Loud & Abrasive

If you blinked last year (or hiked the Appalachian trail) you may have missed Microsoft’s big continuous integration service redesign and rebranding; from Visual Studio Team Services to Azure DevOps. I’ve had the surprising pleasure to work extensively on the platform since returning; migrating my client’s CI/CD operations over to build and release pipelines in Azure DevOps. So far, it has been a dream, especially compared to my past experiences with VSTS. Microsoft’s documentation on Azure DevOps is fantastic, and I’m not looking to reinvent any wheels. Instead, I’ll share a success we’ve had with managing internal Nuget packages.

It’s been a hot minute or three since I’ve emailed you. It would be easy to assume, as with previous updates, I’ve been to busy walking to get my thoughts together. At first I did not want to write this final post, but over time I realized it was unfair to leave my story without an end.

The transition to living on the trail was gradual, from all the expectations of a new adventure, starting like a long backpacking trip, growing to a way of life, then so routine it’s hard to imagine what it was like before. Coming so close to completing the trail is surreal. The time feels short, especially compared to the experience. Many of us are conflicted between a weary eagerness and an anxious fear. But for all of us the end will be a jolt, and an inevitability.

The way passing time and miles are so bound on the trail is most evident to me at its ends. It was a slow, proud, backwards-looking crawl at the beginning, asking “How far have I gone? Can I survive another day or week?” But has twisted to approaching deadline, “How far do I have to go today? Can I make it by this day, or week?” Hikers are buying bus or plane tickets home, fearing their expiring visas, and watching their faster friends’ summit photos roll by on social media, with 400 miles left to go.