Just Five Mins! - SoundSage

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Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

Get full access to Just Five Mins! at www.justfivemins.com/subscribe

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Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

Get full access to Just Five Mins! at www.justfivemins.com/subscribe

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Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

Bit of a ramble! not even the weekend!

GitHub Copilot announcement here

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Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

So, I guess it is inevitable, UI design is getting better and better from an AI perspective.

New Anthropic Claude Design

UX Pilot AI

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Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

So, WordPress has had a good run right? 24 years as of the time of this recording :)

Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

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Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

Okay, a longer (much longer) Easter 2026 version of Just Shut Up Five Mins! :)

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Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

Okay, most coding agents (copilot, claude code, codex etc.) have plan modes and so on, but sometimes you just need the overview perspective when creating code or adding features.

As I have been banging on for the last few weeks about SKILLS.MD (open spec for coding agents to focus your prompts and son), then these two extensions for VS Code (and therefore Antigravity, Cursor etc.) and JetBrains etc. (as well as standalone I think!) take that step a little further and makes things a little more GUI driven.

I have used Traycer before and it is great at spec driven development (as the cool kids used to say) but as of now, Verdent has some really interesting features - really like having a complete coding team.

Anyway, take a listen for more info!

.. oh and not to forget using Olama direct in VS Code (or other flavours of VSC) without extensions etc.

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Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

Yes, skills are important - especially in the AI world and not just for coders!!

Anthropic created this open standard of skills now supported by all of the main LLM systems (or at least most and others are adding support)

For dotnet specific skills, click here

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Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

As we know, things are definitely moving fast in the AI world. No doubt roles are going to (if not already) change. We are moving towards becoming conductors or orchestrators of software/designs.

Google stitch is taking the design aspect one step further. Take a listen for more info!

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Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

AI Skills - worth reading up on yourself to power your AI with tried and tested directions. Impeccable takes a frontend skill developed by Anthropic (Claude etc.) and enhances it in a very nice way.

Not sure what this is all about? take a listen and find out :)

Here is the github repo

Examples and a bit more info here

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Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

Before it was computer viruses, now it is AI manipulation, prompt injection and worse!

So, even if you are building custom GPTs, chatbots and certainly if you are a company providing AI chat interfaces, you might want to check out promptfoo.

I have seen demos of so many different platforms leaking PII (personal identifiable information) and worse, credit card details, API keys and goodness knows what!

Seems to be the new frontier to content with.

It is quite sad really that we have all of this technology, power and opportunities and yet human nature seems to want to create things to harm and destroy - yes, I am a little naive it seems!!

Anyway, take a listen - even if you are building personal AI projects… worth understanding.

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Okay, so this is a little niche perhaps, but if you are a coder or even a bit of a coder (vibing!), then this new feature is pretty cool and at first look: you might miss it or think, “Well it’s just another browser, isn’t it?” But the new integrated browser in VS Code is pretty phenomenal especially if you’re a front-end developer. Check out the episode and the link below for further information.

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

You can check out the video here showing a bit more detail

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So, we are all inherently lazy I guess, so why keep typing on the keyboard? I guess it is ingrained a bit however, what about actually putting AI to work to help with this?

Some links from the show:

Wispr (TBH, my favourite)

Typeless

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

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So, OpenClaw made a splash and hyped up things to frenzy level about AI agent assistants. n8n is still an amazing platform - free open source too, and you can do pretty much everything with n8n as I am explaining in this podcast. n8n is a graphical workflow/AI tool but you still need some JavaScript/JSON knowledge IMHO!

Enter a more simple approach that just uses Claude Code CLI as the brain along with some other free resources to add memory, text embeddings (meaning of words etc.) and I have a completely locked down mini virtual private server (512mb RAM, 1 vCore) running on AWS Lightsail for around $5 (free for 3 months). You can run this on your own local linux box too or even in Docker of course or anywhere a service offers linux servers (everywhere then!).

I have hooked in:

Telegram: as my main chatbot interface which can accepts voice as well as text
Twilio: for a real telephone number to talk/SMS with (optional, but why not!)
Official Google MCP for calendars/email
Official Microsoft MCP for my MS calendar/email
I “could” easily hook into things like SalesForce, HubSpot, Slack and millions of other services.

I am currently building an Alexa skill (even though Alexa+ is coming) to give Alexa a real brain and hooks into the above.

All of this running on a very basic locked down linux VM :)

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

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Well, if you haven’t heard of “ClaudeBot”, “MoltBot” or now “OpenClaw”, then shame on you! You have once again missed the hype train ;)(probably not a bad thing, I think people out there have a real life?)

Since recording this episode, I have seen some great examples where peeps have taken the idea of OpenClaw and created more secure (??) options using n8n or even Claude Code with Agent mode… this is something I am really interested in and will no doubt have a show out soon about that!

For now, sit back, relax, and watch those 12-13 minutes evaporate before your very eyes :)

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

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You need skills… from making coffee (decent coffee at least!) to whatever you do in your day job. Skills for AI has been introduced by the claude folks Anthropic.

Skills are really useful and powerful, and in essence, just a set of folders in your code project (but not limited to code! could be a folder for marketing and what not). You can define certain aspects, detailed specifications including code/text/document snippets.

What really makes skills efficient is they a progressively loaded as needed. None of this massive context window chomping through your AI subscription tokens!

Anyway, further info below in the links:

Skills, Instructions and Moar

Anthropic Skills Info

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

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It has been a little while… but I am back! and as ever, the subject is AI - of course it is!

This one became (unintentionally!) a bit of a weekend ramble…

Some links from the podcast:

GitHub Copilot - get all of the main AI models in one place and for $10 :)

Traycer AI - Sure, VS Code and other platforms all have skills and planning mode, but Traycer goes a wee bit further…

VS Code AI Toolkit - Seriously, the stuff you can do here and play around with is awesome!

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

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The ebb and flow… “this is great”… “this is bad…” the neverending movement. Well, there isn’t anything wrong with Javascript frameworks… use what you need and what you love.

However, given the modern state of Javascript (and Typescript if that is your thing), do you really need the frameworks? What about just plain web components? web components have been around for years and so has LIT (link here) to help build web components (reactive and all that good stuff). LIT is really just a small library (not a framework) weighing in at just 5kb.

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

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Okay, it might sound a bit sad recording a JFM on Christmas day, but there we go :)

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

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So, where is all of this vibe coding taking us? Serious question, and I am not knocking the whole vibe coding thing - it does really does help anyone build apps, but what kind of apps? and how are they working in production/live?

Some links from the show:

Lovable

Replit

Google Antigravity - actually, it is a downloadable app… I might have mixed up Google Firebase studio! :) which, in turn, is probably Windsurf now Google own it :)

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me, then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

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Here is the link from Anthropic about the topic being discussed.

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

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Well, it is one of those rambling weekends again!

Link to the research paper here about TRM (Tiny Recursive Model)

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

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Well, more agent stuff then! but what are you all doing with these AI agents?

Open AI just released agent builder. If you believe their documentation, codex (their coding AI offering) wrote 80% of the agent builder itself… if that is indeed true, it is rather amazing.

However, building out agent solutions other than hobby projects or small PoC’s, is probably more involved. That is where A2A protocol comes in from Google. Along with MCP (model context protocol), it provides a complimentary protocol to handle the authorisation/authentication and so on between agents.

Anyway, take a listen for more!

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

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Who doesn’t like FREE ?

Well, JetBrains (the folks who created WebStorm, PyCharm and Rider etc.) have now released one of my favourite database management tools free; DataGrip.

Free for non-commercial use, but what a great tool to get across. So many different databases you can connect to not to mention a more lovely experience connecting to SAP HANA :)

Read the blog post here and download

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

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Okay, a little experiment. Okay, I have been researching how LLMs work with vectors and how AI search works for a while now. But rather than me warble on for a while (and more than 5 mins!), I have tried an AI approach to explain the research ;)

In fairness, I did listen back to this, and personally I was quite impressed. The explanation about quantization methods was particularly useful.

If vectors, AI search and quantization mean nothing to you - take a listen :)

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

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🧠 What RAG Actually Does

RAG enhances LLMs by retrieving relevant external information (e.g. from documents or databases) at query time, then feeding that into the prompt. This allows the LLM to answer with up-to-date or domain-specific knowledge without retraining.

💸 Is RAG Expensive?

Yes, it can be — especially if:

You repeatedly reprocess large documents for every query.
You use high token counts to include raw content in prompts.
You rely on real-time parsing of files (e.g. PDFs or Excel) without preprocessing.

This is where vector storage and embedding optimization come in.

📦 Role of Vector Storage

Instead of reloading and reprocessing documents every time:

Documents are chunked into smaller segments.
Each chunk is converted into a vector embedding.
These embeddings are stored in a vector database (e.g. FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate).
At query time, the user’s question is embedded and matched against stored vectors to retrieve relevant chunks.

This avoids reprocessing the original files and drastically reduces cost and latency

⚙️ Efficiency Strategies

Here’s how to make RAG more efficient:

Strategy

Description

Benefit

Vector Storage

Store precomputed embeddings

Avoids repeated parsing and embedding

ANN Indexing

Use Approximate Nearest Neighbor search

Fast retrieval from large datasets

Quantization

Compress embeddings (e.g. float8, int8)

Reduces memory footprint with minimal accuracy loss

Dimensionality Reduction

Use PCA or UMAP to reduce vector size

Speeds up search and lowers storage cost

Contextual Compression

Filter retrieved chunks before sending to LLM

Reduces token usage and cost

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Design for UI/UX is obviously an art form, but can AI do as good a job or better? or as the case may well be, using AI to help with the tedious stuff?

UX Pilot

Figma

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Okay, AI agent automation is everywhere and so are MCPs (Model Context Protocol) to allow you to connect to anything and everything via AI. However, this still needs some technical know-how, even in the low-code offerings.

But what if you have a complete virtual AI employee? and better yet, where it can work with your existing applications seamlessly - even older ERP systems or applications that have no API or external connections?

Let’s take a listen to find out more!

Warmwind OS

Warmwind OS intro

This is a deeper dive into Warmwind OS

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So, a slightly boring episode but surprisingly useful, I think.

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

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Oh dear, so many meme phrases!

Hey, this is a free podcast however, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep-dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

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Using VS Code (free and open source) along with the AI Toolkit extension allows you to play with several different AI models as well as local models - all from one user interface. Yes, you can run AI models locally! (okay, not the larger online ones!) and certainly the SLM (small language models) models like PHI-4 from Microsoft.

You can even get into building AI agents visually and generate actual code!

You don’t have to be a developer - this stuff is easy enough to use if you are curious about this sort of thing. If you want some guidance or examples of what you can do, just ping over a comment and I will be happy to help.

Hey, this is a free podcast however, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep-dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

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What does all this mean?

Microsoft AI Extensions: An abstract set of classes to enable a c# .Net developer to talk to different AI models/platforms instead of specific individual frameworks. Also allows you to create and interact with MCP (model context protocol).

MCP: Model Context Protocol - soooo many resources out there now. I did an episode on MCP a few podcasts ago if you want to take a look/listen.

Azure AI Foundry Local: A bit like Ollama allowing you to run AI models locally :)

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How easy is it to create AI agents? without code (or at least minimal!)?

Take a listen as we refresh our memories with n8n.io. Build automation workflows but specifically AI agent-based ones! all this locally or on your infrastructure too!

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

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Well, I have been trying to settle on some day-to-day tools i.e. OneNote for my note taking (don’t shoot me!) and I did have Todoist for tracking my endless lists of things to either “really do” or attempt to capture for later (yeah right!).

Although there are lots of choice, and that is a good thing, I thought with Todoist I had found the perfect “ToDo” app (or just a large bucket of broken dreams!). No problem with Todoist at all, but I came across Tick Tick and dismissed it a few times.

About 6 months ago I figured I would give Tick Tick a try. Anyway, have a listen if you want to find out how that went.

No affiliates or selling here, just info from my perspective :)

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

Unicorn University:

https://applied-ai-services.kit.com/020c6040f2

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So, are you “vibe coding”? or just asking AI to help with some code?

Have you come across custom instructions for VS Code? Windsurf and Cursor AI etc. all of their options too.

Provide a preset app requirements and/or product requirements document (PRD) and you can make building apps with AI a bit more predictable and follow your guidelines about the tech stack you want to use, testing approach etc.

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

Or just buy a unicorn a coffee here!

Oh, and yes, I have ended up on YouTube (doesn’t everyone eventually?):

https://www.youtube.com/@justfifteenmins but don’t worry, no ugly face to worry about (yet!).

Unicorn University:

https://applied-ai-services.kit.com/020c6040f2

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Well, just a ramble as advertised!

Some links mentioned in the show:

Microsoft Build 2025

Google IO

Anthropic

Google Stich

Hey, this is a free podcast. However, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

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Firstly, I am not sure what AI did to generate that title image!

As mentioned in the shameless plug, I will be starting to do some further deep dives/one-to-one things soon via Patreon… if you are interested of course! (see links below).

Anyway, plugging aside, I did a video a few months ago about Cursor AI (a VS Code based AI editor) and using local LLMs. Although you can use local LLMs (via Ollama or LMStudio etc.), the experience wasn’t very connecting :)

VOID AI Editor addresses this. In fact, it is an open-sourced version of Cursor AI, still based on VS Code, but absolutely does integrate directly with local LLMs such as Llama 4, DeepSeek etc.

