Get the changes since the last Release in Azure DevOps

A request came by me to: Get all the commits associated to a specific release, based on the previous succesful release. The fun thing is, we’re using Azure DevOps. Easy right? Well, that’s what I thought, because this information is readily available in the web interface of Azure DevOps. As the saying goes: We do things not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy! This phrase applies to the above request. Read more →

Use Azure API Management (APIM) to rewrite a response

Have you ever been on a project where an API returns a response that you can’t, or don’t want to, handle in your own application? Or a customer asks to generate a different response? Yeah, me neither… If you ever come across a project, where they want you to return a response like this: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Connection: Keep-Alive Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: application/json Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2024 20:59:21 GMT { "error": 404, "status": "NotFound", "description": "Could not find the object" } This post is for you! Read more →

Adding Open AI to an existing solution with Semantic Kernel

For those of you who are reading my posts from time to time, you probably know one of my side projects is a URL minifier solution. It’s one of those services which I’ve created to learn about specific Azure services. I’m still making improvements to it and sometimes adding new features to it altogether. With the focus on AI and large language models in just about everything nowadays, it is time for me to add it to the URL minifier too. Read more →

Running Home Assistant with Zigbee2MQTT on Synology NAS in containers

For those of you who are following me on Twitter, you might have seen my Philips Hue bridge was acting up in the past couple of months. Major bandwith usage, automations not being triggered at the appropriate times, and even the internet connectivity wasn’t working anymore. The bridge is also about 14 years old, so it might have been its time to shut down. A relative cheap solution would be to buy a new Philips Hue bridge and set that up. Read more →

Using deploymentScripts to do additional IaC work

Most people who are professionally working with any of the cloud providers use some kind of infrastructure-as-code solution. For Microsoft Azure, I’m mostly working with ARM- or Bicep templates to describe the resources necessary. While I’ve written ARM templates for years now, I’m enjoying creating Bicep templates a bit more due to the tooling it offers. There is at least one downside to using these solutions, and that’s the fact most operations are happening on the Azure control plane. Read more →