It’s been a while since I posted on this blog! Not because I stopped blogging or caring about the community, but in the past year I focused my efforts on publishing new content and articles in the Tech Community website of my team at Microsoft.
Over time, I started to work on many different technologies. This blog started with Windows developer content, then I moved into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, and I’ve started to share articles around building apps for Teams, add-ins for Microsoft 365 apps, etc.
Now, like many other colleagues, I’m supporting the AI motion in Microsoft, focusing mostly on Microsoft 365 and Copilot. To mark the occasion, I decided it was about time to reboot my blog and start sharing again my learnings using my own platform. As Scott Hanselman often shares, owning your content is the best way to make sure that it doesn’t disappear if your blogging platform of choice goes out of the market. As such, I decided to reboot my blog not only from a content perspective, but starting from scratch: new technology, new name.
Please welcome The Developer’s Cantina (yeah, I’m a big Star War fan)!
The new blog is based on Hugo, which is a static blogging platform hosted on Azure Static Web App. This means that my posts are simply made by Markdown files, which are stored on my hard disk. Whenever I want to publish a post, I simply commit a new Markdown file (and the related images, if I have them) into a GitHub repository. A GitHub Action generated by Azure does all the heavy work, by compiling the content of the repository into static web content (HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript), which is then served via HTTPS.
The choice of this platform gives me a few advantages:
- Since the posts are simply Markdown files, I can store them anywhere. If at any point in time I should decide to move away from Azure Static Web App, I just need to change the GitHub Action to point to another platform.
- If I need to recover my content, I don’t need to host a blog platform first to read it. I can just open the Markdown files with Visual Studio Code or any other editor.
- There is no database or server-side code, everything is static and running on the client. As such, the blog is super-fast.
For the moment, this old blog will stay online, even if most of the content on is now outdated. I still haven’t made up my mind if migrating it to the new blog. Technically it’s doable, there’s a handy tool to convert content from WordPress to Hugo (or, for what matters, for almost any blogging platform), but I still need to evaluate if it makes sense from a “quality” perspective.
Thanks to everyone who visited my old blog so far, I hope I will see you in The Developer’s Cantina!
