Early on in September, I was having a conversation on Twitter with Gregor Suttie, and he mentioned that he and Richard Hooper were planning an Azure Advent Calendar this year, and asked if I was interested in participating. The plan being for members of the Azure community to each create a video about a particular topic in Azure. Then they'd publish 3 videos per each day of December on the Azure Advent Calendar YouTube channel.

One of my goals this year was to do a talk at a developer conference. I did a few talks at .NET Oxford last year, and wanted to take my public speaking a little bit further, and the fantastic Developer Developer Developer conferences gave the perfect opportunity! For those that haven't heard of these conferences - there are a number of them throughout the year at different locations. They're always free to attend, and always on a Saturday. This means that most of the attendees are there because they want to be there, not just because they've being sent and paid for by their work. I've been to a few now, and there's always a really great community vibe.

UPDATE: Since doing this lightning talk, I have also done an extended hour-long version at a couple of the DDD conferences. The full blog post about the hour-long version of the talk can be found here. That includes everything that is in this post, plus a lot more. So probably worth reading that one instead of this!

One of my recent blog posts - "Git GUIs versus the CLI", discussed why I think that a GUI is far better suited for source control than the CLI. However ... being a big command line fan (albeit, perhaps not always for source control!), the last thing I wanted was to come across as anti-CLI! Far from it! So I thought a post about the CLI, together with a few tips to help you get the most out of it was in order!

I quite often hear experienced Git users say that you should always use the command line for Git, and you should try to avoid using Git GUIs. Whilst I understand the reasons given, I also think it's a huge generalization that unfairly sees Git GUI users as unlikely to really understand Git properly. I certainly know Git very well, and honestly think I'm far faster and more efficient in a Git GUI than I could possibly be on the command line - and I'm certainly not slow in the CLI.