Hey, this is a free podcast however, if you feel you want to support me then check out Patreon. I will have some more detailed deep dives for Patreon members as well as one-to-one sessions.

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So, if you code (including “Vibe Coding” if you must!) or are just a “fiddler” (like myself!) then you have no doubt used some sort of code editor.

Because I mostly live in a Microsoft world, Visual Studio (as of this recording, v 2022) has been my mainstay. But what about cross platform editors (and indeed IDEs - Integrated Development Environments)? and, given all of the choices around us, what about other vendors?

That is what we are talking about this time on JFM! :)

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Oh yes, jumping on the band wagon again!

Open AI released a whole lot of updated models and so on last week. But one tool (in preview) jumped out. Open AI Codex CLI.

Now, from first impressions, this looks and feels a lot like Anthropic Claude Code that I looked at a few weeks back. But hey, everyone copies everyone right?

Anyway, it is more of a “technical” thing to use but you really don’t have to be super technical. It, like Claude Code, generated very clean code based on just a couple of prompts.

Anyway, take a listen for more :)

Some links from the show:

Open AI Codex CLI - Getting Started

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I have already burdened you with an episode about MCP. Now, I am digging into some actual code examples in dotnet (maybe I will try other languages later). What the heck is an MCP host? MCP client? MCP server?Well, take a listen to find out more!

A few links mentioned in this episode:

Microsoft partners with Anthropic to create MCP SDK

GitHub Repo of the MCP SDK and examples

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Indeed!

Azure Functions has been around for some time. Like AWS Lambda, it allows you to create the smallest piece of functionality for whatever code you need to build i.e. an API, a timer-based execution function and so on. Although you can build an extensive system with Azure functions, you can quickly become embroiled in some spaghetti code and communication between functions (similar to microservices etc.). Now, there is something called Azure Durable Functions - which I have to confess it has been a while since I looked into this, but the key aspect of durable functions was to orchestrate flow and so on between Azure functions.

Which now begs the question, using .NET Aspire within Azure Functions supersedes durable functions?

I am not sure, as I haven’t delved too deeply, but it certainly looks like a more modern approach to build distributed systems and, in this case, with Azure functions. This is not only available when building new Azure Functions, you can add the Aspire orchestration to existing functions too.

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Well, love it or hate it, consumer-based AI app building is here. I haven’t had chance to try Loveable as yet, but for today, we have Replit.

Replit is a new kind of online app building environments that you can use in your browser (or even from a mobile phone) without having to download any editor/development environment. Replit also takes the app building further by hosting your app and even allowing you to make money (bounties!) by selling your app or access or selling your services to help others build on their creations.

Certainly, as an all-in-one browser environment, it is pretty impressive, and I need to give myself more time to properly explore!

It is a strange new world building apps with AI but i think augmented development is here to stay for better or worse!

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Who would have thought? Tron Unicorns! oh yes!

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard designed to connect AI models with external tools, data sources, and services. Think of it as a "USB-C for AI applications"—a universal interface that simplifies how AI systems interact with various resources. MCP enables seamless integration, making it easier to build workflows and enhance AI capabilities.

Quick Overview of MCP:

Purpose: MCP standardizes how applications provide context to AI models, enabling them to fetch data, call tools, and interact with services.

Architecture: It follows a client-server model:

MCP Hosts: Applications like IDEs or AI tools that need access to data.

MCP Clients: Protocol clients that connect to servers.

MCP Servers: Lightweight programs exposing specific capabilities (e.g., accessing databases, APIs, or local files)

Flexibility: MCP supports both local and remote data sources, making it versatile for various use cases.

A few links for MCP “servers” (remember, these are not OS servers, but lightweight “server” programs using MCP to connect to local/remote things like File Systems, YouTube or whatever):

Awesome MCP Servers

VS Code MCP Extension

MCP Server Finder | The Ultimate Model Context Protocol Directory

MCPServers.Net | Find Your Ideal MCP Servers & Resources

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What to say?

Well, thanks to Tim Abell for all of the JFM suggestions - I will get to them I am promise! You can also take a listen to software should be free (and actually, part of this ramble is about just how much free resources there is!).

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I hadn’t realised “Play misty for me” was a crazy phycological thriller (apparently, the first film Clint Eastwood directed). But I just remembered the song actually!

Anyway, similar to Ollama, LM Studio, Msty looks like a very easy option to run LLMs locally (as well as accessing larger models up in the cloud like Open AI etc.).

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Well, another day another AI tool - for coding anyway.

I had a go at building a cross-platform mobile app using GitHub Copilot. It did eventually build something I wanted and better still, using best practices. But it did take some patience!

I have the fortunate (or unfortunate) position to not know when to give up ;)

So, also tried Claude Code. Bit more of a developer tool being a command line tool, but still pretty easy to get going. You do need an active Anthropic account (the people who created Claude Sonnet/Code) and at least $5 of credit. In the app I created, this was less than 5c! Try outsourcing that for that much!

Anyway, more of a weekend ramble this one! rather odd - I have a YouTube channel called “Just Fifteen Mins” but I think I might have to swap around the video and podcast channel at this rate!

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Well, do you want your own private VPN? Network all of your devices (including mobile!) together? oh, and yes for FREE?

Tailscale is definitely worth a look - take a listen to learn more!

FREE! Yes, indeedy for personal use.

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JSON is all around us. How do you make sense of all of that JSON data?

JSONata

A suggestion from a good friend of mine Tim Abell - he also has a fab podcast from properly in the dev trenches! I’m just waiting until Tim just takes the next leap and becomes a symbol ;)

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Well now, the explosion of vector databases is overwhelming (yes, not just “whelming”).

I have been playing around with PostgreSQL pg-vector but if you use Microsoft SQL for your main day-to-day stuff, then vector support is coming! It is in preview for Azure SQL databases as well as SQL 2025 (preview).

Okay, if you are not sure what a vector even is (in AI terms) then:

In artificial intelligence (AI), a vector is a mathematical representation of data, such as words, images, or other entities, in a multi-dimensional space. Each vector consists of a list of numbers that capture the essential features or characteristics of the data it represents. This numerical representation allows AI models to process and analyze complex information more effectively.

Vectorizing Words:

To enable AI systems to understand and manipulate human language, words are converted into vectors through a process called word embedding. This process involves mapping each word to a high-dimensional vector space, where words with similar meanings are positioned closer together. For example, the words "king" and "queen" would be represented by vectors that are near each other in this space, reflecting their semantic similarity.

Link to the MS announcement

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Well, why would you use Docker when Podman is free/open source?

It is a good question!

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Well, a boring episode no doubt, but is prompt engineering still a thing?

What do you think?

I will be running a series of courses soon. Everything from getting started with modern coding to using AI to help code and also baking AI into your own code!

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Taking the Raspberry PI concept a little further and providing a Linux platform, the Mecha Comet is (hopefully!) going to change how I look at Linux computers for sure!

It has a modular design, snap-on extensions and lots of cool stuff! It can be a phone, games machine, electronic fiddling machine, you name it!

Definitely worth checking out!

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Oh goodness me, what a way to start 2025!

Agentic systems - AI Agents - are indeed getting better and better (or worse?).

Today we look at Magentic One and Autogen. We also discuss the split of Autogen from the original founders. Take a listen to learn more!

Magentic One

Autogen

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Well, although I am a long-term user of OneNote, UpNote might just tempt me away!

UpNote has an app for every platform (even Linux no less!) and syncs across seamlessly. A free version exists but also a very cheap monthly version as well as a really cheap lifetime deal.

Worth a look? well, take a listen to learn more :)

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Just a ramble about 2024 and the ever present AI goldrush…

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So, Figma has been around for a while. A designer tool for creating layouts of all kinds be it websites, mobile UI’s and so on.

With AI, and specifically GitHub Copilot Vision, can you build user interfaces? and take that one step further to actually generate the code?

Figma link here

GitHub Copilot Vision here

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Hey welcome again!

Okay, this time around is all about coding from anywhere. Why would you want a cloud development environment? Well, you can develop in the same environment no matter where you are or what computer you are using - even tablets like Android or iPad’s.

Take a listen to learn more :)

Thanks again to my good friend Tim for this suggestion!

Unicorns drink a lot of coffee. Consider a one-off “Unicorn Coffee” here :)

If you feel compelled to help support this on-going (and the YouTube Just Fifteen Mins channel), the click here to become a Patreon :)

Links from the podcast below:

DevPod - Open source and no vendor lock-in

GitHub Codespaces

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YAAICE! (Yet another AI Code Editor)

Yep, there are lots of these IDE/Code Editors popping up all based on VS Code since it is open source, and why not!

We covered cursor.ai a few weeks back which caught me out as I just thought it was VS Code with a different skin, but oh no, it was much more than that.

Windsurf is from the excellent Codeium company. Again, we covered Codeium a while ago. Codeium provided AI code add-ins to most of the known IDE’s and Editors out there allowing a CoPilot style interface but with a selection of LLMs to choose from.

The Windsurf IDE is certainly based on VS code so you can still use all the wonderful extensions and so on, but with sooooo much more. Take a listen!

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Don’t worry, as long as no one creates an AI agent called “Smith”, I think we are all safe!

FOMO time again perhaps, but AI agents ARE going to change the way you live and work. Like everything, it can be a positive or a negative - you choose, but choose wisely :)

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Well, I did a podcast back in Episode 22 (crikey! 2022) covering a few of the key points regarding Docker vs WASM.

It seems WASM (Web Assembly) and WASI (Web Assembly Infrastructure) is continuing to gain strength. WASM containers could be a more lightweight option and will run anywhere - no need to switch from Linux to Windows containers.

Anyway, take a listen to find out more! :)

Some links that can provide a deeper dive if you wish:

InfoWorld Article on WASM vs Docker

Yes! You can run WASM based Docker stuff!

If you really must support me, please do here via Patreon :)

.. and further information on the Docker infrastructure vs Containerd runtime:

Docker

Docker is a comprehensive platform for developing, shipping, and running applications inside containers. It includes several components:

Docker Engine: The core part of Docker, responsible for creating and managing containers.

Docker CLI: The command-line interface for interacting with Docker.

Docker Compose: A tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications.

Docker Hub: A registry for storing and sharing container images.

containerd

containerd is a container runtime that focuses solely on managing the container lifecycle. It was originally part of Docker but was later separated to become an independent project. Key features include:

Container Lifecycle Management: Handles the creation, execution, and supervision of containers.

Image Management: Manages container images, including pulling from registries and storing locally.

Storage and Networking: Manages storage and networking for containers.

OCI Compliance: Uses Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant runtimes like runc for standardization and interoperability.

Key Differences

Scope: Docker is a full-fledged platform with tools for building, shipping, and running containers, while containerd is a more lightweight runtime focused on managing the container lifecycle2.

Components: Docker includes additional tools like Docker Compose and Docker Hub, whereas containerd is primarily concerned with the runtime aspects.

Usage: Docker is often used for development and deployment workflows, providing a user-friendly interface and additional features. containerd is used as a backend component in larger systems like Kubernetes, where it handles the low-level container operations.

In summary, Docker provides a complete ecosystem for container management, while containerd focuses on the core runtime functionalities, making it suitable for integration into other container orchestration systems.

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Well, I originally took a look at Retool a while ago. It is a really rich application builder that allows self-hosting too (as a Docker container). I liked the idea of this given a company might want to have control of apps within their own infrastructure.

Retool as come along leaps and bounds and now:

Still has an amazingly rich application building interface with lots of integrations options including your own API targets
“Hands-Free” PostgreSQL database! Use whatever datastore you want (including the Retool internal one) or indeed PostgreSQL to have full database control either via SQL code or SQL GUI :)
Has a really slick workflow module - you can trigger things, perform actions, and conditions and of course lots of integrations :)
Mobile! Just investigating this, but check it out for yourself!

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Well, AI is certainly helping in all areas of life, for better or worse!

I decided to give GitHub Copilot a run for its money to attempt to create, or at least help, a command-line tool in dotnet to extract XML schema information (yes, they are still a “thing”) to generate SQL creation scripts i.e. table create / stored procedures and so on.

As a bonus, even though I know nothing of the Rust language, my good friend Tim does! (that is the symbol “0x5” formerly known as Tim Abell!)

So, I decided to ask our AI friend to convert the dotnet application to Rust… and it did!

Well, it runs and seems to provide the same output as the dotnet app however, since I don’t really know Rust (yet!), this might give me some insight at least!

Anyway, until the next time!

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Well, if I could sell any software, I would be happy to pay for a Jetbrains subscription!

However, if you are like me, you can now use Jetbrains Rider (for all things .NET) and Webstorm (for all things Javascript/frontend) freeeeeeeee!

I can still seem to ramble on over 5 minutes even with something as simple as this!

Anyway, take care. Until the next time…

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Well, inovation is continuous for sure. Just look at the amount of Javascript frameworks that exist at any one moment!

So, we have cursor IDE. A new (ish) IDE (integrated development environment) for coding in whatever language you want. It is built on the same platform as VS code. The key selling point is it is an AI first IDE, meaning it has AI code assistance built in from the get go. Cursor has a free plan and also paid plans that allow you more flexibility and different AI models.

Although I haven’t given cursor a good run as yet, the issue for me personally, is it is similar to VS code but not quite. I found myself doing things I would do, or look to do, in VS code but were not in the place I remembered from VS code. This is most probably down to just me, but it shows the bigger issue I guess - we all get stuck using things we know and are comfortable with. I have been trying to use Linux more and more but get frustrated by the squillion ways to do something - but again, I am not giving up - it is good to try to expand your own vision!

