You can find all previous newsletters here on this page. If you like what you see, you can subscribe to the newsletter easily below!
Share
Matt Allford's Newsletter | Issue 18
Published 12 months ago • 3 min read
Hey, it's Matt.
I hope you've all been out there vibe coding your ideas into MVPs.
I'm looking forward to a bit of a break over Easter. The family and I are going away for three nights down to a spot on the east coast of Tasmania. I've got a couple of books lined up to read that I've found myself not getting to this year, but fingers crossed the weather holds out as it is starting to cool off down here as we approach Winter!
I've pulled together a few resources I've seen recently, and thought you mind find something of value in them as well.
Have a great Easter!
Model Context Protocol
It's been difficult to be in the tech space and not hear about Model Context Protocol (MCP) in the last month or two.
If you've just been scrolling through all of the posts thinking "I should check that out soon", I wanted to share a 20 minute video where Ras Mic joins Greg Isenberg to explain MCP. I learned a lot on my first watch through, and I wanted to share this with you as I think it sets the scene before you start looking to get hands on and play around. Well worth putting 20 minutes aside for.
The Meetingless Project
I recently came across an article from Andrew Boyagi at Atlassian, about how he ran a meetingless project. My natural way of working is to default to asynchronous communication, so I was interested when I saw this headline.
Andrew talks through some of the considerations, how he got started, and reflections from the team. A big part of being able to achieve something like this is culture. Have you or do you run meetingless projects? I'd love to hear about them!
I know what you're thinking - "we're all good, and we don't have any secrets stored anywhere in our code bases". But have you checked to confirm that's true? How?
If you use GitHub and are on the Team or Enterprise plan, GitHub have introduced new functionality which is currently in preview, to perform a secret risk assessment on your GitHub Organization(s).
After a few seconds you'll get a nice report identifying secrets in your environment, where they are located, how many repos are vulnerable, and what type of secrets they are (if they can be identified through the GitHub partner secret integration).
This will take you less than 5 minutes to run, there's pretty much no reason not to run it! I've linked the blog post, as well as a short (7 minute) video from Mickey Gousset below.
I've seen and experienced first hand where organisations enable or license a new tool or feature, send out one lot of communication to let people know it is available, and then assume people will know how to be successful with the tooling.
The article below stuck out to me with some great starting points for adopting GitHub CoPilot at scale. While the article is written for GitHub CoPilot, the patterns and concepts shown in the article can pretty much be replaced for any other AI tooling - or for that matter, even more broadly to a lot of software tools.
I personally liked the phases of creating champions to drive adoption, and establishing knowledge bases and prompt libraries. Especially with AI based tooling, having a library of prompts you can share, tweak, and improve with your organisations processes and output requirements is really key to success.
A year or two ago, Microsoft released a load testing service in Azure. There's a lot to like about ALT. I even created a YouTube video on ALT which has been pretty well received, and until recently it was built around the JMeter testing framework.
It's been in preview for a while now, but Microsoft recently announced support for Locust in Azure Load Testing is now generally available. Locus is a python based load testing framework which has been around for a long time, and as someone who can hack their way through some pretty poorly written Python, I was very happy to see this now fully supported!
Did you know I author content over on the Pluralsight platform?
If you're a subscriber, this is a shameless plug to check out my courses! I publish content in the IT Ops and Cloud spaces, make sure to give me a follow on the page below to get alerted when I release a new course.
If you're not a subscriber, click on the Pluralsight logo above to get taken to a 10 day trial sign up page!
Hey, it's Matt. And there goes January - that was quick! Down here in Tasmania it's been great weather, and the kids are about to go back to school (finally!). I spent a bit of time today putting together a list of tech I want to dive into and learn this year, and before I knew it the list was massive! This really is such a broad field with a lot going on. I don't know about you, but I often feel overwhelmed with the amount of technology flying across my socials that I have no idea about. But...
Hey, it's Matt. Whoops, it's been a little while. Hoping you've had a great Christmas, and maybe able to step away from work for a week or two! I've got a goal to get this newsletter on a proper cadence in 2025. Hopefully fortnightly, but at least monthly is my initial goal. As usual I've collected a few pieces of information below that I hope you find helpful, as well as the usual podcast recommendation at the bottom. Talk soon, Matt. Azure CDN from Edgio Retiring on Jan 15 2025 As well as...
Hey, it's Matt. Whoops, it's been a little while. Things have been busy, we're doing some renovations at home and had to move out, and it is winter where I am, which has meant cold, miserable weather, with plenty of colds circling around. We're almost at the start of Spring, though! As usual I've collected a few pieces of information below that I hope you find helpful, as well as the usual podcast recommendation at the bottom. Talk soon, Matt. GitHub Hosted Runner Azure VNET Integration I...
