Reading Notes #684

Balancing cloud innovation with AI practicality, this week’s notes blend Azure updates, .NET’s AI roadmap, and clever Python hacks. A sharp reminder on burnout prevention anchors the mix, while creative teams and DevOps culture inspire fresh perspectives. From Docker model runners to Git worktrees, every corner here offers actionable insights or a spark of curiosity, no clichés, just tools and truths for developers navigating the stormy seas of tech.

Suggestion of the week

• To Every Developer Close To Burnout, Read This · theSeniorDev (Dragos Nedelcu) - Your friendly reminder to take care of yourself, it's more important than we think. Everyone should read this.

Cloud

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) - January 2026: Configuration & Performance ( PuiChee (PC) Chan) - Happy to see this great tool getting updated, as I will need it soon.

AI

• .NET AI Essentials - The Core Building Blocks Explained - .NET Blog (Jeremy Likness) - A really interesting first post to a series with a lot of promises on .NET and AI

• Unlocking AI's full potential: Why context is everything (Rahul Auradkar) - Learn how to avoid the pitfall of too many enterprises where they are agents are data-rich but are missing context.

• Optimizing Python scripts with AI – Daniel Lemire's blog - Cool idea! This post shares how a Python script was used to aggregate c++ files following some rules.

• Use Claude Code with Docker Model Runner (Dorin Geman) - Short tutorial use use your local model in one more tool.

Podcasts

• 493: Git's most powerful but underutilized tool (Merge Conflict) - Great episode where I finally understood what Git work trees are and how to use them in VSCode. Frank is also hilarious in this episode with all the emojis

• Scott Hanselman: The Future of Software Engineering - Episode 382 (Azure & DevOps Podcast) - The Future of Software Engineering is definitely a hot topic; nice episode.

• 122. How AI Is Transforming Human Resources - with Ana Inés Urrutia (Betatalks the podcast) - AI is affecting ALL domains and is accessible to everyone. I'm always curious to learn more details on how.

Miscellaneous

• How a Creative Team Learned to Love Azure DevOps (Golnaz ) - More teams should take an example from this and bend tools to fully help them. We shouldn't accept the status quo. It's also great to see the synergy between different teams.

~frank

Reading Notes #682

This week’s Reading Notes bring together programming tips, AI experiments, and cloud updates. Learn to build Python CLI tools. Untangle GitHub issue workflows. Try running AI models locally. Catch up on Azure news. And explore ideas around privacy and cloud architecture. Short reads. Useful takeaways.

Programming

• Make a CLI command from your Python package (vast cow) - Nice way to create a CLI. It looks very simple.

• Programmatically Setting GitHub Issue Types (Den Delimarsky) - This post shares a cool workaround to work with types in GitHub

• 5 Minimal API myths and the real truth (David Grace) - Nice post, I really like minimal API, and it's true that people are asking themselves a lot of questions. Here you will find many great answers.

• How does Aspire expose resource connection info to the Azure Functions runtime? (Safia Abdalla) - This post explains how to connect Azure resources.

AI

• Private AI Coding: OpenCode + Model Runner - A very interesting post about how we can use local models in open code, looking forward to trying that.

• All the Azure news you don’t want to miss from Microsoft Build 2025 | Microsoft Azure Blog (Alysa Taylor) - Well, it's all in the title, and yes, this post is packed with news because Build is one of the biggest Microsoft events.

Miscellaneous

• Who Decides Who Doesn’t Deserve Privacy? (Troy Hunt) - A very interesting post about privacy. We should also think about all that when designing systems and applications.

~frank