workflow in GitHub Actions. I thought it will take somewhat more than the single...

20 Jul 2023

Progress is not linear

Last Thursday I was greeted with the excellent news of my 14th year as a Microsoft MVP. Thinking about it… 14 years is a long, long time, and my career evolved with it - from...

10 Jul 2023

No more excuses with App Registrations in Azure DevOps

It’s not really news, however…you can now add App Registrations and Managed Identities as users in Azure DevOps. They will cost you a licence, however there is one massive benefit in enterprise environments: you can...

24 Apr 2023

Inner Source in an enterprise, the role of testing

Driving back home tonight I thought it was about time I continued my series on Inner Source… now time to talk about testing. It is part of the model you must define for contributors as...

28 Mar 2023

Feature flags and configuration management - are they the same?

Recently I’ve been dabbling with Azure App Configuration - a very nice technology if you ask me, which allows you to build your applications or services leveraging dynamic exposure control, canary releases, etc. I liked...

22 Jan 2023

Defender for DevOps, or rather enterprise integration...

Great news at Ignite in the past few days. There is one I am particularly close to: Defender for DevOps. There are a number of reasons I am excited for it, there is no denying!...

14 Oct 2022

Inner Source in an enterprise, the contribution model

Finally the most important topic to cover: how to build a sustainable contribution model? Inner Source is not just some code dropped somewhere so that anyone can use it. Inner Source is about enabling teams...

28 Sep 2022

Inner Source in an enterprise, the consumption model

I wanted to talk about the contribution model first, however I felt it would be important to think about the users first. So after talking about the whys, it’s time to talk about one of...

27 Sep 2022

Inner Source in an enterprise, how to get started

I want to talk about a project that took a year and a half to get to full speed, now bringing an incredible amount of value to one of my clients: an Inner Source project....

20 Sep 2022

Where Supply Chain Management really matters

If you use GitHub you are surely used to this: Nowadays we are starting to take supply chain management for granted. Unfortunately it is a tendency as an industry - instead of focusing on remediating...

06 Apr 2022

Solving an identity crisis in an Azure and DevOps world

So… identities. A cornerstone of any cloud platform and essential in a DevOps world. However I end up talking about these on a daily basis in the Azure space, so I hope this post can...

28 Feb 2022

PAT options for Azure DevOps organisations

This was a fairly unknown feature, however it’s a very important one when it comes to security in a large-scale Azure DevOps deployment… As I am sure you know, PAT tokens are secrets directly bound...

30 Jan 2022

The most useful tool in Inner Source

I introduced Inner Source to my current client roughly 18 months ago. It was a big change for a massive 100,000 employees organisation, used to somewhat traditional development practices (not Waterfall - I would have...

18 Jan 2022

Triggering the butterfly effect

An interesting conversation came up a few weeks ago at a conference panel: there is definitely one strong misconception when it comes to Software Engineering, DevOps and transformations in general - if you want to...

07 Jan 2022

Why I took a break from blogging

For the past fifteen years I’ve been blogging with regularity, at least once a month. This blog starts with entries from 2012, however I’ve been blogging for far longer. I just needed a bit of...

10 Dec 2021

Why GitHub Issues is different

The point of this post is not to do a walkthrough of the new GitHub Issues experience (it’s awesome by the way!), but rather to think about what I believe is the reason and the...

24 Sep 2021

On repeatable automations

Automations are the cornerstone of DevOps, and they allow for a substantial increase in speed and quality. I say this at least on a monthly basis, which is good because it means there is demand...

04 Aug 2021

Azure DevOps Token Scoping

Working for a client that does large scale enterprise development and Inner Source means we run into this fairly often with new projects consuming different resources in a pipeline: It is a well documented behaviour...

20 Jul 2021

Unpublishing your latest Git commit

Sometimes it happens - you pushed a commit to a remote repository and you need to remove it, in a rush and without changing the repository’s history. There are so many ways of doing that,...

18 Jun 2021

Just roll-up your backlogs!

I know - it’s 2021 and Agile methodologies should be used as standard. They are, for the most part, but every now and then I find myself talking to clients that would like to see...

02 May 2021

Template extensions in Azure Pipelines

As part of a project I am working on we have a strong usage of Pipelines templates, and the consumption chain is nested across multiple repositories. In my situation, let’s say we have a Core...

23 Feb 2021

Why I believe Azure Pipelines is still the best orchestrator for Azure Kubernetes Services

Small confession to make: I don’t get excited by pure technology anymore. Gone are the pioneeristic days of getting something together, as in 2021 we now have such a wealth of technologies, frameworks and documentation...

07 Feb 2021

CI and CD with GitHub Actions - what is different from Azure Pipelines?

Eventually, I did it - I tried an end-to-end CI/CD workflow exclusively on GitHub Actions. Talking about details, I moved my end-to-end demo of an ASP.NET Core application deployed to an Azure Web App (with...

31 Jan 2021

Why DevOps won't save you from struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic

New year, first new post. This is a reflection I’ve been mumbling over for the past few months. I am building up a session about DevOps during the COVID-19 pandemic, and when researching things I...

