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

Ask AI from Anywhere: No GUI, No Heavy Clients, No Friction

Ever wished you could ask AI from anywhere without needing an interface? Imagine just typing ? and your question in any terminal the moment it pops into your head, and getting the answer right away! In this post, I explain how I wrote a tiny shell script that turns this idea into reality, transforming the terminal into a universal AI client. You can query Reka, OpenAI, or a local Ollama model from any editor, tab, or pipeline—no GUI, no heavy clients, no friction.

Small, lightweight, and surprisingly powerful: once you make it part of your workflow, it becomes indispensable.

💡 All the code scripts are available at: https://github.com/reka-ai/terminal-tools

The Core Idea

There is almost always a terminal within reach—embedded in your editor, sitting in a spare tab, or already where you live while building, debugging, and piping data around. So why break your flow to open a separate chat UI? I wanted to just type a single character (?) plus my question and get an answer right there. No window hopping. No heavy client.

How It Works

The trick is delightfully small: send a single JSON POST request to whichever AI provider you feel like (Reka, OpenAI, Ollama locally, etc.):

# Example: Reka
curl https://api.reka.ai/v1/chat
     -H "X-Api-Key: <API_KEY>" 
     -d {
          "messages": [
            {
              "role": "user",
              "content": "What is the origin of thanksgiving?"
            }
          ],
          "model": "reka-core",
          "stream": false
        }

# Example: Ollama local
curl http://127.0.0.1:11434/api/chat 
-d {  
      "model": "llama3",   
      "messages": [
        {
          "role": "user", 
          "content": "What is the origin of thanksgiving?"
        }], 
      "stream": false
    }

Once we get the response, we extract the answer field from it. A thin shell wrapper turns that into a universal “ask” verb for your terminal. Add a short alias (?) and you have the most minimalist AI client imaginable.

Let's go into the details

Let me walk you through the core script step-by-step using reka-chat.sh, so you can customize it the way you like. Maybe this is a good moment to mention that Reka has a free tier that's more than enough for this. Go grab your key—after all, it's free!

The script (reka-chat.sh) does four things:

1. Captures your question
2. Loads an API key from ~/.config/reka/api_key
3. Sends a JSON payload to the chat endpoint with curl.
4. Extracts the answer using jq for clean plain text.

1. Capture Your Question

This part of the script is a pure laziness hack. I wanted to save keystrokes by not requiring quotes when passing a question as an argument. So ? What is 32C in F works just as well as ? "What is 32C in F".

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    if [ ! -t 0 ]; then
        QUERY="$(cat)"
    else
        exit 1
    fi
else
    QUERY="$*"
fi

2. Load Your API Key

If you're running Ollama locally you don't need any key, but for all other AI providers you do. I store mine in a locked-down file at ~/.config/reka/api_key, then read and trim trailing whitespace like this:

API_KEY_FILE="$HOME/.config/reka/api_key"
API_KEY=$(cat "$API_KEY_FILE" | tr -d '[:space:]')

3. Send The JSON Payload

Building the JSON payload is the heart of the script, including the API_ENDPOINT, API_KEY, and obviously our QUERY. Here’s how I do it for Reka:

RESPONSE=$(curl -s -X POST "$API_ENDPOINT" \
     -H "X-Api-Key: $API_KEY" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d "{
  \"messages\": [
    {
      \"role\": \"user\",
      \"content\": $(echo "$QUERY" | jq -R -s .)
    }
  ],
  \"model\": \"reka-core\",
  \"stream\": false
}")

4. Extract The Answer

Finally, we parse the JSON response with jq to pull out just the answer text. If jq isn't installed we display the raw response, but a formatted answer is much nicer. If you are customizing for another provider, you may need to adjust the JSON path here. You can add echo "$RESPONSE" >> data_sample.json to the script to log raw responses for tinkering.

