Rob Bos

Posted on Dec 20, 2023 • Originally published at devopsjournal.io on Dec 20, 2023

Best Blogposts 2023

layout: post title: Best viewed blogposts of 2023 date: 2023-12-20 tags: [Blog, GitHub, Azure DevOps] —

It’s that time of the year again! Time to look back at the most viewed blogposts of the year. I’m always amazed at the number of views some of these posts get. I’m also amazed at the number of people that find my blogposts useful. I’m glad I can help out!

Here is the overview:

#	Title	Published	Description	Views
1.	2022	GitHub workflows not starting	🙀The most viewed for a reason! When your GitHub workflows are not starting up, there can be quite a few things causing this. Read this post to find out more!	17.2k
2.	2022	GitHub access tokens explained	Personal Access Tokens can be a quick an easy way to test things out, but should not be used in production scenarios for a number of reasons 👺. In this post I explain why and what alternatives there are	6.7k
3.	2020	.NET core: nesting appSettings.json in the IDE	A three year old post that I jotted down for future reference. Seems like other people still have that same need! 🎉	4.5k
4.	2020	GitHub Actions with private runner: deploy to IIS	🔍 Using a private runner for GitHub actions unlocks tons of scenario’s to deploy into your private production environment as well. Some folks thing it’s hard to do so on Windows and a classical setup with IIS. In this post I explain the moving parts in making this happen! IIRC I used the same setup to stop, install, and start Windows Services as well. 🦖🌴	4.2k
5.	2020	Authenticate to Azure DevOps with a Personal access token	Authenticating to Azure DevOps using a personal access token takes a while to figure it out. For future reference I jotted it down. Still helping other folks after 3️⃣ years!	3.5k

Looking at these things is always interesting for me. For the last three years I have been blogging mostly on GitHub, Advanced Security, and some Azure DevOps (mostly on Advanced Security on Azure DevOps). The top post is about a typical scenario that I see a lot of folks struggle with, so I am very happy this post gets found a lot to.

Three of the top five posts are from 2020! That means a lot of folks still have the same need to know this as I did when I wrote the post. This is also the reason why I keep on blogging about these things. It means I can find these things myself, and apparently other folks find them useful as well 🤗.

My top post from 2023 isn’t even in the top 10 of best viewed posts! It’s the post on GitHub Advanced Security on Azure DevOps, where I explain the new features on Azure DevOps that where announced in the beginning of the year. These security features are available for anyone to use since November 2023 (if you need help with it, let me know!).

Blogposts from this year 📝

Looking back at blogging in 2023, I wrote 12 blogposts and shared my lessons learned or how I implemented things for customers. So even though I average a post a month or so, people still are able to find them and use them for their own benefit.

For me the ones I looked at this year that stand out are:

GitHub Advanced Security on Azure DevOps - I’m a fan of Advanced Security, so this functionality becoming available for Azure DevOps is a big win for me.
How to write to the GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY - Very helpful to have a mental image of the moving parts. Instead of looking at the sparse GitHub docs for this, I refer to my own post almost quarterly at the moment.
GitHub container based action cleanup - I’m a fan of container based actions, but it can be a bit tricky to clean up after yourself in a container based action.
Get alerts from GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps - In the past months I created an extension for Azure DevOps to show alert information in your dashboards, as I was missing that information in the default functionality. This post explains how I you can get those alerts from the REST API yourself (written when the docs were not avaiable yet).