So, cursor seems to be a nice proposition, but I feel if I am going to use something like that, I would keep using VS Code. In addition, Codeium is pretty cool! I did a podcast about it a while ago, and it is sort of like GitHub Copilot (mandatory $10 per month) but works with whatever editor you like (they state over 40+ IDE/editors!) as well as being a simple browser extension! The great thing is with Codeium, it has a very generous free plan and on the paid version (pro version is the same as GitHub Copilot at $10 per month), you can switch between AI models. Codeium is a nice modular way to get a similar experience across a wide variety of IDE/Editors instead of putting all your focus into just one thing like cursor. Again, not putting cursor down as I haven’t tried it for long enough, but there we go!

So, take care until the next exciting episode ;)

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Well, what to say… 100 episodes! yes, polluting the digital airwaves for far too long!

Taking a quick retrospective look back - he says, as if 100 episodes is an achievement!

Ulysees the Unicorn will be happy to welcome you :)

(You can subscribe free by the way!)

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Well, if you have ever heard of NodeJS then this might be of interest to you :)

NodeJS has been around for quite some time, and used by a lot of large companies - but it did have some issues (not to mention the whole NPM world!).

The creator of NodeJS went away a few years ago to create DENO (yes, switch those letters around!). DENO aimed to fix some of the failings of NodeJS but didn’t support a lot of the existing NodeJS ecosystem.

DENO 2 does let you use the older NodeJS modules as well as it’s own newer modules which are, apparently, a lot safer.

Also, I didn’t quite do my research - DENO 2 is built with RUST :)

Deno is written in Rust and based on the V8 engine that powers Chromium browsers. "Rust has been crucial to Deno’s development, especially with Rusty V8, recently stabilized," Dahl told The Register. "Rust's unified build system simplifies adding third-party functionality compared to C++, keeping Deno fast and reliable for server-side apps."

Anyway, take a listen and here are a few links if you need them.

https://deno.com/

https://fresh.deno.dev/

DENO 2 Serverless hosting

Okay, take care until the next time!

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Well now, are you using Docker? never heard of Docker? well perhaps you might want to ask AI to help there.

If you do use Docker to create containers of your apps/micro-services then what about Fly.io?

Fly.io is a public cloud infrastructure platform. Users deploy applications as Docker images, but Fly.io does not utilize Docker to run the applications.

Docker images are actually OCI (Open Container Initiative) images, which are essentially stacks of tarballs (are these similar to harballs that a cat has?). Fly.io unpacks these layers onto virtual machines and can retrieve the container manifest from the Docker registry.

Fly.io employs a custom registry to fetch and unpack image layers. It utilizes Firecracker microVMs for virtualization. Firecracker is a virtual machine manager that creates lightweight microVMs. Fly.io uses Firecracker to orchestrate these VMs, along with containerD for isolation. ContainerD is responsible for managing and unpacking application images, with each app instance running on its own isolated kernel.

There are some generous free options described here.

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Well, what do you know? back to some frontend web stuff no less!

I have been using bootstrap CSS for years, and still do, but when I eventually realised Tailwind CSS was “something”, I have since been trying a few projects out with Tailwind CSS. However, because I am lazy and have been using WordPress with Elementor (page builder), I stumbled across dev dojo and some of their product offerings, one of which is “tails” - a page builder using Tailwind CSS no less! It looks really cool and produces a webpage/site with Tailwind CSS for the display aspects.

Interestingly, dev dojo also have a product called “pines” which using AlpineJS and TailwindCSS to build really stylish websites too… AlpineJS is an ultra-minimal JavaScript framework that I really must rediscover!

Until next time, take care!

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We are not talking just chatbots - albeit more intelligent ones!

An AI agent/assistant can be tasked to do specific things to reach a goal and work with other agents, either in parallel, or sequential (i.e. do all these things first, then does this).

The cool thing is each AI agent can use a completely different model i.e. you don’t have to tie everything into just chatGPT/Open AI. You might find a different model or model sets beneficial for certain things.

Also, the big component is a mix of RAG (retrieval augmented generation), goal setting and external “tools” or functions where you can call out to external systems.

I will be creating a video (Just Fifteen Mins! as if I ever stick to any timeline!) to explain a few of these concepts in more details. I am also going to be creating a workshop course too! not overly technical, but mostly from a business perspective about the concepts and how they could benefit companies. Again, we are not talking just fancy chatbots!

Until next time, take care everyone!

Please consider subscribing too! It’s okay, you don’t have to pay - unless you want to of course! :) If you do pay for a subscription, you will get a free weekly update from the chief unicorn - Ulysses :)

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Well, for the time being, I am sticking with OneNote as I have so much in there!

However, the way Obsidian Notes is moving, is looking tempting. Of course, the notes/data stay on your device which is a plus however, for convenience, you will most likely need the data synchronised to your other devices. It is possible of course!

Also, AI is ever creeping in to everything in modern life - love it or hate it.

Obsidian

Obsidian Sync

Obsistants for Obsidian

Until next time, take care!

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Okay, two suggestions for the price of one!

Both from my good friend Tim Abel who also has a podcast if you wish to take a listen.

In fairness, the first GitHub Action thing, I have little idea of what/how this is used and even when I looked at the use case, I was still a little baffled! I guess you need to be “an actual developer” to appreciate this! :)

On to the second suggestion, Playwright for browser web app testing. I get this and it is nice to remember that you don’t need to code lots of things like good old selenium. You can test your web app as a user would use your application. It has some wide support for different languages and seems to be easy enough to get started.

Thanks again Tim!

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VMWare “Player” was always free, but the workstation (or Mac Fusion Pro) used to cost real money (not Unicorn dollars).

No you can create VM’s on your laptop/Mac for freeeeeeee

Here is the post for VMWare

“And now for something completely different”, as Monty Python once said:

VS Code Profiles! yes, if you are like me and have far too many extensions in VS Code, maybe use profiles to split up the different categories of development! with different themes too!

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Why? oh why?

That is all…

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Okay, free for as long as you have an Azure subscription ;)

Still, who doesn’t want a 32gb cloud-based Azure SQL database to play with?

Check out the details here

Of course you can then use something like Azure Data Studio to work with the database - again for free! it even has a free version of Copilot for Azure Data Studio so you can look like a SQL pro! (I did say “look like” ;) )

Hey and what the heck, why not throw a REST or GraphQL API at the database too - for free! using Data API Builder.

I will be showing some of the above in action via a new-fangled device called a “video” - apparently all the kids these days are doing this…

Just Five Mins! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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I remember the days when we had to create Docker containers to deploy our apps…

Well, you still can use Docker - more on that later.

Fermyon Spin (and so much more) is a framework to build WASM (Web Assembly) apps. I covered a little of this back in Episode 65 and an intro to Fermyon a while back.

This episode was prompted by my good friend Tim Abel who also has a podcast called Software Should Be Free (check it out, some good insights here).

Quite a bit to get into in this episode - hence it ran over to 10 mins! which reminds me, I really should delve a little deeper into some of these articles and produce a video on my “Just 15 mins” YouTube channel… BTW, it is just full of tumbleweeds right now ;)

Anyway, Docker desktop also has beta support for running WASM modules too! Again, will get more details together and perhaps a video for that one!

Dotnet is not forgotten either! since dotnet 8, experimental WASM/WASI features have been thrown in.

Take a listen for more info

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Memory-Optimized Tables, also known as In-Memory OLTP, were introduced in SQL Server 2014. This feature was further enhanced in subsequent versions of SQL Server, including SQL Server 2016, 2017, and in Azure. However, in Azure, they're only available in the Premium tier.

Memory-Optimized Tables in SQL Server are a feature that provides significant performance improvements by storing table data in memory and optimizing data access. Here's an overview:

What are Memory-Optimized Tables? Memory-Optimized Tables are tables that have their data completely held in memory, eliminating disk access except for durability purposes. This allows SQL Server to redesign how data access is handled, including locking and latching, resulting in substantially improved performance.
How do they work? Memory-Optimized Tables store their data in memory using multiple versions of each row’s data. This technique, known as "Non-blocking multi-version optimistic concurrency control", eliminates both Locks and Latches, thus achieving breakthrough performance. All row versions are maintained in the same table data structure. Row versioning is used to allow concurrent reads and writes on the same row.
Durability of Data: Memory-Optimized Tables are fully durable by default, meaning that like transactions on (traditional) disk-based tables, transactions on memory-optimized tables are fully atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable (ACID). A second copy of the table data is maintained on disk, but only for durability purposes. Data in memory-optimized tables is only read from disk during database recovery (e.g., after a server restart).
Non-Durable Tables: Besides the default durable memory-optimized tables, SQL Server also supports non-durable memory-optimized tables, which are not logged and their data is not persisted on disk. This means that transactions on these tables do not require any disk IO, but the data will not be recovered if there is a server crash or failover.
Limitations: Memory-optimized tables and natively compiled stored procedures support only a subset of Transact-SQL features. Starting with SQL Server 2016, and in Azure SQL Database, there are no limitations for collations or code pages that are specific to In-Memory OLTP.

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I tried to do a “simple” overview of vector databases back in September 2023 (Episode 57 if you really want to know). I tried to get a basic overview back then and now, I figured, I would try to delve into this a little deeper.

Oh, that was such a wrong decision! (or was it?)

Vector databases, or at least vectors, are nothing that new but vector databases do seem to be quite a new thing although I suspect vector storage has been around for some time too of course.

Anyway, my brain is most definitely pickled and if you want your brain to be pickled too, then take a listen (at your own risk ;) ).

A few links from my ramblings:

What is a vector database (Amazon AWS)

About the k-NN algorithm - in this example, used within AWS OpenSearch

PostgreSQL vector database features (pgvector)

Microsoft: vector database explanation

Microsoft vector search

Back to school to learn some basic mathematics!

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So, you don’t want to go down the whole ETL (Extract Transform Load) route in order to access external data from your Microsoft SQL server?

Okay, what about MS SQL Polybase?

Take a listen to learn more and to see how you could access external data using T-SQL without having to ETL the data into your environment - leaving the external data where it is.

For me personally, the CSV option via say Amazon S3 buckets, Azure Storage is an interesting option as well as being able to query SAP HANA data and possibly even joining to SQL database data ;)

Here are some links to delve deeper if you so wish:

What is Polybase / Data Virtualization

Virtualize a CSV file into SQL

Accessing generic ODBC sources

Accessing SAP HANA data via Polybase

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We all love JSON data, don’t we?

Well, unless you are working with JSON directly from say C# or whatever flavour of language you use, working with JSON data can be a challenge sometimes. Sure, if you are in native JavaScript land or one of the many plethora of JS frameworks, then “JavaScript Object Notation” (aka JSON) isn’t much use!

jq is a really neat command line JSON processor. Written in portable C, it seems to be available anywhere… and I mean anywhere! even the old Solaris (Sun Microsystems).

There is a great tutorial too!

Thanks to my good friend Tim Abell for suggesting this one!

Maybe check out Tim’s podcast too!

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Okay, so just to be clear, DAB (Data API Builder) doesn’t simply expose your database ;) better make that clear!

However, when you need to build the key components to work with a database i.e. CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete), then you can of course use whatever method you like. But what if an API can be delivered for you? better still you can have REST or GraphQL or both!

Oh, and yes, it works with MS-SQL databases, Azure SQL but also noSQL databases and MySQL/PostgresQL too! :)

Anyway, take a listen to learn more.

Links from the podcast:

Data API Builder on Github

More in-depth MS Learn docs

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What is the most popular database engine around?

Well, a good contender is SQLite - it has been around for years and is in pretty much every device! yes, inside your Android and iPhone as well as many others including the web browser (I have only looked at using via WASM BTW!).

SQLite is a flat file based SQL database with some rather nifty features (including functions, CTE and JSON support via plugins). It has an amazing ecosystem and has been around for a long, long time.

SQLite cloud is taking the next step - SQLite, well, in the cloud! multi-region support, local/cloud sync and much more!

Take a listen to find out more.

Links below from the show:

SQLite official docs

SQLite CTE support

SQLite JSON support

SQLite Cloud!

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Well, perhaps this should have been one for my other podcast (just experimenting with “What’s going on with…”) although, here it is trying to fit within just five minutes - not a chance!! :)

Okay, so a ramble it is! Covering some AI investment observations as well as AI hardware - the brutal world of trying something new and attempting to break ground into new markets, even if you don’t need them ;)

I reference a couple of links which are below:

The investment video I mentioned is here

The limitless AI site which includes the AI hardware pendant (where I would bet my AI hardware money) is here

Okay, if you managed to get through the whole podcast, I should honestly buy you a coffee or beer or whatever you care to enjoy!

I promise I will not make too many of these weekend rambles! back to normal JFM’s now :)

Oh, and if you want to understand/take a look at Nvidia GeForce Cloud Gaming, the link is here (I cannot believe I didn’t understand the whole proposition of this!)

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I think I covered some basics about Docker dev containers a while ago when it was new’ish in beta.

Recently, I have been playing more and more with dev containers to save cluttering up my local machine and being able to be truly portable. I can take my dev container with me :) Windows, Mac, Linux - all works the same.

What is really fun is being able to say develop dotnet with SQL Server within a dev container, and have that same experience across any platform - including GitHub Codespaces - essentially developing fully in that infamous cloud! Might have to revisit a Codespace episode in the future!