With Reka, the response look like this:

{
    "id": "cb7c371b-3a7b-48d2-829d-70ffacf565c6",
    "model": "reka-core",
    "usage": {
        "input_tokens": 16,
        "output_tokens": 460,
        "reasoning_tokens": 0
    },
    "responses": [
        {
            "finish_reason": "stop",
            "message": {
                "role": "assistant",
                "content": " The origin of Thanksgiving ..."
            }
        }
    ]
}

The value we are looking for and want to display is the `content` field inside `responses[0].message`. Using `jq`, we do:

echo "$RESPONSE" | jq -r '.responses[0].message.content // .error // "Error: Unexpected response format"'

Putting It All Together

Now that we have the script, make it executable with chmod +x reka-chat.sh, and let's add an alias to your shell config to make it super easy to use. Add one line to your .zshrc or .bashrc that looks like this:

alias \\?=\"$REKA_CHAT_SCRIPT\"

Because ? is a special character in the shell, we escape it with a backslash. After adding this line, reload your shell configuration with source ~/.zshrc or source ~/.bashrc, and you are all set!

The Result

Now you can ask questions directly from your terminal. Wanna know what is origin of Thanksgiving, ask it like this:

? What is the origin of Thanksgiving

And if you want to keep the quotes, please you do you!

Extra: Web research

I couldn't stop there! Reka also supports web research, which means it can fetch and read web pages to provide more informed answers. Following the same pattern described previously, I wrote a similar script called reka-research.sh that sends a request to Reka's research endpoint. This obviously takes a bit more time to answer, as it's making different web queries and processing them, but the results are often worth the wait—and they are up to date! I used the alias ?? for this one.

On the GitHub repository, you can find both scripts (reka-chat.sh and reka-research.sh) along with a script to create the aliases automatically. Feel free to customize them to fit your workflow and preferred AI provider. Enjoy the newfound superpower of instant AI access right from your terminal!

What's Next?

With this setup, the possibilities are endless. Reka supports questions related to audio and video, which could be interesting to explore next. The project is open source, so feel free to contribute or suggest improvements. You can also join the Reka community on Discord to share your experiences and learn from others.

Resources

• Reka Terminal Tools on GitHub
• Reka FREE API key
• jq - Command-line JSON processor

Reading Notes #664

Welcome to another edition of my weekly reading notes! This week's collection brings together some fascinating developments across the tech landscape. From the intricacies of building cross-platform .NET tools to impressive AI breakthroughs like Warp's stellar performance on SWE-bench, there's plenty to explore. I've also discovered some thought-provoking content about leadership, product management, and the art of meaningful communication. Whether you're interested in the latest AI tools, looking for career insights, or simply want to stay current with industry trends, this week's selection has something valuable for every developer and tech professional.

Programming

• Using and authoring .NET tools (Andrew Lock) - Interesting post that shares the behind-the-scenes when you're building a tool for multiple targets and the challenge that it represents. Those also share the new ways of .NET 10

AI

• Warp scores 75.8% on SWE-bench Verified! (Suraj Gupta, Daniel Peng) - New Warp update, great performance.

• Spec-driven development with AI: Get started with a new open source toolkit ( Den Delimarsky) - A new tool that looks very promising. A multi-agent specification driven and compatible with Visual Studio Code. Worth trying it

• Google Gemma3 270M : The best Smallest LLM for everything (Mehul Gupta) - Interesting... It makes sense to have a tiny model available on our phone; smaller devices and much simpler tasks.

Podcasts

• Design at GitHub with Diana Mounter (.NET Rocks!) - Very interesting, discussion about so many things: career, the balance between design and engineering, GitHub, and so much more.

• How to Lead with Value with Dr. Morgan Depenbusch (How to Lead with Value with Dr. Morgan Depenbusch) - I really enjoyed this episode about the little things we can do to shift the way we interact with others.

• 746: How to Make Small Talk with Executives, with Lorraine K. Lee (Coaching for Leaders) - A very rich episode to start improving the way we see and use small talk.

