Blog

We're professional nerds who like to share our thoughts.

Running Self Hosted Agents in Azure Devops using an Azure AD Access Token

by Lee Beenen on Aug 21, 2023

Have you always wanted to get away from Personal Access Tokens in Azure DevOps? In this article, we're going to take a look at how we can use Azure AD Access Tokens to run a Self Hosted Agent Pool in Azure DevOps and walk through the entire process step by step. Then, we're going to throw all that work away and automate it using Terraform so we never have to do that by hand again.

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Writing a plugin for the Elastic APM Java agent

by Sven Rienstra on Jul 18, 2023

Application Performance Monitoring (or APM) is one of today's powerful tools to get useful information about your application. Why is my application slow? What do I need to improve? There's a vast ecosystem of APM agents available with support for a wide range of languages and frameworks. But what do you do when your framework isn't supported? You create a plugin for your APM agent. In this blog we'll dive into doing just that.

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Reliability Engineering - Stop Trying To Make Pagers Happen!

by Benny Cornelissen on Jun 8, 2023

Many companies are adopting modern practices like DevOps and SRE in their engineering organizations. Yet, when discussing reliability and business continuity, it's mostly about High Availability, Incident Response, and On-call duties. While these are all important, they paint an incomplete picture and when a company decides to focus solely on those aspects, they may still end up with unreliable systems supported by unhappy and overworked people. In this blog we'll discuss why this is the case, and focusing on eliminating On-call whenever possible results in more reliable systems.

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Joining Skyworkz and hitting a conference on my first day

by Stefan Leenen on Jun 5, 2023

Starting a new job is always an exciting experience - new people, a fresh environment, and a different set of responsibilities. After spending 7.5 years at the same company, Piggy Loyalty, it felt like a significant leap, leaving behind amazing colleagues and the comfort of familiarity. What to Expect on Your First Day? When starting a new job, what are your expectations for the first day? I asked ChatGPT for its insights, and it provided the following list:

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