But for now, enjoy, and here are some links to get you started if you wish to do so:

Docker Desktop - Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm Pilot

Dev Containers

As a bonus link, test containers! a clean test environment whenever you need it :)

Test Containers

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GitHub Copilot is great, you do have to pay and it integrates nicely with VSCode and Visual Studio but what if there was a generic AI code assistant that is free to use and you can use it anywhere (not on the moon I am guessing)?

Codeium is the tool we are talking about.

It has a lovely free account that is pretty feature rich and you can use it all over the place! in your favourite IDE/text editor and even as a browser extension :)

Codeium also have trained their own models - no reliance on OpenAI or other API’s.

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Well, it was Microsoft build conference recently and although there were some interesting announcements most were, of course, AI and Copilot related.

I have to say though, the new ARM based Windows “Copilot + PC’s” (my goodness, they need a better name!) do look rather interesting!

New Windows 11 File Explorer - 7-zip/TAR and built in GIT source control

Windows Copilot + PCs

Copilot runtime and library (local “SLM” small language models)

Until next time, take care!

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Well, moving single pieces of data from one system to other systems isn’t too complicated. What happens when you need to move batches of data?

This is an old problem and an older scenario for sure - nothing that new here!

Perhaps, just tweaking how you might approach staging data, might help. That is what I am talking about today :)

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Well, Tim Abel returns!

My good friend Tim (see the link above for more about him!) kindly joined me to discuss software testing - specifically outside in testing!

This podcast came about after I had listened to Tim’s podcast episode, and this spurred me on to ask a few questions! (well, three actually!)

Since Tim is a contract developer/team lead type of person, he has some wonderful experience working with many teams, and especially larger teams.

For someone like me, who isn’t a real developer these days, I wanted to try to understand where software testing is at these days. I remember doing some TDD (test driven development) and E2E (end to end) testing with some projects in the past, but these days I don’t get the exposure of larger scale software testing principles. It does seem things have moved on quite a bit!

Tim has a great approach about outside in testing from a user perspective. Please check out his full episode (above link) as it is well worth the listen!

Until next time, cheery bye!

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Well, YARP - the open-source Microsoft dotnet (or .NET if you are old school!) reverse proxy (Yet Another Reverse Proxy). If you have watched the movie Hot Fuzz or live in the west country UK, then this might steal a laugh:

Hot Fuzz YARP!

So, YARP is used internally by Microsoft and within Azure I believe. It is essentially a web-service you configure to handle routing, authentication, transformations and all of that. The advantage is this is code, your code - you can host it where you need it.

I have done previous episodes on Azure API management/gateways and also Zuplo, but for reference, the links to Zuplo and a new API management service I stumbled on, Treblle are below.

Zuplo API management

Treblle API management

I have used Azure API management gateway a fair bit in the past however, I am a fan of Zuplo right now. I haven’t had chance to play with Treblle as yet so I will update once I have!

Until next time!

P.S: Just Fifteen Mins YouTube will be going live soon :)

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Well, another recording, ramble mode enabled (is it ever switched off?).

If 2023 brought AI to the masses, then 2024 seems to be the rise of AI hardware. AI in your pocket (or in this case on your clothes!).

Take a listen to get a quick (ish) overview of two AI devices pushing into our lives :)

The humane AI pin

The new re-branded limitless.ai software and AI pendant

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Okay, a “real” ramble for a public holiday (well, here in the UK at least).

dApps, smart contracts, blockchain? what the heck is all of this!

Well, you must have heard of Bitcoin right?

Ethereum (which has been around since approx. 2015) has had this idea of smart contracts where developers can create dApps for various distributed blockchain applications - everything from logistics type stuff to procurement and custom crypto currencies.

Well, Bitcoin has primarily been just a crypto currency - until recently.

BVM (Bitcoin Virtual Machine) is out providing a way to build on the Bitcoin blockchain network (known as L2 or Layer 2) in a similar way to Ethereum.

If you must, take a listen to the ramble in this podcast. I will link to some further resources soon - especially how to build dApps/Smart Contracts, but for now:

Bitcoin BVM

Blockchain/ledge in SQL 2022

dApps

I really need to re-visit the above two older podcasts and drill into the detail a bit - as well as bring them up to date :)

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Using .NET/dotnet? need some easy AI? Using at least dotnet 6?

Smart components - from the great mind(s) that brought you Blazor!

Still an experiment at the moment, but a neat way to create drop-in-replacement of say text boxes/text areas and combo/dropdown boxes that use some magic AI.

Use cases are actually quite subtle and useful. Check out the podcast for further info and we have some links below to delve a little deeper if you need to.

Github Repo for smart components

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So, more note taking apps!

I am still a steadfast OneNote user and I have tried Notion as well as Microsoft Loop of late.

Obsidian was something a saw a couple of years back but looked really basic. The selling point at the time (and one of the main points still) is your notes are stored locally or wherever you decided to save them i.e. not directly linked to a cloud provider like Microsoft, Google and so on.

Obsidian as a nifty graph built in too - this is where the knowledge management aspect kicks in, and for all its gimmicky premise, it actually very clear and useful IMHO!

Take a listen to learn more.

Obsidian link here

Pricing information (keep in mind it really is FREE for personal use with all features!)

A way better explanation of what is the Markdown Format here :)

For Android, I am using this Folder Sync Pro app - not sponsored BTW! but seems to do the job!I did have an issue with the “two-way” sync TBH however, I just setup two one-way syncs to better manage things anyway! They do have an early release of a desktop app and MAC/Linux etc. coming soon.

Okay, that is that - catch you next time.

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… a bit like Michael Jackson’s “filler” song ;)

Well, just a ramble (what’s new?) about a few odd things I have been reading.

Amazon DynamoDB - How many requests per second? !!

In 2021, there was a 66-hour Amazon Prime Day shopping event.

The event generated some staggering stats:

○ Trillions of API calls were made to the database by Amazon applications.

○ The peak load to the database reached 89 million requests per second.

○ The database provided single-digit millisecond performance while maintaining high availability.

All of this was made possible by DynamoDB.

Amazon’s DynamoDB is a NoSQL cloud database service that promises consistent performance at any scale.

History of DynamoDB

In the early years, Amazon realized that letting applications access traditional enterprise databases was an invitation to multiple scalability challenges such as managing connections, dealing with concurrent workloads, and handling schema updates.

Also, high availability was a critical property for always-online systems. Any downtime negatively impacted the company’s revenue.

There was a pressing need for a highly scalable, available, and durable key-value database for fast-changing data such as a shopping cart.

Dynamo was a response to this need.

However, there was one drawback of Dynamo. It was a single-tenant system and teams were responsible for managing their own Dynamo installations. In other words, every team that used Dynamo had to become experts on various parts of the database service, creating a barrier to adoption.

At about the same time, Amazon launched SimpleDB which reduced operational burden for the teams by providing a managed and elastic experience. The engineers within Amazon’s development team preferred using SimpleDB even though Dynamo might be more suitable for their use case.

But SimpleDB also had some limitations such as:

The tables had a small storage capacity of 10 GB.
Request throughput was low.
Unpredictable read and write latencies because all table attributes were indexed.

Also, the operational burden wasn’t eliminated. Developers still had to take care of dividing data between multiple tables to meet their application’s storage and throughput requirements.

Therefore, the engineers concluded that a better solution would be to combine the best parts of Dynamo (scalability and predictable high performance) with the best parts of SimpleDB (ease of administration, consistency, and a table-based data model).

This led to the launch of DynamoDB as a public AWS service in 2012. It was a culmination of everything they had learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.

Over the years, DynamoDB has added several features based on customer demand.

The below timeline illustrates this constant progress.

Operational Requirements of DynamoDB

DynamoDB has evolved over the years, much of it in response to Amazon’s experiences building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services. A key challenge has been adding features without impacting the key operational requirements.

The below diagram shows the six fundamental operational requirements fulfilled by DynamoDB.

Let’s look at each of them in a little more detail.

Fully Managed Cloud Service

A fundamental goal of DynamoDB is to free developers from the burden of running their database system. This includes things like patching software, configuring a distributed database cluster, and taking care of hardware needs.

The applications can just talk to the DynamoDB API for creating tables. They can read and write data without worrying about where those tables are physically stored or how they’re being managed.

DynamoDB handles everything for the developer right from resource provisioning to software upgrades, data encryption, taking backups, and even failure recovery.

Multi-Tenant Architecture

DynamoDB also aims to create cost savings for the customers.

One way to achieve this is using a multi-tenant architecture where data from different customers is stored on the same physical machines. This ensures better resource utilization and lets Amazon pass on the savings to the customers.

However, you still need to provide workload isolation in a multi-tenant system.

DynamoDB takes care of it via resource reservations, tight provisioning, and monitoring usage for every customer.

Boundless Scale for Tables

Unlike SimpleDB, there are no predefined limits for how much data can be stored in a DynamoDB table.

DynamoDB is designed to scale the resources dedicated to a table from several servers to many thousands as needed. A table can grow elastically to meet the demands of the customer without any manual intervention.

Predictable Performance

DynamoDB guarantees consistent performance even when the tables grow from a few megabytes to hundreds of terabytes.

For example, if your application is running in the same AWS region as its data, you can expect to see average latency in the low single-digit millisecond range.

DynamoDB handles any level of demand through horizontal scaling by automatically partitioning and repartitioning data as and when needed.

Highly Available

DynamoDB supports high availability by replicating data across multiple data centers or availability zones.

Customers can also create global tables that are geo-replicated across selected regions and provide low latency all across the globe. DynamoDB offers an availability SLA of 99.99% for regular tables and 99.999% for global tables.

Flexible Use Cases

Lastly, DynamoDB has a strong focus on flexibility and doesn’t force developers to follow a particular data model.

There’s no fixed schema and each data item can contain any number of attributes. Tables use a key-value or document data model where developers can opt for strong or eventual consistency while reading items from the table.

Prompt Engineering is already dead?

Well, who knows! but if you are brave enough to try, Google Collab (to allow you to run heavier workloads in the cloud instead of your own laptop/PC) has a process by Anthropic:

Anthropic is the company behind Claude AI too!

Okay, until next time! As promised, I have an overview of Obsidian Note Taking App coming up soon!

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Well, Unicorns aside for a moment, let us delve into the world of API gateways and why you might need one - certainly if you build API’s that is!

I have used Azure API gateway management for quite some years now, since it first appeared on Azure actually! But that’s nothing to brag about since it has changed immensely over recent years.

So why do you need an API gateway? what’s in it for me you might ask. Well, have a listen and found out :)

Thanks to the lovely Scott Hanselman for providing the insight for this JFM.

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Work with databases? especially Microsoft SQL Server or Azure SQL? then roll up, roll up for yet more AI - just when you think you can’t eat anymore AI, there is room for just a bit more :)

Optionally (and it is a bit gross in a funny way) it reminds me off Monty Python’s Mr Creosote:

Anyway, back to business!

Even though the name “Azure Data Studio” has “Azure” in it, you can use it as an updated replacement to say SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). ADS is built on the same foundations as VS Code and therefore can be used cross-platform (yeah, you can use MS-SQL on Linux don’t you know!). In fact, a lot of my local dev work uses MS-SQL 2022 within a Linux based docker container. Saves me having a local instance running and I can switch between versions much easier!

ADS (when you install some “needed” extensions from MS!) is almost on par with SSMS and has a lot of advantages. Because ADS is built on the same foundations as VS Code, you can install extensions. Also, you get really good IntelliSense i.e. completion of commands and so on. You can manage PostgreSQL and MySQL as well as MongoDB and Azure Cosmos DB.

So, no surprise that ADS now has GitHub Copilot :) Yeah, you need to pay for GitHub Copilot, but you do get lots of immediate assistance right there when working with SQL or data structures (as opposed to jumping over to ChatGPT).

Here are some links as noted in the podcast:

Overview of Copilot in ADS

Getting started with ADS

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I can just hear the Rocky theme music (eye of the tiger) playing in the background…

So, why produce a filler episode? hey well all TV series seem to so why not me!

Nothing too detailed this time around just the sheer gasp of the revenue these cloud providers are making.

Sit back, sip your favourite beverage, and perhaps perform a good old face palm (is that still a thing?) at the magnitude of these figures!

P.S: I am not condoning the above, just a casual observer :)

The link to the original article is you wish to read further…

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AI Overload (for now!)

Oh yes, AI overload for sure!

This time around we take a casual stroll around Open AI assistants and GPTs.

GPTs are custom chatGPT instances anyone can create. For example, you can create your own GPT to allow an upload of PDFs (or several) and perform some "chatGPT" type stuff on that or those specific PDFs. Lots more you can do, so check the links below.

Assistants are similar to GPTs however, this is more for developers. You do not get an easy front-end to create GPTs, you use code to call assistant APIs. But this also provides some deeper options for creating multi-model GPTs or chaining (langchain) multiple requests to different models (i.e. understanding text, then images, sound etc.). Assistants make it possible to create more complex AI based apps and allow for fine tuning of prompts, setting the tone (i.e. "You are a design specialist in the area of website building") to name a few.

Anyway, take care until next time!

OpenAI GPT store and how to create your own GPTs

OpenAI Assistants - the developer side of creating your own GPTs

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Welcome back!

For this episode, kindly suggested by my good friend Tim Abell, we have a privacy first knowledge management app for all of your devices. You could download the code, run as a docker container which means you could keep everything on your own environment instead of letting those massive corporations control you! ( :) ).