Miscellaneous

• The two-ear Product Manager: Why balanced listening is your superpower (Bart Wullems) - This post shares great insight about how to become a better product manager. It's a good read, I strongly suggest it to everyone.

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 #662

From Docker's security practices to the latest in GPT-5 discussions, there's quite a mix of topics to dive into. I particularly enjoyed the thought-provoking piece about junior developers in the age of LLMs - it's a conversation we should all be having.

As always, grab your favorite beverage, and let's explore what caught my attention this week!

DevOps

• Practitioner's View: How Docker Enables Security by Default (Pedro Ignácio, Denis Cruz Rodrigues) - Improving the culture can be a challenge, but security is worth the effort. This post lists your first targets if you want to go that way, and explains why it's important.

AI

• Announcing the NuGet MCP Server Preview - .NET Blog (Jeff Kluge) - Oh! That's a cool one, looking forward to trying it and seeing if you can help me when I'm searching for a package but I don't know the name or don't remember the name

• Introducing MCP Support in AI Shell Preview 6 - PowerShell Team (Steven Bucher) - Cool way to have AI into your terminal; amazing good idea

• The GitHub Prompt Injection Data Heist | Docker (Ajeet Singh Raina) - Yes! This post talks about this injection story. But there is more! It shares how to prevent it, and all the things that we need to be aware of those dangers.

Podcasts

• Focus Friend by Hank Green is #1 in the App Store with Bria Sullivan (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - Cool episode about that very and new mobile App. They talk about how it started and some technical challenges. Very interesting.

• SPI 884: Personal Branding is More Important than Ever with Rory Vaden (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - Interesting discussion about the personal brand, and how to build it and how it could be use to help you.

• SPI 885: What's Working on Social Media Right Now (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - Social medias are evolving and this podcast episode talk about how we should adapt and change the way we do business with it.

• 476: GPT-5 Is Here, What's next? (Merge Conflict) - As much as I like the new GPT-5, they made me realized that I was thinking exactly like them! I won't spoil anything but it is a great episode where James is in fire! ;)

Miscellaneous

• The role of junior developers in the world of LLMs (Oren Eini) - This is a great question. AI is definitely affecting the job market. However, this interesting post denies the annihilation of junior roles. What do you think?

• Your Twitch live stream graphics don’t really matter, but they can help (Salma) - Good advice for those who want to start doing videos or streaming. The best advice to get started is still just start and go! But after a little while, here what you can do to improve your setup.

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 #604

It's reading notes time! It 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. 

You also read something you liked? Share it!

 

Cloud

• Azure Communication Services May 2024 Feature Updates (Daysha Carter) - Wow many great new features in this update.

• Logic App Consumption: How to set an API connection to use Logic Apps Managed Identity inside Visual Studio 2019 – SANDRO PEREIRA BIZTALK BLOG (Sandro Pereira) - I love those true life story where the author shares how they solved a real-life problems.

Programming

• Blazor Basics: 9 Best Practices for Building Blazor Web Apps (Claudio Bernasconi) - This post shares best practices. They are simple to follow but very impactful.

• Performant, Secure, and Versatile Containers (Savannah Ostrowski,Sohan Maheshwar) - Cool! It's time to try it, only one switch to flip..

• An introduction to primary constructors in C#12 (Andrew Lock) - Wow! This post dig into what can and cannot do the new constructors in C#. Example by example trying more complex scenarios, fascinating!

DevOps

• Use Azure DevOps Pipelines as a Serverless Compute Engine (Chris Pietschmann) - Do you know or use Azure DevOps Pipeline? They can read your code from most source repository and will execute tasks for you. Like CI-CD as explains in this post.

