Reading Notes #708

I’ve gathered a few insightful pieces this week exploring smarter ways to manage AI costs, practical hardware setups, and the foundational logic behind better programming. Each link offers a different perspective on how we can refine our workflows and think more intentionally about the tools we use every day.

AI

• MCP Beyond the Chat Window: Build Diagnostics in CI (Jan , Yuliia) - Instead of copy-pasting the log, the promises of this MCP server are very interesting.

• Why Reusing AI Instructions Costs You More Tokens (Ken Muse) - This post shares great advices on how we must think when writing or planning skills and queries.

• Set up OpenClaw on your Raspberry Pi (Lucy Hattersley) - Tease about a very interesting post (available in the Raspberry Pi Official Magazine) more to come

Databases

• Learning a few things about running SQLite (Julia Evans) - Nice post sharing some useful lessons learned.

Programming

• The Power Of “Why?” (codemanship) - A great post that reminds us that asking the right question helps us understand the real need and build better solutions.

Miscellaneous

• The Knowledge You Give Away (Mark Downie) - A quote that hopefully makes us think.

• Microsoft reveals 15+ products losing support in 2026, check if you're affected (Abhijith M B) - It's worth having a look while you have time to plan something. Products will continue to work, but no more updates or support.

~frank

Reading Notes #707

This week's highlights bring together insights on evolving API security, the realities of integrating AI into your workflow, and tools that can help streamline the testing process. I selected these pieces for their practical advice on simplifying everyday development tasks while building more robust and resilient infrastructure.

Programming

• Web Application & API Protection: An Overview (John Brawner) - I knew many security tools existed, and obviously I use some. But I learned a lot in this post. WAAP emerged because WAF alone was not enough to address APIs, bots, DDoS, and modern cloud traffic patterns in a single runtime protection model.

• How to Turn a Postman Collection into a Maintainable pytest Suite (Mikhail Golikov) - Tests are important, so keeping them clean should be too. This post gives us a great example of how to build reliable tools to do exactly that.

• OpenAPI Code Generation with Corvus: Typed HTTP Clients (Matthew Adams) - Who doesn't uses APIs?! I need to try that today!

AI

• A new way to reflect on how you use Claude - This post shares a reporting tool to visualize our Claude utilization.

• Better tools made Copilot code review worse. Here's how we actually improved it. (Napalys Klicius) - Interesting story that shares experiments to improve AI when doing code review. How it failed and how it work, and how the same fix didn't do great in a different context.

Miscellaneous

• Your Laptop Is the New Production Environment (Karan Verma) - The title definitely caught my attention, and it's so true. First post of a promising series.

• AI is ready. Your APIs probably aren't (Matt Gray) - Postman has always been an interesting tool. I've been using something else for a while but am thinking about exploring it again!

• How GitHub gave every repository a durable owner - A nice behind-the-scenes story where GitHub shares the issues, failures, learning and success.

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

 ~frank

Reading Notes #706

This week's collection highlights several practical upgrades for your workflow, ranging from cleaner C# patterns to more secure ways to manage AI agents. I’ve also included a few podcast episodes and articles that offer some much-needed perspective on productivity and community life.

AI

• Why AI Agents Need Isolation with Docker SBX (Karan Verma) - Power comes with responsibilities. It's well known (at least for Spider-Man fans), but more seriously, AI users have a simple way to stay safe. And now, with "the kits", it looks like it's even easier.

• Using AI to Build a Blazor App 1: Start With the Problem (Jon Hilton ) - It's so true that AI doesn't always do or act the way we expect. In this case, I wonder if a different model would have been better. In my experience, GPT is better at doing things compared to brainstorming.

Databases

• Fundamentals of Azure DevOps with SQL projects - Azure SQL Dev Corner (Drew Skwiers-Koballa) - This post provides all the details and pieces of config/ code required to get an Azure DevOps pipeline to work, no magic.

Programming

• Azure WAF - Never used yet Yarp, but nice to see a great example exists for when I will. Great solution.

• How to match names in C# without exact string comparisons (Nick Harrison) - Excellent post that shares many patterns and strategies (with code snippets) to optimize our research.

DevOps

• New: Versioned CLI and SDK Docs (Cam Soper) - That's a nice feature that more should implement! You pick your API version, and the documentation follows.

Podcasts

• Create a Happier Version of Yourself: Redirect Your Energy for Positive Thinking (The Mel Robbins Podcast) - I think this episode should be listened to by so many! It's a simple discussion between a son and mom, but so helpful for anyone.

• The space between the Commits with Zed and DeltaDB's Nathan Sobo (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I was happy to listen to this episode with Nathan and learn more about his projects: Zed and DeltaDB.

• Azure Container Apps with Paul Yuknewicz and Jan Kalis (.NET Rocks!) - Hmm, a very interesting usage of Azure Container Apps! I'll have to try that.

Miscellaneous

• 3 Tricks to Help You Stop Procrastinating (Suzanne Scacca ) - Need tips to improve your time management? This post is for you.

• Goodbye, forever, probably. (Salma) - Sad news for the communities, but at the same time, it's because of those same communities. This post shares a very sad portrait of the online world that affects many people.
  

~frank