Reading Notes #689

Another week, another batch of interesting reads. This edition covers AI video experiments, extending coding agents with .NET skills, open source contributions, and a few podcast episodes worth adding to your queue.

AI

• I Spent $50 on AI Video Generation and Got Nothing Usable (Golnaz) - Interesting to see how a prof3esional video studio sees AI and what they can and cannot do with this tool.

• Extend your coding agent with .NET Skills - .NET Blog (Tim Heuer) - New repo and vscode extension to give us access to a bank of managed skill files for our agents.

• Reka Edge: Frontier-Level Edge Intelligence for Physical AI -  Launch of the latest version of Reka Edge, a vision language model that you can run locally.

Programming

• We are still engineers (Mark Downie) - Just like Mark, many engineers feels the same way.

Open Source

• How to make your first contribution to an open source project (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Another great post from Salma, this time sharing her experience about open source projects and how to get started in the lowest stress way.

• OpenWebUI + Model Runner: Zero-Config Local AI (Ignasi Lopez Luna) - I'm a fan of OpenUI, and seeing this synergy between projects is awesome! This post is a must if you are thinking of running some AI locally, which will save you some pain.

Podcasts

• Run your AI Agent in a Sandbox, with Docker President Mark Cavage (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Very nice episode about all the more AI features that Docker have and more precisely Sandbox.

• The Rise of The Claw with OpenClaw's Peter Steinberger (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Finally! The OpenClaw that we all needed. Peter has been interviewed many times, and many people have written about OpenClaw, but this episode was exactly what I needed.

• Paul Duvall: AI-Driven Development - Episode 390 (Azure & DevOps Podcast) - Another great discussion with a real DevOps expert about the impact of AI on our processes, and how we can use it.

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, podcasts and books that catch my interest during the week.

If you have interesting content, share it!

~frank

Reading Notes #688

I'm always on the lookout for innovative ideas to streamline my development workflow. This week, I stumbled upon some fascinating reads that caught my eye, among them, an article about building an AI-powered pull request agent using GitHub Copilot SDK, and another demonstrating the secure use of OpenClaw in Docker sandboxes.

AI

• Building an AI Pull Request Agent for Azure DevOps using GitHub Copilot SDK (Dominique St-Amand) - That's a cool idea to have your custom agent.

• Run OpenClaw Securely in Docker Sandboxes (Oleg Selajev) - Now that looks much safer! I just need to decide what I would connect it to, and I could finally try it. Nice tutorial.

• What's new with GitHub Copilot coding agent (Andrea Griffiths) - Oh wow, I didn't know we could continue our session from the cloud to the CLI and the other way around ,pretty cool

• Subagents and web search in Claude Code - A short post showing how to use the sub agent from Claude code running on Obama.

Programming

• WebAssembly is everywhere. Here's how it works (Jessica Wachtel) - This post explains all the magic of wasm, and it's maybe more than you think.

• A minimal way to integrate Aspire into your existing project (Tim Deschryver) - I really like this post that explains how to add an existing solution to Aspire. On top of that, this solution contains JavaScript and .NET products awesome.

• Cleaner switch expressions with pattern matching in C# (Bart Wullems) - My first reaction when I read the code in this post was: Wait, what? That works?! So, I guess I also forgot that C# has evolved; it's so much clearer.

~frank

Reading Notes #687

Welcome to this new Reading Notes post, a collection of interesting articles and resources I've been absorbing lately! This week's roundup dives into a variety of topics, from practical storage solutions and leveraging AI for code upgrades to exploring the intersection of AI and business value. Get ready for a diverse mix of tech insights and management reflections.

Programming

• Upgrading old code with Copilot (Mark Downie) - In this post, Mark shows one area where AI is really making a huge difference.

AI

• Hosting Declarative Markdown-Based Agents on Azure Functions (Anthony Chu) - A pretty cool idea to make accessible simply and get quick responses. Looking forward to seeing what people do with it.

• Vector Data in .NET - Building Blocks for AI Part 2 (Jeremy Likness) - Instructive post that shows and explains the value of AI.Extensions in our code.

• The Missing Link Between AI and Business Value (Kris Kang) - How do you benchmark or track the efficiency of your AI usage?

• So, you want to run OpenClaw? (Jim Gumbley) - An interesting post that gives us hits where to start searching for more information about how to raise protection.

Books

The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You (Julie Zhuo) - Most management books are written by advanced managers, people with a lot of experience who already have the "manager" mindset well established in their heads. This book feels different, more accessible, closer to a conversational tone. In this book, Julie shares her stories of becoming a manager and the advice she learned along the way. I think it's a good book to get started on this topic, especially if you are new to that position or thinking about it, to understand and be better equipped for the new challenges coming your way.

Miscellaneous

• Active vs Archival Storage: How We Store Petabytes on Pennies (Golnaz) - Storage is always a concern over time. How can you keep years of data without getting ruined.

~frank