Anyway, take a listen for more and the links as mentioned are below:

Link to Logseq GitHub main page here

(scroll down a bit to see the main read me)

Link to the main website of Logseq - I forgot to mention they have iOS, Android and Desktop covered!

The wonderful Tim "whispering Bob" Abell Software Should Be Free podcast

Finally, a direct link to the codebase read me for Logseq if you want to explore further

Until the next time, take care!

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We all love to aspire to be something better :) even robots!

.NET Aspire is a new way to build out microservice type projects. I believe I am correct in saying Aspire definitely had some foundations from project TYE which was an experiment a year or so back.

In addition, DAPR is also a similar offering however, Aspire aims to be rather opinionated (which can be a good thing!) and DAPR is more of a pick and choose offering.

Anyway, a few links below, but take a listen for some further ramblings!

Aspire release preview 2

Some info on how Aspire and DAPR are different but complimentary

DAPR - the distributed application runtime thingy!

Until next time, take care.

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Welcome back. Whhhaaassup with WASM and WASI - look, I'm trying okay!

Anyway, WASM and WASI - what does all of this mean?

That is what we are talking about today!

Some links on WASM/WASI:

Get on the Blazor Train - WASM from the dotnet world

Original JFM about Fermyon

From the dotnet perspective - WASM/WASI

The next level of cloud compute?

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Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays or whatever you want to call it!

A couple of links from the show:

https://hanselminutes.com/922/education-should-be-free-with-freecodecamps-quincy-larson

Blinkist: Best Book Summaries - Black Friday Deal

Until the next time, take care.

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Go on! you need this!

Wow, I know this gets used everywhere, but you have to say, his enthusiasm was right there, along with a rather sweaty shirt :) But does he care? probably not since he is a billionaire, right?

Well, replace "developers, developers" with "AI, AI" - I just don't have the time or skills to do a clever video rework!

But goodness me, AI does seem to be moving at a pace. Of course, the key bit is trying to find some really practical ways to use it! :)

So, the first thing is the Humane pin. Is this the Apple iPhone moment for smartphones generally? well, it is a device that "pins" to your jacket/shirt etc. (although I would say it is more like a badge!). Interesting concept given that it is in the realm of a pricey smartphone but without a screen as such - although it does have a cool green laser which will display stuff on your hand when you hold it out in front of you. It is completely driven by AI, and that accounts for the $699 price tag but also $24 per month for the mobile/cell access. I am not sure about the rest of the world as yet, but I am guessing it will be equivalent pricing. Here is a link to another news article coving the key points.

Also, the drama of OpenAI of late:

OpenAI (who bring you chatGPT) board of directors fired Sam Altman (CEO) apparently for not exactly telling the truth... but about what you ask?
After a couple of days, Microsoft (a big investor in OpenAI) offered a job to Sam Altman and anyone else from OpenAI
The day after, it seems the OpenAI board of directors were disbanded (although I don't know the exact scenario!) and Sam Altman was back as CEO

Allegedly, the reason for this "not telling the truth" bit was about the latest internal GPT (or otherwise!) possibly named "Q*" internally having reached AGI status. AGI means "Artificial General intelligence.". Basically, the AI can reason and approach a problem as a human could (although there are many, many descriptions of AGI!).

So many more things, but that will do for today!

Take care until the next time!

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A heavily Microsoft slant for this one!

Where do I begin... well, have a listen, and if you really want to know more I have summarised the overall .NET conf stuff below :)

.NET Conf 2023 Keynote - Welcome to .NET 8 Introduction * .NET Conf over the next 3 days, hear from team, partners, and the .NET Community about what's new in .NET and things people are building with it. * Goal: build a unified development platform that developers love and businesses trust, enabling them to build any kind of application with best-in-class runtime, programming languages, development tools, and a vast ecosystem. * Momentum: .NET used by over 6 million developers, adopting the latest version faster than ever, over 50,000 contributors to date, the most admired framework on Stack Overflow survey, and one of the highest velocity open source projects. * Launching .NET 8, one of the largest releases, built with trust and contributions from developers worldwide.

"Tomorrow our goal with .NET is to build a unified development platform that developers love and businesses trust."

Performance Improvements in .NET 8 * .NET 8 brings over 1,250 performance improvements. * Significant improvements in performance across frameworks and programming languages. * Notable improvements in the TechEmpower web framework benchmarks using ASP.NET Core, with an 18% improvement in the Json API scenario, reaching nearly 1 million requests per second. * In the Fortune scenario, which simulates real-world workload including database access and HTML rendering, a 24% improvement was achieved, reaching over 300,000 requests per second.

".NET 8 brings over 1,250 performance improvements."

Full Stack Web Apps and APIs with ASP.NET Core in .NET 8 * ASP.NET Core in .NET 8 offers everything needed to build modern web apps, whether browser-based or scalable backend services. * No need to stitch together multiple frameworks, as ASP.NET Core provides a complete solution out of the box. * Includes Blazor, a front-end web framework for .NET, which allows using server and client together for full stack web UI needs. * Blazor in .NET 8 provides enhanced server-side rendering, navigation, and streaming rendering, optimizing page load time and elevating the user experience. * Improved performance in Blazor WebAssembly, with components rendering 20% faster. * New tooling enhances developer experience in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

"ASP.NET Core in .NET 8 has everything you need to build modern web apps... No need to stitch together a solution from multiple different frameworks."

"Blazor now includes enhanced server-side rendering capabilities... so you can optimize page load time and elevate the user experience."

New APIs and Enhanced Tooling in ASP.NET Core for Productivity * ASP.NET Core in .NET 8 packed with new APIs that boost developer productivity. * New tooling in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code enhances the developer experience. * Route Tooling in .NET 8 highlights route parameters and provides helpful warnings for unused parameters. * Primary Constructors feature in C# 2 allows concise syntax for declaring constructors with parameters available in the entire class body. * Enhanced Web CIL packaging format for deployment simplifies the process. * New built components for displaying data, defining section outlets, and handling authentication improve productivity.

"ASP.NET Core in .NET 8 packed with new APIs that allow you to be more productive."

"New tooling in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code enhances the developer experience."

Endpoints Explorer in Visual Studio * Visual Studio has an Endpoints Explorer tool that allows developers to browse all routes registered in their application. * The routes are discovered statically, so there is no need to build or run the application to see them.

"I don't need to build or run my application in order to see these routes. They're all discovered statically."

Generating Requests for Endpoints * Developers can select any endpoint and right-click to generate a request for it. * Visual Studio has a built-in HTTP request client that shows the request and response right within the IDE.

"I can select any of the endpoints that I've created, here's my new one and right click to generate a request for it. This request will show up in Visual Studio's new built-in HTTP request client."

Testing API Endpoints * It is important to test API endpoints before shipping to production. * The speaker shares that they have already started writing tests for the API endpoint. * They mention using collection expressions, a new C# 12 feature, to provide a parameter value for a method that takes an IEnumerable.

"I've added a new test to exercise the API endpoint that I've just introduced, and I'm using another cool new C# 12 feature, collection expressions, to provide a parameter to a method that takes an IEnumerable."

Debugging and Fixing Test * The test fails because it was not able to find the route associated with the new endpoint. * The speaker sets a breakpoint after registering all the routes in the application and debugs the test to figure out the issue. * The debugger display for the app type in .NET 8 has been improved, allowing better examination of the registered endpoints.

"My test is failing because it was not able to find the route associated with the new endpoint that I just added. I'm going to set a break point right here at the entry point for my application and start debugging my test to figure out what might be going on."

"The debugger display for this type and quite a few others in ASP.NET has been improved in this particular case. I can take a look and examine the endpoints that are registered in my application."

Front-End UI and Blazer * The speaker introduces the front-end UI for the web app and mentions that it is built using Blazer and Blazer components. * Blazer allows for server-side rendering and enhances the page loading experience by making it faster and smoother.

"That Dev experience for building that new endpoint API looked amazing."

"This whole web app is built using Blazer and Blazer components."

Server-Side Rendering with Blazer * Blazer and .NET 8 support server-side rendering, allowing the web app to be fully rendered from the server. * This improves the page loading speed and scalability.

"Blazer and .NET 8 support static server rendering."

Enhanced Navigation and Form Handling with Blazer * Blazer enhances page navigation by intercepting requests and intelligently updating the DOM without requiring a full page reload. * This results in faster and smoother navigation without losing scroll position. * Blazer also enhances form handling by intercepting form requests and using fetch requests instead of full page reloads.

"Instead of doing a full page reload, Blazer's intercepting the request, doing a fetch request, and then intelligently updating the DOM with the retrieved content from the server."

Static Server Rendering and Enhanced Form Handling in Action * The speaker demonstrates the enhanced navigation and form handling features in the running app. * When filtering or submitting a form, the updates are fast, smooth, and preserve scroll position.

"It's fast, it's smooth, and I no longer lose my scroll position."

"It's fast, it's smooth, and I no longer lose my scroll position."

"That's enhanced navigation and form handling."

Streaming Rendering in Blazor * Apply streaming rendering attribute to the component to enable streaming rendering in Blazor.

With streaming rendering, Blazor will render the component immediately with some placeholder content, allowing for a faster user experience while the API call is being made. Once the API call is completed, Blazor will render the component again and stream the updated content to the browser. This provides a much better user experience as the page loads quickly and updates are streamed automatically.

Interactivity in Blazor Components * Apply the interactive render mode to build richly interactive components in Blazor. * Use either Blazor Server or Blazor Web Assembly to add interactivity to specific components. * Disable pre-rendering if animation repetition is undesired.

By applying the interactive render mode in Blazor, developers can create interactive and responsive user experiences. Even when using server side rendering, components such as a chatbot can be made interactive. This allows for a seamless user experience as users can simultaneously interact with the chatbot while browsing and filtering the product catalog.

No Websockets Required for Streaming Rendering * Streaming rendering in Blazor does not require a Websocket connection. * Streamed updates are sent on the same response used for the initial request.

Unlike other techniques, streaming rendering in Blazor does not require Websockets. The updates are sent on the same response used for the initial request, ensuring a streamlined and efficient process.

Maui and the C and C devkit extensions * Developers can install the Maui extension to easily set up the necessary dependencies. * Maui extension will automatically pull in other required extensions. * Detailed instructions for setting up Maui are available.

"Maui the C and the C devkit extensions"

Writing and debugging mobile apps with Maui * After setting up the Maui workloads, developers can start writing and debugging mobile apps. * Apps can be tested on any target platform supported by the device. * The speaker demonstrates running an app on a Mac, with Xcode and Android SDK installed. * The speaker shows the available deployment options, including the pixel emulator and different simulators provided by Xcode. * To run the app, the speaker simply hits the run button.

"once you have the Maui workloads you can then start writing your mobile apps and debugging them and trying them on any Target platform that your device supports so on my Mac here I have um xcode installed and I have my Android SDK installed so I can actually see all of those things when I zoom in down here to what we're calling our language status item um and it's telling me the project that I'm deploying to and also the target I'm deploying to so I'm going to go up and pin this so I can see it um and then when I click on this that says my Mac I can see all of the valid places I can deploy this app to so I have my pixel emulator and then I have all of the different simulators that xcode gives me we are going to run this on my Mac all I have to do is hit run and debug if I want to create a launch Json file I totally can but it's really easy to just hit run or hit F5 if that's what you like to do give it a second and then you see that the debugger launches and the app is going to pop right up for me"

Customizing Maui apps for different platforms * The speaker showcases a rebuilt version of the eShop app with a customized user interface using Maui. * The app's UI is different from the previous version, demonstrating the flexibility of Maui. * The speaker compares the app running on Mac and iOS simulator, showing that it is cross-platform. * Customizations, such as adding a delete button on the desktop app, can be achieved with a few lines of code. * The speaker explains how the customization was done by modifying the XAML code for the basket item.

"so again this is the same eShop app we were just looking at but I rebuilt the UI in Maui so it's a little bit different I took some creative liberties with it but I can just go ahead add things to my cart and then go look at my cart and see all of that in the total if I pop up my iOS simulator alongside this I already have the app running again and you can see it's the exact same crossplatform even things like the app icon this purple Northern mountains logo is the exact same as it is on my Mac so it's all part of Maui I didn't have to do anything custom to get that to work both places and then I also customized the code so that on the cart page there's a delete button only on the desktop app because on a mobile phone I might want to swipe right swipe to delete that's something that people do but on my desktop app I probably don't want to swipe with my trackpad as much so I just created this delete button does the same thing and all I had to do to make that work was actually go into the XAML go to the XAML for my basket item and use a couple lines of code to create a button that says on desktop it's visible that's it that's all I had to do to customize this based on desktop or mobile apps"

Testing and running unit tests with Maui and C devkit * The speaker demonstrates running unit tests using the testing project in Visual Studio code. * The C devkit provides all the necessary tools for testing and running unit tests. * The speaker emphasizes having everything needed to get started with Maui and work on different platforms.

"and thanks to C devkit I can actually also go and see my testing project and run my unit tests right with inv Visual Studio code so I have everything I need right here to get started with Maui and to start working on all the different platforms"

Overview of .NET Maui developer experience * The speaker provides a sneak peek into the .NET Maui developer experience with Visual Studio code. * Maui is in preview and available for download and testing. * The speaker invites viewers to join a deep dive session later in the afternoon to explore more features of .NET Maui and .NET 8.