Miscellaneous

• Introducing Plans on Microsoft Learn (Kaberi Bell) - Would it be to be a data engineer, AI specialist, app builder there's a plan for you and that's a very cool new feature on learn have a look this blog post explain all of it

• How Do You Measure Developer Experience? (Jennifer Riggins) - An interesting article about what and how measure performance. I didn't know so many system and details concepts were that detailed.

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.21 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Tons of new features again and I love| seeing all those community contributions.

~Frank

Reading Notes #593

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Azure Functions Extensibility - Runtime Scaling (Tomasz Pęczek) - A well written post that goes in the details.Perfect to really understand how things works.

Programming

• 5 Powerful HTML Attributes That Don't Require JavaScript (Ashish Patel) - Wow! I didn't even known that most of those attributes existed..

• Docker Init for ASP.NET Core Compared to VS or VS Code Extensions (Julie Lerman) - awesome comparison! I've been thinking about doing it for a little while. Another great post from Julie.

• Blazor and .NET 8: How I Built a Fast and Flexible Website (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - optimisation is often a step that people forgets, but it's one that is extremely rewarding.This series seams very interesting, we will s| more of those in the notes...

• Warp, the modern terminal, is now available for Linux (Aloke Desai, David Stern) - I didn't heard of that terminal before. It looks interesting! Looking forward to try it.

• Using Visual Studio Code for .NET MAUI Development (Vijay Anand) - it's incredible the progress that was done in such little time I'm looking forward to try it.

• The FAST and the Fluent: A Blazor story - .NET Blog (Vincent Baaij) - Nice post that teach us a bit of history. I'm fan of Fluent UI and Blazor...and more recently of the Fluent UI Blazor library. I think it's a must for all Blazor developers.

• GraphQL vs. REST—Which is Better for API Design? (Hassan Djirdeh) - Pretty cool comparison of different type/design of APIs.

Miscellaneous

• Windows AI Studio : Getting Started ( Shreyan Fernandes) - Nice tools the works locally. I'm installing it, will you?

~Frank

Reading Notes #575

Happy Thanksgiving to all Canadian🍁! 

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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 think you may have interesting content, share it!

Suggestion of the week

• New experiences designed to make every developer more productive on Windows 11 (Mike Harsh) - Damn! I'm very tented to go right away and reinstall Windows on my dev PC, it looks so great.

Programming

• Get Started with the Microcks Docker Extension for API Mocking and Testing (Ajeet Singh Raina, Yacine Kheddache, Hugo Guerrero) - This looks like an amazing and simple to use tool to test all our API.How doesn't need it.

• Windows Subsystem for Linux September 2023 update (Craig Loewen) - Wow! So many new improvement. Its time for an update which one will it be for you WSL -update or -pre-release update ?

• New Azure DevOps scopes now available for Microsoft Identity OAuth delegated flow apps - Azure DevOps Blog (Angel Wong) - Security is the job of everyone , right? Nice update for Azure DevOps.

• Hugo + VSCode + Docker = ❤️ (Aaryn Smith) - After an upgrade of Hugo or the theme, one of my site wasn't being generated anymore. Happy to to find a that devContainer, I will be able to investigate quickly.

Open Source

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.19 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Cool updates! I love that right-click web search! You know... when there is an error it will be so much efficient! An that was a community contribution! Fantastic!

• Unlocking DevOps Magic: Dive into the Azure Kubernetes Service Wonderland in Visual Studio Code! (Japhlet Nwamu, Tatsat Mishra) - Great tools that really simplify the life of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). It was the topic of an episode of open at Microsoft.

Podcasts

• Introducing TypeChat with Anders Hejlsberg (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - It's the second time I hear about TypeChat, remember Reading Notes #565, it seams extremely interesting.
• How to rally support for your big idea (Modern Mentor) - Listening to winning strategies to make sure our biggest ideas have good start... It's always a good idea.
• Community and Empowerment with Sharmadean Reid (A Bit of Optimism) - See ideas and challenges as a way to learn more, to learn maybe something different, to climb higher as Simon says, love it.

