While working on a different blog post, I ran into a scenario where I needed to produce a Docker container of a microservice that I was creating. This made me remember that my production architecture is different from my development architecture and I needed to produce a Docker container image that supported both architectures. In this post, I share with you how I ended up getting this to work in my GitHub Actions pipeline and publishing to the GitHub Package Registry.
When building my new website, I wanted to bring in my most recent Blue Sky posts to also attract new readers to follow me on Blue Sky. I ran into an interesting problem though. My website generator couldn’t read timestamps in the format that BlueSky published them. In this article, I walk through what I want to do, the problem that I hit, and my first exploration into building a custom GitHub Action to solve the problem and get my Blue Sky posts on my website.
My ultimate career goal is to build and sell my own software products and services, but I want to do it in a fashion where I can develop software openly and let others see the source code that goes into a product while still protecting my commercial interests and ownership. In this post, I look at the different options and how fair-code may help me to achieve my intended goals.
As a manager and lead software developer, developer productivity is critical to me. I need to be able to onboard new developers quickly. I also need to make sure that all developers are using the right versions of software, programming languages, and tools. I also need to ensure that developers can run other services that our code depends on such as SQL databases. Development containers have been a huge improvement in reducing onboarding complexity and ensuring that I and my team are using the same tools to successfully build software solutions for customers.
Just published: learn how to build multi-platform Docker containers and publish them to GitHub Package Registry (or other registries). I was working on another post/project when I ran into this problem, so I stopped to blog about itt. https://michaelfcollins3.dev/blog/2025/03/multiplatform-containers-with-github-actions/
After over 30 years working as a professional software developer, nothing brings me to the brink of tears like setting up a new DevOps pipeline.
Just published: my first experience with writing a custom GitHub Action. I ran into an issue with importing my Blue Sky posts into my website. I created a custom action to help me fix this issue so that Blue Sky and Hugo could work together: https://michaelfcollins3.dev/blog/2025/03/bluesky-rss-feed-github-action/
I've been listening to the audiobook of The City of Mirrors again on Audible. I desperately need movies done of this book trilogy. It's so unfortunate that Fox messed up The Passage and the series was cancelled after the first season. I just want to see "the seige" happen on the big screen.
Just published: a new article about fair-code and software licensing. This is a look at how I might be able to start building products openly, sharing the source code for others to see, while protecting rights to earn income from my software products: https://michaelfcollins3.dev/blog/2025/03/fair-use-licensing/
2025 has been a year of setting and achieving goals, no matter how difficult they are. So far I've attacked my caffeine addition and have been "sober" for over 60 days now. I'm back in the gym and working to rebuild me. I'm also setting aside an hour each day for "me" time to read and learn.
After a long hiatus, I'm back with a new website and blog trying to share my thoughts and ideas around software development. Here's my first post reintroducing development containers and what you can do with them: https://michaelfcollins3.dev/blog/2025/03/development-containers/
You know when you spend all day building something great and everything is clicking, but your program isn’t working right and you’re getting frustrated and then you take a break to go to dinner and come home and read the documentation and then you change your code to do it the right way?
I built my biggest dev container to date: Prometheus, Grafana, Dapr services, Redis, RabbitMQ, Azurite, SQL Server, Cosmos DB emulator, OpenZipkin, APISIX, Traefik, and ngrok. It’s almost the ultimate dev container for local Azure development!