"that has been a sneak peek into the do net Maui developer experience with Visual Studio code like I said it's in preview today so you're more than welcome to download and try it out and you can also join me and my teammate David Orton now later this afternoon for a deep dive into all of the amazing features of dunet Maui and net 8"

Adoption of .NET Maui by Microsoft and other companies * The Microsoft 365 admin app and the Microsoft Azure app, both with millions of downloads, have adopted .NET Maui. * Companies worldwide are choosing .NET Maui as their platform for multiplatform development. * The speaker highlights the success of the MBC Sports Journey with .NET Maui, resulting in faster delivery of features and increased productivity.

"teams at Microsoft have been adopting net Maui over this past year including the micros moft 365 admin app and the Microsoft Azure app which have millions of downloads and excellent ratings across the platforms that they ship to there are companies around the globe that have adopted net Maui as their platform for multiplatform development let's take a look at the MBC Sports Journey with net Maui for the last 10 plus years we have leveraged a multitude of Microsoft engineering Technologies specifically the net platform has been as productive as it has been innovative for us and our products as we continue to build crossplatform Solutions across the board we're always looking to become more and more efficient and that's where Mai comes in it has allowed us to coordinate and share code across web mobile and our apis leading to Features being delivered to the market faster having used Microsoft's traditional crossplatform approach for mobile for more than eight years we have learned to streamline not only code productivity but also better collaborate and communicate within our product and Technology teams in 2022 our team embark on re right in the sports engine app we would attract to the D net Maui as it promises simpler and scalable development compared to other crossplatform Frameworks and with Microsoft fully behind Maui we decided to use it for this project this choice helped us to finish the work much quicker releasing the app in record time the success of this project underscores mau's productivity boost reaffirming our choice to embrace this technology in my experience net Maui is intuitive and a timesaver it opens up the door to integrate with blazer on the

Leveraging AI in Application Development * Demonstrating how to use natural language to interact with an application. * Adding items to the cart using natural language commands. * Showing the code behind the AI integration in the chatbot. * Highlighting the use of semantic functions to invoke AI actions. * Emphasizing the ease of making applications intelligent with just a few lines of code.

"We have a very natural response and... you too can make your app intelligent"

AI in User Experiences * Microsoft and developers worldwide using AI to personalize user experiences. * Bing Chat as one of the most popular AI assistants built with .NET. * Collaboration with industry partners like Intel to push performance boundaries.

"AI is setting industry standards on how you build large-scale AI applications"

Cloud Native and Building Resilient Applications * Making .NET the best platform for building cloud-native applications. * Focus on observability, resilience, scalability, and ease of management. * Collaboration with service partners to extract useful components. * Deep integration with open telemetry for observability. * Improving security and size of containerized deployments in .NET 8.

".NET team has been working really hard this release on lots of features".

Ahead-of-Time Compilation * AOT (Ahead-of-Time) compilation in .NET 8 for performance optimization. * Creating small, self-contained executables for cloud-native microservices. * AOT sample application showcasing improvements in size, working set, and startup time. * SignalR and Entity Framework not fully compatible with AOT yet.

"We think that Partners really nicely with Cloud-native because you often have small microservices"

Publish Size of the Application Before * Before applying the AOT (Ahead-of-Time) compilation and trimming, the application size was 102 megabytes. * The published application included the entire framework and all its dependencies, making it quite large.

"This application contains the entire framework and every dependency required to run the application, but it's not very small."

AOT Compilation and Trimming * AOT allows us to trim the application to its bare minimum dependencies and compile the code natively without depending on the runtime. * Enabling AOT compilation during publishing resulted in a significant reduction in the application size. * By running the dotnet publish command with AOT enabled, the application was compiled to IL (Intermediate Language) and then transformed into native code.

"During this phase of compilation, you will get warnings if your app or any of your app dependencies are not native AOT compatible."

Reduced Application Size * After applying AOT compilation and trimming, the application size was reduced from 102 megabytes to just 23 megabytes. * This reduction in size allows for better resource utilization and the ability to fit more applications onto a cluster.

"The app that was 102 Megs is now 23 megabytes. That's amazing, and you're going to be able to fit a lot more of those onto a cluster when you're trying to achieve high-density Cloud native apps."

Project management and configuration * Aspire handles all the project configuration details like connection strings, URLs, and ports. * The Aspire orchestration process injects the appropriate connection strings into the application at runtime. * The eShop application, consisting of about 13 projects, is wired up with only 63 lines of code. * Aspire eliminates the need for using Docker Compose or configuring multiple startup projects in Visual Studio.

"Project configuration details like connection strings, URLs, and ports are all handled by Aspire, saving developers time and effort."

Aspire Dashboard overview * The Aspire Dashboard provides an overview of all the projects, containers, and executables in the entire application. * The dashboard displays error logs, end points, environment variables, and console logs. * Developers can run the entire application with a single run command and monitor its behavior through the dashboard.

"The Aspire Dashboard provides developers with a comprehensive overview of their application, allowing them to monitor various aspects like errors, end points, and environment variables."

Traces and distributed tracing * The Aspire Dashboard allows developers to view a list of requests and traces that occurred in the application. * Traces provide a detailed view of the distributed operation, including calls to dependencies like Redis and RabbitMQ. * The dashboard helps identify errors and visualize the flow of the application.

"Traces in the Aspire Dashboard provide developers with a detailed view of the distributed operation, including calls to dependencies, facilitating effective troubleshooting."

Aspire project structure and customization * Aspire projects include the Aspire AppHost and Aspire DoServiceDefaults projects. * The Aspire DoServiceDefaults project allows customization of default settings for Telemetry, health checks, service discovery, and resilience. * Developers can easily configure their own defaults for specific services or components.

"The Aspire project structure allows developers to customize default settings for various components and services, ensuring flexibility and adaptability in their applications."

Deployment to Azure using Azure Developer CLI * The Azure Developer CLI supports deployment of Aspire projects to Azure. * Developers can run the "acd up" command to deploy the application to Azure after scanning the code in the current directory. * The Aspire project description file (appst) helps in understanding the application's dependencies during deployment.

"With the Azure Developer CLI, developers can easily deploy Aspire projects to Azure, leveraging the project description file to ensure accurate deployment of dependencies."

"The Azure Developer CLI simplifies the deployment process for Aspire projects, making it quick and seamless."

Thanking the .NET Community * The speaker expresses gratitude towards the .NET community. * Thanking the viewers for joining the event, providing feedback, and offering support for .NET.

"I want to close out this keynote by thanking all of you for joining us today, giving us your feedback, and all the support that you provide around .NET. Thank you, and have a great .NET."

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Okay, so I re-watched "Das Boot" again recently and, of course, immediately thought, "what would this look like with cats?":

So, there it is! I enjoyed the theme music to Das Boot too, but it then reminded me of a techno version from the early 90's can you believe?

Anyway, what the heck does this have to do with the subject at hand? well, "Das Prompt" came to mind for some reason! or "prompting all the way to the bank".

The gratitude chain:

Thanks to Tim Abell for sending the link
JayJen_X on twitter/X

Keep well and until the next time, goodbye!

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Okay, you might not be as old as I but surely you remember Blondie!

Heart of Glass

But heart of glass is what we are talking about today - when talking about all of this data we are creating!

Where does that data go? how is it stored? well, in most cases, the data is stored on hard disks (SSD or otherwise) and for backups/long-term storage it is mostly still down to tape! yes, the 80's cassette tapes are not forgotten! :)

Enter Microsoft Project Silica. Storing data (more like backups, not fast read-write stuff like in your laptop or phone... yet!) in glass.

Take a look at the video here which explains more.

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Another browser? Well, a browser with some nifty tricks up its sleeves perhaps! It also still uses the chromium engine, so no worries about another browser compatibility war!

The browser company has developed a new bundle of AI-powered features called Arc Max. The goal of Arc Max is to make the internet experience faster and easier for users. Some of the features of Arc Max include 5-second previews, which provide information on restaurants or other websites by simply hovering over a link; tidy tab titles that shorten and organize the titles of open tabs; automatic renaming of downloaded files to make them easier to find; and an AI-powered search function called "Ask on Page" that quickly finds specific information in articles or web pages.

I love their release video - brilliant lesson in marketing and to have some fun along the way, take a look here.

Until the next time!

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Okay, I am not sure they sell Wispa chocolate bars internationally, but worry not, this podcase has nothing to do with chocolate (sadly!).

Use Whisper AI to transcribe audio from video/different audio formats in any language and produce the text of the audio

We are talking Whisper AI from the good folks who brought (and totally destroyed our world! :) ) ChatGPT to the unexpected masses.

Read to the end to see how you can run Whisper AI as a docker container :)

The reason you might not have heard of it as much as ChatGPT is because you will generally need to run Whisper AI yourself or use a cloud service as an example. I have played with Whisper AI via Python/PyTorch using the Google Collab service which you can use for free (need to check the actual info here!) to work with some of these types of use-cases. In my case, this enabled a VM of sorts to actually run Python/PyTorch to interact with Whisper AI.

So, Whisper AI itself is pretty amazing but then add the fact you can of course now make the transcriptions searchable. In my case I am already working with Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search for this type of thing however, you could also use something like OramaSearch which allows you to use JavaScript to perform powerful search capabilities to not only find the text but also time-link to the audio itself. There is an example where a developer has used Astro (JavaScript framework) to stitch the UI side together - I will get a link to that.

But now the real golden nugget: you can run Whisper AI as a docker container! oh yes, but make sure you have some decent PC performance :) This opens up new opportunities of course not in the least being able to run on your own infrastructure.

Until the next time, take care.

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So, is it game over for Docker? probably not!

What is Podman then?

"PodMan is a container engine that helps us with developing containers, managing both the containers and the images, and deploying containers."

On the surface, very similar to Docker i.e. Podman runs containers from images just like Docker. However:

Daemon-less Approach * PodMan uses a daemon-less approach, unlike Docker. * Docker relies on a background daemon process, known as the Docker Daemon, to perform various container-related tasks. * In contrast, PodMan performs all tasks directly from the client itself, using a fork-exec model. * This architecture makes PodMan more efficient, lightweight, and secure.

Root versus Rootless * PodMan offers a root-less approach, which adds an extra layer of security compared to Docker. * Running applications as root can have security implications, as vulnerabilities could potentially affect the entire system. * However, running applications as non-root within containers limits the impact of any exploited vulnerabilities to just the container itself. * This difference in approach between PodMan and Docker enhances the overall security of containerized applications.

OCI Compatibility * Both Docker and PodMan are based on the Open Container Initiative (OCI) standards. * OCI sets standards for container technologies, ensuring compatibility and interoperability. * This means that many of the commands used in Docker, such as pulling, pushing, and building images, are also applicable to PodMan.

So, until the next time, take care.

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Well, if you don't get the joke in the title gif/images, then perhaps this will help (yes, it is an old movie but still very funny!). I the "Airplane" movie is still one of my favs!

So, vectors and what the heck they are all about. Well, of late, vector databases have been getting a lot of visibility as well as established database vendors (Postgress etc.) adding vector database functionality.

Vectors appear in many AI/programming contexts, but one realm is text embeddings used in a lot of AI models to represent words/phrases etc. as arrays of numbers that can be used to find similar things.

Two great videos below will explain vectors, text embeddings and vector databases a lot better than myself!

A great 30 min intro to text embeddings

A quick dip into the world of vector databases (yes, the Fireship guy again!)

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Oh, I wish they had called this Bunee!

So, another week another framework! But this one is clever, I think. BUN is a drop-in style replacement for NodeJS. Aims to be much faster and includes a lot of things out of the box including its own package manager/bundler along with native support for tests and SQLite.

Because BUN has pretty much full compatibility with NodeJS, you can use NodeJS modules and of course NPM - but for new projects, you could probably find most native API's have got you covered.

The next thing for myself is to try BUN with HTMX (the Javascript-less frontend library) as I can see (for some projects) some amazing productivity gains for a lot of my webapps!

No bunee's were harmed in the making of this podcast :)

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Yes! you can run (some!) Azure AI services locally!

Rather than repeat, I have a blog post here to explain a little more.

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So, you want to quickly build a web page or web pages?

You might be familiar with Squarespace, Wix, Webflow etc. all of which use these visual designers to help you quickly build the webpages you desire.

The only issue is you are locked in to their platform hosting and of course monthly/yearly subscription costs.

Webstudio is a really neat open source version - very much like Webflow and currently in beta (although very feature rich already!).

The visual editor is available as an online app or you can download the app for Windows, Mac, Linux. I have a feeling (sorry! not investigated enough here!) it is based on or around something like Electron (I did a podcast a while ago about this).

But the other good news is you can take the hosting part of this open source project and host the web apps you build anywhere you like... locally, docker or your hosting platform of choice.

Webstudio do offer hosting themselves - actually they use CloudFlare workers which provide a serverless hosting model sort of like AWS Lambda/Azure Serverless etc. They have a free tier too if you want to use their hosting to try things out.

As you can tweak/embed Webstudio in your own apps too, this really does make for an interesting option to not be locked into one platform and endless costs - obviously always check the licensing!

Open source = Awesame Sauce perhaps :)

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There really is no limit what you can do these days - even without JavaScript!

Once again, I have been inspired (aka stollen!) by a video from FireShip.io, this time about something called HTMX. It is HTML on steroids (without the nasty side effects of JavaScript :) )

Sprinkle in a few HTML attributes and you have a new way to build modern web apps without touching a line of JavaScript. HTMX even has a client-side router (boost) to enable the single page app (SPA) feel.