~Frank

Reading Notes #557

It is time to share new reading notes. It 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!

Open Source

• Introducing Dart | Windows (Tim Sneath) - This a nice post that makes us dive into a world close to the machine. An interesting open-source project indeed.

Programming

• Boost Your Local Testing Game with the LambdaTest Tunnel Docker Extension (Salman Khan, Ajeet Singh Raina) - With this extension, we can test simply and securely our application. This tutorial helps us get started.

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.18 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Tons of super cool features coming up in this release. Kalya and Hanselmann showed a few of them during Build keynote.

• PSReadLine 2.3.1-beta1 Release - PowerShell Team (Steven Bucher) - And it keeps getting better. This tool helps everyone. Make heavy user faster, and save the occasional user with suggestions.

LowCode

• Ridiculously Simple Power Apps Drop Shadow Technique (Matthew Devaney) - New cool looks for our apps.

• Building Quick and Visual Reports with Power Apps Reporting not Power BI (Shane Young) - This post shares an interesting alternative to PowerBi when requirements are less demanding.

Podcasts

• Toi Wright: Blazor WebAssembly - Episode 246 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - Great interview about this .NET author.
• Episode 179: Maintainer Month with GitHub's Martin Woodward (Sustain) - Learn more about the Maintainer Month during this episode. Martin talks also about the status of GitHub, five years after being acquired by Microsoft.
• Contribute to Kubernetes (DevOps and Docker Talk) - Inspirering episode about open source. The focus is on Kubernetes but this is true for any project.
• Computing History with Atari and Commodore's Leonard Tramiel (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I grow-up with a Pet Commodore and Commodore 64. This episode is a great interview.

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft Learn announces Microsoft Q&A Assist and new content for building AI skills (erinrifkin) - This is brilliant. Asking the question correctly or asking the right question make all the difference to the answer we will get.Looking forward to seeing this available more broadly.

~Frank

Reading Notes #540

Good Monday!

Already time to share new reading notes. It is a habit I started a long time ago where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Accelerate your Azure cloud management using Azure Cloud Shell with Predictive IntelliSense (Jason Helmick) - That's excellent news! After trying it locally, I cannot stop using it.

• Take your Azure CLI skills to the next level (nadavbh) - Oh wow, nice! I'm customizing my prompt right away!

Programming

• Bringing GitHub Actions to GitHub Mobile (Maximilian Sachs) - I'm Involved in a few repos, and being about to review some PR or questions and be able to answer them quickly is super nice. Learn more about this app in the post.

• How I built the first PDF report for KlipTok using IronPDF (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - A nice tutorial that shows how this tool was used with a Blazor static web site to print reports. A real implementation with his real challenges.

• Windows Package Manager 1.4 (Demitrius Nelon) - The more I use this tool the more I like it. Nice update that makes it even easier to use.

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.17 Release (Christopher Nguyen) - Nice new features, new configurations...I like that mica effect.

Databases

• Azure Data Studio 1.41 release - Microsoft SQL Server Blog (Erin Stellato) - Nice new update on this nice tool. Not all of them are visible, but the impact is big nevertheless.

Miscellaneous

• Practice Tests released on Microsoft Learn (Georgia Kalyva) - So many of you asked me about where they could find those tests... Happy to provide an easy answer moving on.

Reading Notes #533

Good Monday!

It's time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles and blog posts, that caught my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Azure SQL Trigger for Azure Functions in Public Preview (Renato Losio) - This is interesting this way you could beneficiate the trigger and keep the code outside of the database.

Programming

• Install Terminal App Themes in Windows 11 (Sofia Sondh) - Simple and we have the choice, great!

• My Top 10 Visual Studio Code Extensions for 2022 (John Kilmister) - Oh wow, there were a few gems I didn't know in this post. Great list.

• Ref vs Out C#: Which is the Better Choice when? (Byte Hide) - A simple post that lists the differences between those two keywords.

