Let’s talk Mastodon! This won’t be a how-to as there have been plenty of those over the past few weeks, but I wanted to make some observations based on my past experience and how it triggered my nostalgia.

I joined about a week ago (the hachyderm.io instance – an awesome community!) I was very reluctant to join Mastodon at first, because I couldn’t see the value. It felt too complex and segmented, but after a chat on Twitter on the subject I decided to give it a try and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the experience!

What has resonated with me since I joined was how much it reminded me of what I consider the golden age of the Internet, which for me is the pre-social media era.

If you saw my previous article, why I chose Hexo for my Technical Blog you may be wondering, why the move to Hugo now?

I’m not going to spend a ton of time recapping all of the various options as I already did that in the previous article. Hugo was the close second last time around, I even mentioned it could be a coin flip!

I spent a bit of time kicking the tires on Hugo for some test projects and really liked how the templating worked. I was also a fan of the various themes that were out there and available and decided to go with Mainroad which I’ve modified a bit to suit my needs.

I also wanted to check out a few other things - which finally caused me to make the switch!

• Azure Static Web Apps - This was launched a while back, and I’ve been following it since. I was previously using Static website hosting in Azure Storage. It has some nice integration I wanted to try which brings me to…
• GitHub Actions - I’ve not had the opportunity to use it yet, and since it has direct integration with Static WebApps - it was an opportunity kick the tires.

So switching to Hugo has given me the chance to check out three new pieces of tech! Hard to argue with that!

I’ll go a bit into detail on the process and steps I took to make it happen.

Over the years I have managed my notes in many different ways. I’ve used Notion, OneNote, Evernote, and probably more that I don’t even remember. At the same time I was writing a lot more code, and creating documentation for web applications and APIs. This naturally got me using a whole lot more Markdown.

At this point Markdown truly is ubiquitous and it’s the defacto standard for writing technical documentation. Naturally, the more I used it the more I began to enjoy it. I started to wonder how I could incorporate it into my normal note taking activities. As an engineer, I take a lot of notes - many of them are technical in nature. It felt only natural to start using this in my normal workflow. I finally ended up settling on Visual Studio Code in combination with several plugins. I’ll take you through what I’m using, and also what I tried previously.

Read on to learn more!

It has been just about a month and a half since my first day at Microsoft! I’ll soon be in the field helping customers on their journey to the cloud. As part of my training I’ve been able to obtain three Azure certifications I’ve been looking to obtain for some time!

I’m happy to announce that starting April 1st 2019 I will be joining Microsoft as a Senior Premier Field Engineer!

My time at Rackspace has been life changing. The past few years I had the opportunity to lead the technical vision of our Microsoft Private Cloud product, where we began to use more and more Azure to manage on premise resources. Prior to that I worked with some of our largest customers and help them make complex technical decisions about their architectures. And along the way I made some lifelong friends. But it is now time for the next phase of my career.

It’s long been a career goal of mine to join Microsoft and I feel like now is one of the most exciting times to join. Over the past 5+ years I have worked very closely with many employees at Microsoft in a variety of different programs. In my new role I will be focused entirely on Microsoft Azure Technologies. I’ll be helping customers navigate the complex landscape of cloud services so that they can have a successful journey. I can’t wait to get started!

There will be a bit more travel involved in this new role so things here will tend to quiet down a bit. But I do still intend to share my experiences and things I’ve learned along the way. I’m looking forward to the new challenge!

Originally when I setup my blog on Static website hosting in Azure Storage I went with Azure CDN because I wanted to have an SSL endpoint. As of right now, you cannot do custom SSL with static website hosting unless you use Azure CDN.

But then I hit another snag, you cannot redirect the root domain and redirects in general were a bit too complex for a simple project like this one. There is a user voice suggestion for this feature but it remains under review. This started to bother me because I wanted to do redirects with SSL but couldn’t because the I could not install the certificate generated by Azure CDN on the Linux VM I decided to do the rewrites on. All my previous articles were on https://hammertime.tech breaking all of my links from places like Google and Bing, or even worse resulting in the dreaded SSL error.

Fast forward a bit to Cloudflare. In a previous life I used their free plan to protect against attack but that free plan also offers 3 free redirects AND a free SSL endpoint. This meant I could now redirect https://hammertime.tech to www. where my CNAME is setup for Azure Storage. It also meant I could redirect a bunch of my other domains like hammertimetech.com and have all my URLs work how I wanted. Nobody else will probably notice this.. but it’s one of those things I wanted in place - I am weird like that!

One of the things that I wanted to be able to do was setup a full CI/CD pipeline for my blog. As someone once said If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing and it was in that spirit I configured Azure DevOps to deploy Hexo.

First off a short intro to Azure DevOps. Previously known as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) it is a service that allows you to manage code repositories, boards, pipelines (which we’ll cover here) and even test plans. You can also use Azure Pipelines with GitHub and while I did not do that here because I wanted all my repos to be private, there is no reason you cannot use GitHub as your source repo. Especially since two weeks ago they announced free private repos.

I had initially intended to publish this as part of my Azure DevOps entry, but it felt like it needed its own dedicated article. For my Hexo workflow I decided I wanted to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux from here on referred to as WSL. This works best for me because I am primarily a Windows user and I also have a fair bit of experience with Linux. Getting Started The first thing you’ll need to do is get Hexo configured locally so that you can generate the static content for later deployment, and also run your local server to test your content.