I recently attended the Microsoft Reactor hub in London for an invitation hackathon on everything GitHub related within the DevOps space (GitHub with DevOps).
The day was fast paced and competitive seeing 16 teams rapidly build and deploy a basic application to Azure app services using GitHub as the primary tool for code repository and deployment, utilising their newly released codespaces functionality.
After a warming breakfast at the reception from Pret, I joined the first table that I saw an available seat at, around middle of the room, with a pair of developers from a local London entertainment company and another lost looking individual much like myself.
The day started with an introduction from Microsoft’s team by Julian Franze (Senior Cloud Solution Architect) who discussed some housekeeping and objectives before handing over to Colin Beales from GitHub, who wasted no time telling us to get stuck in and cut our teeth on the challenges at hand.
We then quickly learnt to utilise GitHub actions to spin up Azure resources promptly and containerised instances using Docker images, along with some more advanced features helpful for CI (continuous integration)/ continuous delivery (CD) and application insights of Azure after instrumentation of the application.
There were different paces throughout the room, with some more fresh faced developers asking ChatGPT4 to write their code with some degrees of success.
I asked the organisers to let me know of the next upcoming events, particularly focusing on Azure monitoring, Azure DevOps & Azure Load testing (all things we have recently been using/experimenting with at RNID).
Microsoft came back to me on Friday with the list of full WhatTheHack resources available for use privately offline at your own pace. Enjoy! https://microsoft.github.io/PartnerResources/skilling/azure/what-the-hack
The session was led by @colinbeales and the GitHub team in collaboration with Microsoft Reactor. Go register here for their future sessions.