• Web Security 101 - Part 1: Secrets (Abbey Perini) - This is a nice post that lists places or methods to save our secrets and explains the pro and cons of each.

• Fluent Insights EP4: Slots (Paul Gildea) - The new episode of Fluent UI Insights is out. This one talks about slots, JSX children, and triggers.

Miscellaneous

• 10 SEO Tips For Technical Writers And Software Developers (Mahesh Chand) - A great post about SEO and why we should care.

~Enjoy!

Reading Notes #528

Good Monday, 

Already time to share new reading notes. Here is a list of all the articles, and blog posts that catch my interest during the week. 

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Azure DevOps Roadmap update (Gloridel Morales) - Nice update for Azure DevOps, and more details for us.

• Azure Service Bus Performance - Azure SDK Blog (Paul Michaels) - A nice post that explores the edge of the service Bus services in terms of speed and size of the messages. It could have a big impact on your design, depending on your business scenarios.

• Use Power Automate to Retrieve Data from an Azure Function for Reporting – Code with Dan Blog (Dan Wahlin) - This post teaches how to build a cool tool without code.

Podcast

• 42. Programming languages; from .NET and C# to JavaScript, from Python to Rust, and even Rockstar - with Dylan Beattie (Betatalks the podcast) - Another great episode of Betatalks the podcast about that passion burning inside that make people do so many wonderful things.
• Celebrating the Second Edition of Code with Charles Petzold (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - What an amazing interview with the author of the book Code. I heard so much about this book, and now with this new edition++, I think I should put it on my reading list.
• Unreasonable Hospitality with Will Guidara (A Bit of Optimism) - Whaaat?! This is such a great idea! I need to read that book and go to that restaurant. I love the idea.

Miscellaneous

• Introducing the Docker+Wasm Technical Preview (Michael Irwin) - It seems like a good mix. I really need to try it out.

• Windows Terminal is now the Default in Windows 11 - Windows Command Line (Kayla Cinnamon) - Woot Woot! Great work for all these people. Windows terminal is a great project well though. Learn more about its journey in this post.

~frank

Reading Notes #508

It's... Tuesday! 

Yes I know one day later, but it's still time to share my reading notes. Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. 

If you think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• 50 shades of .NET on AWS (François Bouteruche) - A nice, like-real, story that helps understand how decisions are taken when planning in cloud architecture (here AWS).

• Deploy ASP.NET Core websites to Azure App Service with Azure Pipelines (Mark Heath) - Very interesting tutorial about azure DevOps pipeline.

• Introducing the Azure Static Web Apps CLI (Anthony Chu) - Amazing tools this swa CLI is very interesting and useful.

Programming

• Light and dark mode in just 14 lines of CSS (Salma Alam-Naylor) - Lovely there is no real reason to not do it.

• A New Architecture for APIs (Anant Jhingran) - A very interesting paper that highlights the strengths of GraphQL.

• Add an Admin Tab to Windows Terminal with gsudo (Sam Cogan) - That's a pretty a neet tool!

• Development Container CLI (Brigit Murtaugh) - Oh! This is fantastique, I need to try that, I'm assuming we will be able to give a name to the instance and that it will make reopening a container easier.

• Docker Host network alternatives for Windows containers (Vinicius Apolinario) - Networks are hard, at least for me, and this post shows nice alternatives and explains many things.

Podcast

• Studio 2022 Extensions with Mads Kristensen (.NET Rocks!) - Whenever I listen Mads Kristensen talking about Visual Studio, my brain goes 🤯 Awesome, awesome episode.

Miscellaneous

• The Azure Cosmos DB Journey to .NET 6 - .NET Blog (Vinod Sridharan) - Learn how Azure Cosmo DB API gateway is low latency and use .Net in many different scenarios to achieve great performance, in this post.

