Reading Notes #702

This week’s compilation explores a mix of critical topics ranging from integrating AI models with SQL Server to navigating the complexities of Azure container troubleshooting. I’ve selected these particular articles because they offer practical ways to streamline your workflow and better understand the latest shifts in cloud infrastructure and software development.

Databases

• How to host an AI text embeddings model for SQL Server using Ollama (Greg Low) - Cool use of Ollama to get free AI with our databases.

AI

• Learn Anything With My /teach Skill (Matt Pocock) - I use AI to learn many times, but I didn't think doing a skill. Looking forward to trying it.

• How AI coding agents actually use your technology - Microsoft for Developers (Waldek Mastykarz) - A very interesting post that explains all the steps executed by VS Code harness when we submit our prompt. The post also provides some insights on why AI could still get bad results even if we provide SDK and MCP servers.

Cloud

• Troubleshooting Azure Container Apps and Jobs for .NET and Django Workloads | Microsoft Community Hub - First post of a series that covers the most frequent issues and provides methods to investigate and resolve the problems.

DevOps

• Open Source Observability: Tools, Setup, and Trade-offs (Spence Taylor) - A post that introduces many different tools used to collect or display information about logs and metrics, with potential challenges and more.

Miscellaneous

• How I made a 45-video course without wanting to die (Salma) - Doing a series that will work definitely requires preparation. Thank you for sharing Salma.

• Working with product managers (sean goedecke) - Was I that lucky all my life that I never encountered those types?

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 #698

The world of AI is exploding, and with that explosion comes a crucial question: how do we keep these powerful agents in check? Traditional security methods might not cut it anymore, so developers are turning to innovative sandboxing techniques. Let's explore some of the most promising approaches and see which ones emerge as the frontrunners in this AI safety race.

AI

• Comparing Sandboxing Approaches for AI Agents (Siri Varma Vegiraju) - Good news, we have options! But right now, what looks the easiest and safest is the Docker sandbox

• I stopped using /grill-me for coding. Now, I use /grill-with-docs (Matt Pocock) - Looking forward to try this one as the original grill-me was a revelation for me.

Programming

• What's New in Aspire 13.3 (Maddy Montaquila) - Oh, I love that new WithBrowserLog() need to upgrade all my solutions asap!

DevOps

• Top 15 CI/CD Metrics: What to Track & Why They Matter (James Walker) - Are our workflows and pipeline healthy? Could we improve them? This post shares metrics to help us answer these questions.

Podcasts

• he Real Reason You Feel Empty (Even When Life Looks Good) with Musician Mike Posner (A Bit of Optimism) - Fun discussion about life and how the goal in life shouldn't be getting to the end but enjoying the journey.

• Use What Works with Dylan Beattie (.NET Rocks!) - This episode will provide great information for anyone who is interested in using an open source project to build their solution. You should not see OSS as only being free, and you should consider how you can help the maintainers.

• AI SREs, Chat With Your Infrastructure with Anyshift (Agentic DevOps : AI Engineering for Infrastructure) - An interesting tool that Anyshift.io that digs into our infra to build a diagram and helps us to see. See what works and understand what doesn't. I might go try the free trial.

• The Science of Achieving Goals: How to Change Your Life in 5 Simple Steps (The Mel Robbins Podcast) - We all have goals, some are attainable faster than others. For those goals that require more planning, this episode shares simple steps (very simple indeed) to achieve them. It's explained as only Mel can do it.
  

I've made it a habit to share the fascinating articles, blog posts, and books that cross my path each week. Think of this as an open invitation, if you stumble upon something intriguing, don't hesitate to share it!
Let's build a community of curious minds.

~frank

Reading Notes #697

This week’s reading notes cover a wide range of topics, from local AI workflows and Docker agent fleets to data privacy, SQL tips, and developer tooling updates. There’s also an interesting look at how AI may be reshaping platforms like GitHub, alongside practical articles and podcasts packed with ideas for developers and tech enthusiasts alike.

Programming

• The new Run dialog: faster, cleaner, and more capable (Clint Rutkas) - Nice boost to performance for Run dialog (currently only in the insider version)

• Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub (Mitchell Hashimoto) - I didn't realize it was that bad! It's true that I spend less time there, but did AI cause all those outages (by generating peaks of traffic)

• Run Gemma 4 with Ollama locally, and keep the Aspire LLM Insights (sparkles and all) (Erik Lieben) - Oh yes! Interesting tutorial that explains how to hook local AI to Aspire (a dev tool)

Data

• Things I Think I Think... Data Privacy - Data is the new gold, the new oil, now more than ever. This post shares an opinion of our future.

AI

• AI Agent Fleet for CI/CD: How Docker Ships Faster (Manuel de la Peña) - This is a nice post that describes a new tool that's great and also provides good tips on how to write your skills.

