Hey, it's Matt.

If you're back in to the grind of work, welcome back and I hope you've eased back in ok! For those of you lucky enough to still be on leave like me, even if only for a few more days, I hope you are having some great time away from the office.

Our industry never seems to stop, and there's been plenty of activity and news to kick off 2024. The rest of January is shaping up to be busy already, and I'll be putting some cycles in to my content over the next few weeks. I want to try and be a little more active on YouTube this year compared to previous years.

As usual I've put a few snippets of content below, as well as another podcast recommendation. I hope you enjoy!

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Festive Tech Calendar Content

As we're now well in to January, that means the awesome Festive Tech Calendar 2023 has wrapped, which takes place across the month of December, with new content being released each day.

Each year there is also a fundraiser as part of the Festive Tech Calendar, and the donation page is currently still open, so if you were thinking of making a donation, give this page a look as the proceeds are going to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, who have an awesome mission to help young people learn how to code, create and solve meaningful problems using technology.

There's so much amazing content to go through on the Festive Tech Calendar YouTube Channel. Great work as usual by the organisers, and well done to everyone for sharing your knowledge and helping others within the community.

GitHub Certifications are Generally Available

For a while, GitHub have allowed employees and partners to certify their skills and knowledge in GitHub by sitting GitHub certifications. As of this week, the certifications are now generally available for everyone, worldwide.

There are 4 GitHub certifications available today, which are GitHub Foundations, GitHub Actions, GitHub Advanced Security, and GitHub Administration.

I think I'd like to create some hands on and video based learning material on a few of these certifications - stay tuned for more as I start to plan the year in more detail!

See the blog post here

Azure Bicep Native Parameter Files

For the last year or two, while we've had the pleasure of writing Azure native Infrastructure as Code in Bicep, if you're a user of parameter files, you've needed to continue using JSON based parameter files, paired with your .bicep IaC files.

But that's no longer the case, and a few months ago Microsoft released support for .bicepparam files, which are parameter files written natively in Bicep. I did a write of up this on my blog, which also had a link to similar content in video format on YouTube if you prefer consuming content that way.

Here is my blog post

GitHub Copilot Chat GA for Organisations and Individuals

This one snuck in just before the end of 2023. GitHub have now made Copilot Chat available to all organisations and individuals at no additional cost.

This is available in both Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio, and chat is included in all GitHub Copilot plans.

If you haven't had a chance to see or try chat, there's a short 10 minute video from GitHub Universe in the blog post below.

GitHub's announcement is here

Community Azure Autoscaling Cheat Sheet

I stumbled across this post on LinkedIn by Stéphane Eyskens, announcing an Azure Autoscaling Cheat Sheet, which is exactly what it sounds like. This aims to be a one-pager to show which services support auto scaling, and how.

I thought this was a handy resource, and will be even more powerful if some community members are able to get behind it and contribute to help flesh this out!

The direct link to the cheat sheet on GitHub is here.

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Podcast Recommendation

This week I'm back over on the Packet Pushers network with Kubernetes Unpacked, hosted by Michael Levan and Kristina Devochko. These are two people who know their way around k8s and the cloud native ecosystem, and the podcast episodes are filled with a lot of value and insights in to k8s and the surrounding ecosystem. Make sure to give this one a subscribe, click on the image below to find the landing page for the podcast!

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