~frank

Reading Notes #487

It's... Tuesday! Yes I know one day later, but it's still time to share my reading notes. 

Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed. 

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Suggestion of the week

• 5 DevOps tips to speed up your developer workflow (Damian Brady) - Great post with event greater tips to be more efficient.

Cloud

• Azure Cost Management and Billing updates (Michael Flanakin) - Tracking our costs is important to stay on top of your business. This short post shares the latest updates.

• WTH are Azure Container Apps? (Sam Cogan) - A nice post that really does a great introduction of the new Azure Containers Apps that was announced recently.

Programming

• 
  GitHub Issues Graph with Netlify and GraphQL (Den Delimarsky) - Whaaaat! Awesome idea and execution. I love it!
  

• A Nightscout Segment for OhMyPosh shows my realtime Blood Sugar readings in my Git Prompt (Scott Hanselman) - It's cool that you can add anything in the prompt, and there is such granularity control of how the information is displayed.

• GitHubs magic files (Rob Bos) - Nice some of them I never saw.

• Windows Authentication with HttpClient (Rick Strahl) - He got me at Retro post lol

Podcasts

• Egil Hansen on Blazor Testing with bUnit - Episode 169 (Azure DevOps Podcast) - It's the second time I hear good things about bUnit. This is an open-source library for testing Blazor components that can be paired with many popular test frameworks. I need to try it.

• Podcast Tags: Are They Still Relevant? (Feed Your Brand) - It all makes sense. I am not 100% sure about YouTube however because all captions are indexed... I think. But if you create content listen to this.

• Family with Ari Emanuel (A Bit of Optimism) - The best way to learn and grow is to try and fail ( aka fall). A great episode very interesting.

☁️ Frank

Reading Notes #482

Another Monday, a new reading notes; a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Azure Cost Management and Billing updates – August 2021 | Azure blog and updates (Michael Flanakin) - Pretty nice updates this month to better see the info from inside the portal or outside with new downloadable options, and Power Bi.

• Deconstructing Azure PowerShell APIs with Fiddler (Developer Support) - I love seeing those behind the scenes, and this one explains how we can do it ourselves.

Programming

• How WebAssembly Could Streamline Cloud Native Computing (Mary Branscombe) - Interesting post. I didn't play a lot of work kubernetes yet, so I will say the idea seems brilliant.

• My Ultimate PowerShell prompt with Oh My Posh and the Windows Terminal (Scott Hanselman) - This is the perfect post to get started. You have everything to build a pretty decent customized prompt and from there you just tweak it for your preferences... Don't be scare everything is very well documented.

• Boost your productivity with Productivity Power Tools Extensions in Visual Studio 2022! (Leslie Richardson) - This next VisualStudio is looking so promising....very excited

Podcast

• How to Earn More Keynote Speaking Opportunities From Your Podcast (Feed Your Brand) - Interesting discussion on this episode. We could also summarize it by saying just be good to your host.

• SPI 502: All Things Live Video (the Best Way to Connect to Your Audience) with Luria Petrucci (The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast) - That's a hot topic: live! Yep, it is indeed different from recorded content, so what do we need to do to be better at it? Very nice episode.

~frank

Reading Notes #468

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Bicep - Why do we need yet another way to deploy stuff in Azure? (Mark Heath) - I still didn't play with bicep, but really looking forward to it. This post just made me even more excited about finally trying g it.

• Why won't you load my configuration Azure Functions? (Adam Storr) - Yes, it can definitely be a little confusing at the beginning, but that way is the secure way.

• Common Misconception #2 – Serverless is good for APIs (Jason Farrell) - Interesting post about lamda and serverless in general.

Programming

• How to make Command Prompt, PowerShell, or any Shell launch from the Start Menu directly into Windows Terminal (Scott Hanselman) - This is just what I was looking for amazing... And so simple!