• Generate Images Locally with Docker Model Runner (Ignasi Lopez Luna) - I have a very similar setup, and I love having a local AI for my little tasks

• Burn Through Your Backlog With My /triage Skill (Matt Pocock) - This post explains a skill triage to help you in your repos. There is also a video version.

Databases

• Why COALESCE might be the most useful SQL function you’re not using right ( Lukas Vileikis) - If you don't know, coalesce this post for you. If you don't know any other alternative, this post is for you. If you're not sure when to use what this post is also for you

Podcasts

• Docker AI, what’s new with MCP, Agents, Sandboxes, and more (DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling) - Michael Irwin from Docker is on this episode and they go through alllll the recent releases and some major upcoming stuff, rellay interesting episode

• Making opinionated AI tooling decisions with Nimbalyst's Greg Hinkle (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Interesting discussion around Nimbalyst, an AI tool that has a few pretty cool tricks up its sleeves

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.

If you have interesting content, share it!

~frank

Reading Notes #691

This week’s notes bounce between terminals, copilots, and the shifting shape of AI tools in our daily work. From real-world experiments in large .NET projects to small quality-of-life improvements that just make coding smoother, there’s a lot to chew on. A few links stood out more than expected and might change how you approach your setup or your workflow.

All ready the end of the month!

Open Source

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.25 Release (Dustin Howett) - Nice to see a new update for our beloved terminal.

AI

• Ten Months with Copilot Coding Agent in dotnet/runtime - .NET Blog (Stephen Toub) - A real and big project, 10 months of experiments, 1 takeaway and a lot of details with numbers to explain it all.

• Claude Code with Docker: Local Models, MCP, Sandboxes (Yiwen Xu) - Short jump-post. It contains the references needed, including a video, to package Claude Code locally.

• OpenAI is planning a desktop ‘superapp’ (Jay Peters) - Interesting to see the result of this app merge.

• You no longer have to wait for Copilot to finish thinking (Bart Wullems) - Amazing! I love it! Another scenario where this is useful is when you press the wrong new-line key combination, and it sends your request instead of adding a new line.

• My 'Grill Me' Skill Went Viral (Matt Pocock) - After trying grill me, I knew I couldn't do without it. It is a great skill as it forces us to really flesh out our idea.

• Product management on the AI exponential - Interesting post where we learn more about the day-to-day of a PM at Anthropic

Miscellaneous

• DevRel Is Not Measured Like Other Roles — And That Needs to Change (Dewan Ahmed) - This in between role is are to define and to measure.

~frank

Reading Notes #690

AI keeps changing how we build, think, and even feel about software. This batch of posts & episodes mixes practical agent skills, vibe coding, and faster shipping with a bit of reflection on the old internet and why it still sticks with us.

AI

• 5 Agent Skills I Use Every Day (Matt Pocock) - This post shares really useful and impactful skills and explains how they work.

• A beginner's guide to vibe coding (Jessica Wachtel) - A nice and light post that describes the rules or the freedom of vibe coding.

• How VS Code Builds with AI (Pierce Boggan) - From shipping monthly to weekly, this post explains how the VS Code maintainers achieved that.

• Let your Coding Agent debug your browser session with Chrome DevTools MCP | Blog | Chrome for Developers (Sebastian Benz, Alex Rudenko) - That's a nice one! Really useful MCP

• 9 Ways AI Coding Has Rewired My Brain (Matt Pocock) - An interesting post that not only describes an efficient way to code with AI but also to stay relevant.

Podcasts

• Your Images are Out of Date (probably) - The Silent Rebuilds problem (DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling) - Very interesting episode. I guess I never realized how true it is that as soon as you download your image, they are outdated. This episode talks about the concept of silent rebuilds and tools to help us solve that issue.

• 503: Welcome to Tiny Tool Town (Merge Conflict) - With a name like Tiny Tool Town, my head always goes to Looney Tunes. No idea why, but this episode is not about that. It's about the collection of open source tools named: Tiny Tool Town, and they also talk about different models in GitHub Copilot.

• Building Software using Squad with Brady Gaster (.NET Rocks!) - Turn your Coplot to 11 with Squad. Carl and Richard talk to Brady Gaster about Squad, a tool for creating an AI development team using GitHub Copilot.

• Daniel Ward: AI Agents - Episode 393 (Azure & DevOps Podcast) - In this episode, they talk about the different AI tools used by developers and DevOps people, and the trends.

• Everything Is a Graph (Even Your Dad Jokes) with Roi Lipman (Screaming in the Cloud) - Nice episode about different database and most obviously about graph databases. Very interesting to learn more about all that explosion of database types.

Miscellaneous

• Kill Your Ego, Ship Your Work (Golnaz) - Great advice from Golnaz in this post. This is why so many people want to work with her.

• I Think a Lot of Developers Are Quietly Grieving the Old Internet (NorthernDev) - I think this feeling is real and I hope it won't stay long.

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 #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