Would you still need JavaScript? perhaps, however, for a lot of apps and more so these days using headless CMS systems (builder.io is a fav of mine) to return snippets/islands of pre-rendered HTML, then this might be a useful tool in the magic dev tool box.

Here is the official link to HTMX.

If you want to read a little more too, please visit my blog post here.

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Blazor: The Microsoft framework to create web apps (and more!) without JavaScript (but you can have some if you like :) ).

I have already written a ramble that goes with this episode - take a look here if so

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50th Episode! yeah!! that hardly anyone listens to ;) Hey, can't take yourself too seriously right?

Anyway, the end of Stackoverflow as we know... sort of similar to the classic REM song - you must know it! unless you were born after the year 2000 possibly!

I wrote a little rambling blog post about a week or so ago about the rebirth of Stackoverflow. I guess they had to pivot/innovate given their traffic stats and the introduction of ChatGPT and similar tools (not to mentioned GitHub Co-Pilot of course).

Anyway, the new breed of Stackoverflow (AI) has some interesting features... take a listen! it really is about 5 minutes long this time!

OverflowAI link here

Just for reference, the announcement video is here too!

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Ahh yes, AI... just take a deep breath.

So, Prompt Perfect. Why? well, if you are playing around with things like ChatGPT, MidJourney and so many others, you will notice very early on that you do need to be quite specific in your asking to generate the desired outcome be that images/text or whatever. This includes providing both positive and negative prompting.

Sure, you can persevere and keep trying, but who has the time?

Enter Prompt Perfect. A sort of IDE for prompting, but not just a clever wrapper around ChatGPT it seems.

There is a massive shift at play, as we all know, but also emerging markets riding the wave of the current AI explosion. I wrote a short article (mini podcast) about Vellum a few weeks ago. Vellum received $5m investment for building prompts via an IDE and pipelining the process with GitHub integration and all sorts of things.

Also, there are prompt marketplaces emerging everywhere it seems! yes, you can buy and sell prompts for goodness sake! One example is Prompt Base

Anyway, I digress yet again!

Prompt Perfect is essentially a way to "design" prompts. It has a beginner level where you can explorer basic prompts and Prompt Perfect will embellish/enhance the prompt to be more descriptive. You can then move to the intermediate/advanced options where you can specify more settings and get "under-the-hood" so to speak!

But, for the finale. Using Prompt Perfect, you can add parameters to a well defined prompt and turn that into an API. You can then share that API or indeed sell it... if it is a restricted niche...

As promised, there is a prompt engineering institute!

What a strange world we live in!

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Well!

I have heard of PostgreSQL of course and even looked at it years ago only to think "oh, it is just another database" - which it is, but I hadn't realised how clever it is! It has been around for years/decades of course!

Michael Stonebraker (aka King of the Databases) is behind it of course and I had forgotten VoltDB too which is worth a look and an episode at some point! (in-memory databases eh?)

PostgreSQL is an open-source relational database management system.
It was developed in 1986 at UC Berkeley under the direction of Michael Stonebreaker.
It stores data in tables, columns, and rows.
Uses structured query language (SQL) to read and write data.
PostgreSQL is technically an object-relational database.
It can create custom data types to store objects with properties.
Supports advanced features like inheritance and polymorphism.
PostgreSQL uses multiversion concurrency control (MVCC).
MVCC gives each transaction a snapshot of the database, allowing multiple transactions to run simultaneously without traffic jams or locks.

Some amazing features for sure!

The official PostgreSQL link is here and also NEON which is a cloud-based serverless offering for PostgreSQL.

Most definitely a slow learner in this case! Oh, and of course, Azure has a PostgreSQL offering too ;) just in case!

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So, what is flutter?

Flutter is the multi-platform framework from Google to build apps on any screen. It uses Dart as the programming language (very similar to Java/C# etc.).

From a Microsoft perspective, this is a similar idea to Xamarin or now MAUI.

One thing jumped out to make app designing/coding easy within Flutter is something called Flutter Flow. Worth checking out as it provides a nice graphic UI experience to build apps for desktop/mobile etc. but also provides clean code - not some weird export that you cannot use elsewhere!

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Just Five Mins you say? this one tracks over a little!

Too much AI indeed. But, what is worth it to you?

ChatGPT (not to be mistaken for "catGPT"), as we know, was the game-changing AI release a few months ago now. There have been so many new releases of other AI based ventures of late including Google Palm2 and Gemini as well as up-coming KOSMOS-1 (and 2 coming soon) from Microsoft all aiming to hit this multi-model sweet spot. For example, being able to interpret images, music and other abstract data.

Here are the links for this JFM for reference and a deeper dive if you need to:

7 New ChatGPT Plugins

ChatGPT just levelled up big time

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Okay, so we have "evolved" from green-screen terminals to GUI (Graphic User Interface) ways to execute commands and now for years really, we are back very much in the command line world.

Executing scripts or commands isn't difficult, but remembering them is!

WARP seems to be addressing this by offering a new take on command line terminals. With WARP drive (yeah, that engage gif!) you can store your workflow/scripts/commands in a nice neat way, share with your team - oh and it is, of course, AI :) Cannot quite remember that command to change permissions? use AI! :)

Thanks to my good friend Tim who sent this through - WARP is written in RUST and Tim has plenty to say about that!

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Tired of paying for Dropbox, Google Drive, Onedrive etc.?

Fear not!

You can create your own storage solution:

In your own network/home
Cheap Linux machine/windows machine
Docker Container

There are lots of these solutions around, this one jumped out so check out the details.

Link to FileCloud here (Enterprise type features, but has a community edition)

NextCloud - aimed more at the home user

A link to the original video I watched - crazy, but useful and informative and way more in depth than my measly effort!

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The true zombie effect... JavaScript will never die!

Even though Douglas Crockford said the best thing we can do with JavaScript is to retire it. Look, i get it, JavaScript isn't brilliant, in some cases, but it is what it is and I can't see it disappearing any time soon. The horse has very much bolted so much so you might want to start using "light years" to specify how far!

There have been so many attempts to replace JavaScript over the years. I honestly thought Dart we do that job or any number of others, but here we are.

So, even though I have only touched briefly on this, Blazor! yes, that word! I did an episode or two-way back however, things are changing a bit in the new release of Blazor (I believe coming in .NET 8 especially).

So, Blazor. It has been out for some time now and came in two main flavours, web-assembly (client/browser) and of course the server-side version.

I will probably do a separate episode for the Blazor updates. Not that millions have already done videos/blogs but hey ho, no harm in adding to the internet! The key "big thing" seems to be Blazor united - mix-n-match web-assembly with server-side/SSR. But let's leave that for another episode!

Here is another link referencing "JavaScript should be retired" - just in case!

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Yes, blockchain in your database! well, why not!

From distributed procurement systems to logistics and of course accounting based scenarios, having ledger (blockchain) tables at your disposal isn't a bad thing... well at least I don't think so.

But, why would you need this? what problem does it solve?

Here is a longer introduction:

(3) Blockchain in your database - by David Sheardown (substack.com)

Of course, there is also the official Microsoft site about ledger tables:

Ledger overview - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn

One more, a really good video overview that shows some use cases and demos:

Bringing the power of blockchain to Azure SQL Database and SQL Server with ledger | Microsoft Learn

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Okay, giggles aside, this is a really slick way to visualise and work with JSON data.. but hang on, not just JSON but XML as well as others.

This reminds me a little of schema explorer by my good friend Tim.

When I first saw this, the website was only for JSON data it seemed. However, upon returning to the site, I was presented with another editor view called Herowand (excellent names!). Herowand seems to be the JSON editor AND an editor for XML, YAML and something called TOML :) I had never heard of TOML but JSON and XML of course is my daily diet ;)

A very cool set of projects, open sourced and available on GitHub (I think written in NextJS unless I am wrong).

You can also use VS-CODE to add the viewer as an extension which is really useful or of course embed into your own product or website. Read the license information as always though! possibly consider becoming a patreon if it is useful :)

Link to JSON Crack itself here

Link direct to Herowand for the combined JSON, XML etc. editor here

Link to the GitHub repo here

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Today we are taking a QUIC look at some interesting changes to the very fabric of the internet... yes, HTTP!

Some new changes coming to help speed up mobile/cell internet and help with those pesky network switching annoyances!

Also, some fundamental security updates too of course.

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Why would you need a headless CMS (Content Management System)?

Very good point! If you have ever used WordPress, Webflow, Wix etc. then you know what a CMS is - a platform to allow you to create a website/blog or whatever it might be. That is great and works for a lot of people however, what if you want to have a slick visual CMS experience in your own website where you host it wherever as just a plain HTML website (although you can get more complex of course)?

Builder IO provides the slick visual CMS aspect, user management, role-based access and all of the admin boilerplate, and you can decide where and how to include the CMS "bits". For example, if you have a basic HTML website with 10 pages, you might want 3 of those pages to be "fully CMS capable" (from header to footer so to speak) then you might only want a section or even component on a couple of other pages to be managed by the CMS. You can decide what goes where very easily.

So, Builder IO is aimed at mostly a developer type audience but with the concept of providing a very slick and easy to use CMS without you having to re-invent the wheel.

There is a "hook" to Builder IO of course - the visual CMS bit to edit those elements/pages however, if you decide to stop using Builder IO in the future, your site is still your site and will continue to work, just you won't have the visual CMS part of course!

Pricing isn't too bad at all - a very generous free version.

The documentation is very clear and well presented. Very easy to add Builder IO to pretty much any frontend development i.e. Vue, Angular, React, Svelte or Qwik which I believe the same people created as a very fast JavaScript framework - not tried yet, but looks impressive.

Builder IO also has a nice Figma import option to magically create the HTML...

At first, for myself anyway, I was confused a bit about how this all works - is Builder IO like WordPress? do they host the sites? but after realising they are providing the visual magic and you can use that "output" how/wherever you like, the penny dropped - finally!

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When the cloud isn't enough ;)

Azure ARC lets you manage off-cloud infrastructure within the same familiar Azure environment, along with governance, security and visibility from one unified viewpoint.

Azure Arc – Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Management and Solution (microsoft.com)

Azure Arc for Developers (microsoft.com)

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Well, it has been a couple of weeks or so since the last JFM mostly as I have been "lost in the machine" so to speak!

So much A.I. stuff happening, good or bad? who knows! I can understand the concerns, but right now I am feeling the A.I explosion is providing some useful assistance within various tools/landscapes.

Today, I am looking into a few interesting ones:

Microsoft Copilot - who wants to remember how to do vlookups anyway! Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work - The Official Microsoft Blog
GitHub Copilot X - They say code is poetry so why not speak code :) along with a few other interesting extras! GitHub Next
Fancy wiring your brain up to GPT? well, you can! Neurosity have just a device! you can even use the Javascript SDK to get data from the Neurosity crown device :) Fireship YouTube channel takes this to the next level! :) (340) I literally connected my brain to GPT-4 with JavaScript - YouTube

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Yet another low code development environment, but this one has some interesting twists!

Retool is a low code development environment which has a browser based IDE to allow you to build internal apps very quickly! you can connect to lots of database systems out there, including SAP HANA which is interesting from my day-to-day role :)

You can also connect to a wide variety of API's including GraphQL, gRPC and custom REST API's - of course there are pre-built connections to a lot of popular API's such as Salesforce, Shopify to name a couple.

An additional bonus that caught my eye is the fact Retool allows a FREE version for up to 5 users, both cloud based and locally hosted! The local hosted model is very interesting since you have the option to host the Retool stack in AWS or wherever you wish in addition to being able to run Retool locally via a docker container :) that means you can run Retool on your laptop/PC or indeed on an internal server. Again, this is FREE for up to 5 users.

The IDE is browser based and mostly drag and drop to build UI interfaces. You can define your queries both via SQL script or via a GUI to assist you.

Definitely a cool low code environment to check out!

BONUS! They also have a native mobile option in beta/preview currently! again, worth checking out for sure.

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Well, the name explains it! we are all a little lazy sometimes ;)

Introducing Lazy Docker - essentially a way to manage your docker environment from a command line with a command line UI (not unlike the days of MS-DOS!). This is a good thing BTW! it is nice to have a clean, easy to use and quick way to manage your docker environment.

Sent in this time by my good friend Tim Abel. Tim also has a podcast worth a listen over here: Software should be free.

So, check out lazy docker - very easy to install and get going, and again, simplifies managing docker without having to remember the docker syntax!

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Well, nothing like a light bit of listening! Web 3.0? Over hyped/Over used term? perhaps, but there are nuggets in them thar hype-fields!

Way too much to discuss in 5 (or even 6) mins! but I try... Certainly, the world of decentralised "whatever" is here and has been some time. I might delve a little deeper into some of the subjects of Web 3.0 including Blockchain generally, dApps of course, and NFT's - trying to make sense, and importantly, make use of any of these emerging technologies.

Some links I have been referring to:

Inrupt - the organisation with Tim Berners-Lee

Solid - PODS to store your data securely and keep control of

Article from Telerik here

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AI is taking over! well, maybe not quite, but it is and will continue to be embedded in our day-to-day lives.

For this episode, I have been exploring Motion (links below). An app to use AI to organise your life. Uses the concept of "time blocking" (link below) and essentially lets you pull in all of your calendars (personal and business) as well as a variety of todo apps, and keeps them in sync but attempts to use some good old AI to attempt to organise the important things you need to focus on.

In my honest opinion, the app is a bit pricey (no affiliation BTW, just my own observations!), but then if you think about synchronising all of your calendar/todo's anyway with the advantage of some organisation/planning, maybe it isn't too expensive. Also, if you do pay, then there is probably more chance of actually employing good practices the app is attempting to help with!

