AL Rodriguez
Developer, Developer, Developer
Orlando, Florida, United States
Actions
AL Rodriguez is a developer, cloud enthusiast, sometimes-blogger, and definitely NOT 3 kids in a trench coat. His background with .NET will usually take over when he starts a new project. Whether it’s a backend, frontend, UI testing, or even Infrastructure as Code, C# is his first thought for developing high quality solutions.
Links
Area of Expertise
Topics
DevOps like a Dev
As DevOps professionals, a lot of our problem solving is more akin to using tools as they're given to us. Those tools force us to think a certain way, which can be sub-optimal at times. How do developers get around their tools working sub-optimal? They build something new to work around the limitation, or replace it altogether. We don't usually build anything new, and I'm jealous. So let's look at some DevOps engineering tasks and use a developer mindset to accomplish them by writing custom code to create more robust solutions.
Setting Up Your C# Pit of Success
Writing code is only ~40% of software development work. Maintaining high-quality code is maybe another ~20%. Reviewing PRs and updating dependencies are just some of the manual processes we have to deal with that regularly take us away from the fun part of software development: writing code.
Did you know a C# project can tell you when there's a known security vulnerability for a NuGet package it's using? How about using a file to manage warnings/errors/suggestions for the entire project? You can even commit the file to source control, so no one needs a 3rd party extension to manage those settings. (That's the .editorconfig file by the way. It's really cool.)
In this session, we'll look at features like those above (and more!) that we can enable within our codebases to set us up for future success. And best of all, you can enable all of these features for free. So you can enable them whenever you're ready.
Intro to OpenTelemetry for Developers
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral, open standard for observing distributed applications. With OTel, you can trace individual requests and view specific metrics about the system's current state. It's like a superset of traditional logging and can be used with or instead of log statements.
In this session, we'll review the basics of OpenTelemetry, discuss why you should consider using it, and see a demo of using it across backend services.
Entire Stack C#
Full stack apps are great and all, but they're not the entirety of code written for an application. "Full Stack" only means front-end and back-end code. As developers we write code for other scenarios where the available tooling is, to developers, less than ideal. Let's take things a step further and create a Full Stack solution that uses C# for as much as possible.
In this session we'll look at an existing application that uses C# for the CI/CD pipelines using the Cake SDK, Infrastructure as Code to manage creating/updating the cloud infrastructure using Pulumi, and we'll wrap the whole thing up looking at some UI Tests written in Playwright. Along the way we'll call out the benefits we get by writing it all with C# instead of the usual tools we use in the DevOps world.
Azure IaC for Developers with C#
Writing the code for an application is an entire project, and then automating cloud resources with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is another entire project on top of that. Writing IaC means you have to know what services the application needs, plus knowledge of the cloud provider hosting the app. Finally, you need to know the toolset you're using to provision the cloud infrastructure.
As developers, IaC doesn't usually fall on us, but we're the ones creating the application. We should be able to automate the creation of cloud resources our applications need. And we should do it with code, the best way we know how.
In this session we'll look at how to use C# and Pulumi together for writing Infrastructure as Code to create Azure services and then deploy our apps to it. Then we'll refactor the code with some abstractions to make the code easier to work with.
Infrastructure as Code for Developers
Writing the code for an application is an entire project, and then automating cloud resources with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is another entire project on top of that. Writing IaC means you have to know what services the application needs, plus knowledge of the cloud provider hosting the app. Finally, you need to know the toolset you're using to provision the cloud infrastructure.
As developers, IaC usually doesn't fall on us, but we're the ones creating the application. We should be able to automate the creation of cloud resources our applications need. And we should do it with code, the best way we know how.
Let's discuss what IaC is. Then we'll write some IaC code using Pulumi, a tool for writing IaC using the programming languages we're used to. When we're done, you'll understand enough of the basics to add Pulumi IaC to your projects.
Azure Managed Identities: Connect Without Connection Strings
While connection strings, tokens, client secrets, and username/password combos are easy to use, using them may be too easy. In a world where tokens get leaked almost daily, you DO NOT want to be the person who leaked it by committing to source control, just posting a picture of yourself online with a password plainly behind you on a post-it note, or some other accident.
Azure Managed Identities change how you authenticate to other Azure services. By abstracting the authentication token away, you and your application never see a token value. Remember, you can't lose what you don't have.
Let's explore Azure Managed Identities and see how easy they are to use in our codebase. We'll also update an application to convert it from using connection strings to using a Managed Identity for all authentications.
Orlando Code Camp 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Update Conference Prague 2024 Sessionize Event
Atlanta Developers' Conference 2024 Sessionize Event
DevOps Days Tampa Bay 2024 Sessionize Event
Beer City Code 2024 Sessionize Event
Denver Dev Day | May 2024 Sessionize Event
Atlanta Cloud Conference 2024 Sessionize Event
Orlando Code Camp 2024 Sessionize Event
Boston Code Camp 35 Sessionize Event
THAT Conference WI 2023
Performed an Introduction to Pulumi session: https://thatconference.com/activities/e08J2wOT0aIUjpcXmTXr
Orlando Code Camp 2023 Sessionize Event
ONETUG Meetup
Performed a deep dive presentation on using NuGet for .NET package management. Going over the creation of NuGet packages, and how to include them in your entire Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), including hosting them within Azure DevOps and strategies for working with pre-release versions.
https://www.meetup.com/ONETUG/events/256542757
AL Rodriguez
Developer, Developer, Developer
Orlando, Florida, United States
Links
Actions
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top