16 Jan 2021

How I moved my demo SonarQube server to Azure Container Instance

Yesterday I realised that the last time I connected via RDP into a server was back in May. That talks volumes about how much cloud-native I am doing these days, but it also made me...

27 Nov 2020

Beware of implicit triggers in Azure Pipelines!

I was talking with Mohamed about this earlier today - it’s something that can make you think you are off the track while in reality there is a much simpler explanation :-) Let’s say you...

25 Nov 2020

No message found for this issue in Azure DevOps

I am writing this post because I’ve been asked four times within two weeks, so it acts as a public service announcement :-) The stage is still successful. Looking deeper into the execution by setting...

11 Nov 2020

An API layer of PowerShell-based Function Apps - a few tips

Something that’s really fascinating for me is how serverless brings new life to existing pieces of technology - in this case, Azure Function Apps. PowerShell-based ones in particular. I am sure you are familiar with...

14 Oct 2020

DevOps in a Landing Zone, how to run commands across it with Azure Resource Graph

I am currently working with a client that’s got a very well made Landing Zone (we are talking tens of subscriptions with nested Management Groups), and my team is building Azure Pipelines running automations that...

05 Sep 2020

Importing pipelines when the root pipeline has not been imported

I ran into this interesting bug the other day - let’s say this is our repository: All I wanted to do was importing the console.yml pipeline in Azure Pipelines. Well, I quickly learned that if...

01 Sep 2020

Bulk import YAML pipelines in Azure DevOps

If you import or fork a repository with many YAML pipelines you will soon face this issue… How can I import all these pipelines? Doing it manually would be quite tedious, so you should use...

21 Jul 2020

Did you know about the Azure DevOps App?

The title is a bit cheeky… but I just realised that you can pick-up a website in Edge and make it an app by clicking on this item here: Now, what if you do that...

02 Jul 2020

What's new in Microsoft Security Code Analysis?

I blogged about the toolkit in the past, Microsoft Security Code Analysis is something that you should look at if you want to integrate a solid set of static code analysis procedures around the security...

29 Jun 2020

Getting started with project management in GitHub Projects

If you want to approach GitHub Issues for your projects, sooner or later you are going to need a form of project management. It can be Azure DevOps (and I am very keen on it),...

21 Jun 2020

Running YAML Azure Pipelines from a restricted GitHub Service Connection

Last week a colleague (hi Kapil!) ran into an interesting scenario: what if I can’t use the GitHub app to integrate Azure Pipelines with my GitHub repository? All I have is a GitHub PAT. The...

04 Jun 2020

Working with Git repositories in Azure Pipelines

I keep talking about Azure Pipelines a lot these days and there are so many features in the Pipelines as Code implementation you just miss or overlook because you cannot go around the UI, poking...

24 May 2020

Azure DevOps as the FinOps enabler

I recently spent a lot of time working on this topic, which in a nutshell can be summarised as: Can I make Azure DevOps my FinOps enabler instead of re-inventing the wheel? Let’s take a...

16 May 2020

CI/CD YAML Pipelines finally GA!

YAML pipelines for CI/CD are finally GA. Hooray! There are a few changes which have been introduced fairly recently: resources, as well as a number of approvals and checks. Resources Resources are the built-in mechanism...

29 Apr 2020

Synchronising GitHub Issues and Azure DevOps Work Items

Another integration between Azure DevOps and GitHub is in work planning and tracking, or project management if you like. While from a technical perspective they will be achieved in a similar way, I believe we...

22 Apr 2020

Review - Team Topologies

I bought this book a few weeks ago after a suggestion by fellow MVP Wouter de Kort: Just purchased!— Matteo Emili (@MattVSTS) February 9, 2020 It was definitely worth it. Team Topologies covers a lot...

14 Apr 2020

What does "automate your workflow" means?

GitHub’s marketing headline is very clear IMHO: But marketing aside, what does it actually mean? GitHub Actions is not just a CI/CD engine, its integration with the platform goes much deeper. The more I spend...

07 Apr 2020

CI on GitHub Actions, CD on Azure Pipelines

If you want to start approaching GitHub Actions, you can easily do that targeting Continuous Integration. However, when it comes to the deployment side of the story, it can be more difficult. Requirements can be...

03 Apr 2020

A tour of GitHub Enterprise Cloud

Continuing my exploration of GitHub from Azure DevOps, the next topic which caught my attention is the equivalence between Azure DevOps and GitHub at service level. I am particularly interested in GitHub Enterprise Cloud, which...

28 Mar 2020

Looking at the CD side of CI/CD with GitHub Actions - also how to deploy ARM templates with it!

It’s been a while I wanted to spend proper time with GitHub Actions and compare it with Azure Pipelines. Today thanks to the storm this weekend I had some time to do so :-) It’s...

10 Feb 2020

A closer look at the pipeline authorisation model

It all starts from this error… Yes, you can click the button and (possibly) fix it, but what was the cause of that? The answer is simple: every Service Connection you are going to consume...

21 Jan 2020
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