This concept/idea is certainly one for myself - keeping focus on the important tasks whatever they may be (work/family/unicorn racing, whatever!).

Here is the link to the motion blog article about time blocking.

Also, the link to the main app page.

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An interesting journey working with Docker over the years. Docker is great for containerising your apps, but what happens when you start to have a lot of containers and/or you want fail-over support?

Well, even though Kubernetes (also known as K8S for short!) isn't the only orchestration tool out there, it is fairly common and a "go to" for a lot of devs.

Setting up and managing K8S can be a handful, but if you you use Docker Desktop on your OS of choice, you can take advantage of "Docker Extensions". One being "harpoon" to visually create and manage your K8S landscape.

Open up Docker Desktop and click on Extensions. Do a search for "Harpoon".

Also, if you want a nice introduction to Kubernetes, check out this link. I do love ByteByteGo articles!

Here is a link to the Harpoon extension.

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Well now, who would have thought a guest episode!

My very good friend Tim Abell (podcast "software should be free") has kindly created a Just Five Mins about asdf.. not just the handy set of keys on your keyboard! Use asdf to "Manage multiple runtime versions with a single CLI tool". I could have done with this a week or two back!

Even though poor old Tim was suffering a bit, his audio still sounds better than mine! :)

I nice easy way to be able to change versions - especially for dotnet and node for myself!

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Well, more databases! but this one has a few tricks up its sleave!

In the realm of things like Firebase, Supabase etc. Pocketbase aims to offer a similar feature set but is open source and deploys as one file...

Pocketbase doesn't offer any hosting like Firebase/Supabase, so you can use this within your own environment/cloud hosted server. Can be used within Linux/Windows/Mac (both x64 and ARM).

Take a listen. I think this is a useful set of tools if you need to build something more than just a datastore app!

Oh! and of course, many thanks to this video for bringing Pocketbase to light! (388) PocketBase... The Ultimate Side-Hustle Backend? - YouTube

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Nearly at the end of 2022... LTS! Reason to think carefully about using an LTS (long term support) version of software!

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Yeah, you bet! We all know the AI world is changing things for us if we like it or not.

ChatGPT is coming... and I don't think we can stop it! we can embrace it in the right way of course.

Old news now, but worth a listen honest!

From a developers perspective, check this video out:

(320) ChatGPT can write better code than me - YouTube

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Okay, where to start! Well, couple of episodes back I talked about how Docker are previewing Docker with WASM (Web Assembly). So WASM became popular from Blazor the Microsoft tech to essentially bring compiled .NET code into the browser (and lots of other technologies can be used with WASM of course!).

Seems WASM, and WASI, are moving from just browser based to other worlds including the server/cloud.

This JFM talks about Fermyon who have something called SPIN to create event driven microservices using WASM (instead of say Docker containers). They also have a cloud offering which seems more compact/faster than possibly Docker containers (i.e. the current container tech that is!).

Link to the Fermyon article here: Fermyon Built a WebAssembly Cloud to Push Serverless Microservices Beyond Containers (infoq.com)

Also., what is WASI: Wasm, WASI, Wagi: What are they? | Fermyon Technologies (@FermyonTech)

Link to the Fermyon cloud here: Fermyon Cloud | Fermyon Developer

And finally, the GitHub Repo for Fermyon SPIN here: fermyon/spin: Spin is an open source framework for building and running fast, secure, and composable cloud microservices with WebAssembly (github.com)

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A very cool, probably mis-understood, nugget this time around!

Natively calling REST based (actually HTTP based, since you can call GraphQL too!) within Azure SQL database!

I have done something similar years ago using OLE style SQL coding, but this felt a little clunky and goodness knows what the performance issues might have been!

This is native.. this is Azure SQL Database so, given the managed nature of the "server" within Azure, it feels/sounds like it has stability. This is only public preview.. I had seen an early adopter version but it didn't really sink in..

Take a look at the blog post from Davide Mauri.. at first it might not click what you can do.. but when you think of Event Grid/Hub and Azure functions to name a couple, the landscape really opens up!

Azure SQL Database External REST Endpoints Integration Public Preview - Azure SQL Devs’ Corner (microsoft.com)

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Well can you believe I had an episode about Hasura all the way back 2+ years ago! even though it was Episode 14 ;) This is a revisit. In my case, Hasura didn't have full MS-SQL support back then, which is where I live mostly, but it does now! along with MongoDB, Postgres to name just a few.

Worth checking out: Instant GraphQL APIs on your data | Built-in Authz & Caching (hasura.io)

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Well, Docker isn't new of course but it has evolved over the years. Now we are seeing Docker WASM - Web Assembly. But why does this matter?

Take a listen!

Further information here:

Why Containers and WebAssembly Work Well Together - Docker

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Who needs an ARMy of ARM chips? !! This episode is all about "project Volterra" or Windows Dev Kit 2023 - an ARM based hardware offering from Microsoft that packs a punch! Seems everything is going ARM based these days, so why not join in!

More info here:

Available today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 aka Project Volterra - Windows Developer Blog

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For those who are older enough to remember, this could be counter for this: (84) Steve Ballmer DEVELOPERS - YouTube and yes kids, this is how Microsoft attracted.. you guessed it, "developers" :)

So, as part of my attending "Microsoft Anonymous" sessions, this episode is all about LINUX, LINUX, LINUX! well, as much as I can pack into about 5 minutes!

I do like the feeling of being able to develop on Windows, Mac and now Linux - I realise people have been doing this for years of course!

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Wow, well you wait two years for an episode and two come along!

This time it is Tauri - a cross platform development stack built on Rust with an incredible small deployment footprint. Supports HTML/CSS/JS type technologies (Angular, Vue, React and whatever too!).

Provides an installable desktop bundle for the main OS's with lots of lovely features for you to check out.

Main Tauri Website

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Well, it has only taken 2 years to create a new Episode!

This one is getting very rusty...

SurrealDB is written in Rust but, although that is cool anyway, it is what SurrealDB has to offer.. take a listen!

Link to SurrealDB: https://www.surrealdb.com

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Show notes here: https://justfivemins.com/ep-17-cross-platform-desktop-apps-with-electron-net/

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https://justfivemins.com/ep-16-low-code-no-code-maybe-just-a-bit-of-code/

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For the full show notes, please visit: https://justfivemins.com/ep-15-latest-news-and-grpc-updates/

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Quite an interesting move on the buzz that (still) is GraphQL and in this case, Hasura have been quite inventive I think by building a cloud/local mechanism to generate GraphQL backends by pointing at (selectively!) PostgreSQL, MySQL and soon to be MS-SQL. Hasura also helps generate the fine-grained authentication too as well as offering a way to integrate business logic and more.

Some links to get you started:

Main Hasura Site
Direct link to the Hasura docs
A cool learning with Jason; Serverless with Hasura (which looks cool and I actually need to watch myself!)

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Really well thought through app, plus the fact the developer has given some really good in-depth walk-throughs of how it was built, with what technologies etc.

Certainly worth checking out!

https://www.cloudskew.com/

How it was built

https://www.cloudskew.com/about/cloudskew-architecture.html

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Sails main website
https://sailsjs.com/

Link to their main documentation and concepts
https://sailsjs.com/documentation/concepts

Thanks to Tim for suggesting this one!
https://timwise.co.uk

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Github Codespaces (Visual Studio Codespaces is merging wit this)
https://github.com/features/codespaces

Github Container Registry
https://github.com/containers

Github Packages
https://github.com/features/packages

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In this episode we take a quick look at Azure SQL Serverless and briefly Amazon AWS Aurora which provides MySql and PostgreSQL as serverless too!

The key take-away here is the fact you only pay when the database is being consumed and you only have the storage to pay for which is pretty minimal.

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Twillio has been around for ages (since 2008!). I first came across it sometime around 2009 as a platform to send outbound SMS/Text messages and also to play with the inbound/outbound voice SDK too.

Twillio has moved on quite a bit and just to correct something in the podcast, Microsoft did not buy Twillio! instead, Twillio have raised a few rounds of funding. I have a feeling Microsoft expressed interest at some point, but I will check my facts!

Twillio now has a whole bunch of offerings, and not in the least very cheap inbound numbers that can be used for voice/text to name a couple. Right now, I have been using Twillio Studio to visually design workflows for incoming calls/texts in order to protect my own personal number/contacts.

https://www.twilio.com/

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Sure, you can architect your own microservice architecture or use specific language/platform specific solutions but what if you could pick and choose not only what you needed but across whatever languages you want to use and hosting platforms/local servers.

Here are some excellent links to get you further if you wish to explore more about DAPR:

A great intro/visual with our friend Scott Hanselman and friends (2 parts to this):
https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Azure-Friday/Learn-all-about-Distributed-Application-Runtime-Dapr-Part-1

Original announcement blog from 2019:
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/10/16/announcing-dapr-open-source-project-build-microservice-applications/

Using DAPR with Azure functions (definitely on my list!):
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2020/07/01/announcing-azure-functions-extension-for-dapr/#:~:text=Azure%20Functions%20provides%20an%20event,set%20of%20capabilities%20Dapr%20provides.

Overview of DAPR on Github:
https://github.com/dapr/dapr

Github samples too!
https://github.com/dapr/samples

Just as a bonus, getting started with Actor Model - maybe a talk of its own!
https://github.com/dapr/dotnet-sdk/blob/master/docs/get-started-dapr-actor.md

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gRPC - Remote Procedure Calls are not new, but gRPC (developed from Google around 2015) provides a very restricted interface for passing data between applications - binary compressed data for performance, has a wide adoption on many platforms. Why use it? why is it different from SOAP or REST (or GraphQL even!). Have a listen to find out more!

Here are a few links that will help take the gRPC subject further if you wish:

A great overview from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRPC
Bit more depth here with some examples too: https://grpc.io/docs/what-is-grpc/core-concepts/
If you don't want to read, then the MSDN Channel 9 peeps can help: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/On-NET/ASPNET-Core-Series-High-performance-requests-with-gRPC

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What happens when you take Xamarin Forms, mix it up with a huge shake up of .NET... .NET MAUI or the full name of .NET Multi-Platform UI.

A single codebase, project to be able to code, test and build as well as deploy to not only native mobile (iOS, Android) but also to desktop forms too i.e. MacOS and Windows :)

It is part of a much larger change coming in .NET 5 but onwards to .NET 6 - one framework, many hats!

Here is the official link from the build conference announcement which obviously contains much more than just five minutes worth ;)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-multi-platform-app-ui/

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Wordpress is massively popular. If you live and breath PHP then great, but if you don't, what if I told you of an approach that provides an MVC'ish style experience to build themes?

A framework called Timber can help! coupled up with a templating engine called Twig makes for just a lovely experience!

Built by an agency (https://www.upstatement.com) and open source:

https://www.upstatement.com/timber/#whats-timber

Yes! you can also apply testing too: https://timber.github.io/docs/guides/testing/

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JAMstack - Javascript, API's and Markup!

What is it?

JAMStack: Javascript, API's and Markup
Fast and secure sites and apps delivered by pre-rendering files
and serving them directly from a CDN, removing the requirement
to manage or run web server
Any project that relies on a tight coupling between client and server is not built with the Jamstack
Microservice/Serverless API's - not exclusive to either but consumption of external/loosely coupled services
Can be used with static site generators but can be plain old HTML/JS (frameworks allowed! i.e. Angular/Vue/React)

Why would I use it?

Why wait for pages to build on the fly when you can generate them at deploy time? When it comes to minimizing the time to first byte, nothing beats pre-built files served over a CDN
When your deployment amounts to a stack of files that can be served anywhere, scaling is a matter of serving those files in more places. CDNs are perfect for this, and often include scaling in all of their plans
With server-side processes abstracted into microservice APIs, surface areas for attacks are reduced. You can also leverage the domain expertise of specialist third-party services

Links

Official JAMstack website
Netlify: a good place to start with JAMstack
Introduction to Azure Static Web Apps
A great 30 min walkthrough of building an Azure static web app (JAMstack style!) with John Papa

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Introduction

We are back, the pheonix edition! Did you really miss us?
Azure functions and more broadly FaaS (Functions as a service) which include amongst others, AWS Lambda and Netlify JAMStack (I think "toast" has to be deployment service here!)

Show

What are azure functions and FaaS in general?
Why would I use them?
Platform tie-in? Azure functions have a docker container with the Azure functions runtime
Deployment. Deploying from GIT (GitHub) with Azure Functions Kudu but you can use Azure Devops etc.
Azure functions in a microservice world i.e. Queues/storage tables/event grid/pubsub patterns etc.
More advanced: Azure durable functions i.e. Orchestrate several functions

Wrap Up

Will post the video walk-through soon!

Public Trello board for any Just Five Mins suggestions! Created by my good friend Tim! (https://pod.timwise.co.uk/)
https://trello.com/b/4Jdod2L4/just5mins

Also, forgot to add the link to the official MS Azure Functions page, and remember, you can get a free Azure account and most of what the podcast covered is pretty much free anyway!
Azure Functions

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Another dip into the vault!

https://famous.co/

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Almost back to the 80's (by the sound quality anyway!), this is the very first episode of Just Five Mins!
Might have been caught in a time-slip or something, as I am sure Steve Sanderson hadn't come up with Blazor back then? ... or had he!

Just Five Mins!: Recent Episodes

D. Sheardown