• Monitoring and Observability in Cloud-Native ASP.NET Core apps | ASP.NET Blog (Nish Anil) - Nice post about this misunderstood topic. There are good examples and references to it. Excellent pairing it Scott Hanselman podcast episode with Tori Wieldt.

• The Windows Terminal made better with the Command Palette plus Multiple Actions in one Command (Scott Hanselman) - Wow, okay this is super cool and even more useful... Let's get started!

• Who Is Responsible For Building Tests? - Redgate Software (Grant Fritchey) - That's an excellent question! What's your answer?

Miscellaneous

• Add Developer PowerShell and Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio to Windows Terminal (Luise) - Del

• What shall I use for managing tasks? Email? Outlook Tasks? Planner? To Do or even OneNote? (Luise) - Still, using pen and paper and thinking to move digital? This post is for you.

~Frank

Reading Notes #460

Cloud

• Let’s compare the cloud shells offered by AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (Richard Seroter) - It's always interesting to read those comparison posts...

• ARM Template deployment, the what-if option for your Azure Deployments (Olivier Miossec) - The what-if feature is awesome, this post explains why and shows how to use it.

• State of the Azure SDK 2021 (Azure SDK Team) - So much good news! A ton of updates already done (do you know all of them?) And a very promising roadmap.

• Use Postman with the Microsoft Graph API - Microsoft Graph - Very complete docs about how to do your rest query using a dev tool.

Programming

• How to Add a Serverless Database to your React Projects (Michael Bagley) - This is a nice tutorial with all the code snippets to get started and try this type of project.

• If You Code on Windows, You Deserve a Better Windows Terminal (Matthew MacDonald) - Lovely. A nice post about why the new Windows Terminal is awesome.

• The New .NET Multi-platform App UI (David Ortinau) - I'm more and more excited by Maoi. The simple experience that it promises is very appealing.

Podcast

• #188 – Fame, Focus, and Billions of Pageviews with Evan Britton of Famous Birthdays (Indie Hackers) - A nice story where people focus on the users, worked super hard (and continue to do it), and had amazing success.

• How to Stop Being Complacent (Influencer Entrepreneurs with Jenny Melrose) - A nice episode to "kick our butt" and get back on track. Yes, 2020 indeed brought tons of new challenges at all and every level. However. we must try to make this year better.

• Who Owns Open-Source Software? (Coding Blocks) - Great discussion. Most of us, at some point, have to ask ourselves those questions (at least I know I did). It was very interesting listening to this episode and follow their thoughts.

• 631 - How to Explain a Gap in Your Résumé (Modern Mentor) - I have gaps in my resumé and I always been very comfortable about it. When I saw the title of this episode I thought maybe I should be concerned... Happy to know I was right!

Miscellaneous

• Coaching sessions: here’s what I talk about with junior developers (Dominique St-Amand) - An interesting post for all more junior will found answers and more experienced will have ideas about how to help others.

Books

Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic

Author: Adam Shoalts

Nice adventure. I wish I could see all those images, animals, and horizon. I had a good time reading this odyssey. And for the record, as a canoeist/ kayaker I was impressed by the upriver challenge.

~Frank

Reading Notes #456

The suggestion of the week

• Using the latest version of the Azure CLI (Gregor Suttie) - Whaaat! This is a master ninja tricks! Well, at the minimum it is freaking cool and useful. Awesome!

Cloud

• More with Gruut: Use the Microsoft Bot Framework to analyze emotion with the Azure Face API (Dave Brock) - This is a very complete tutorial to build a cool demo. Second in a series.
• 4 common analytics scenarios to build business agility | Azure blog and updates | Microsoft Azure (Kaiser Larsen) - Very interesting post that shares real-life scenarios where businesses used Synapse to create a great solution.

Programming

• Creating a Serverless Docker Image (Jason Robert) - A nice demo/ tutorial using Node.js to help us running things where we want.
• Entity Framework Core 5 free resources (Erik Ejlskov Jensen) - This is wonderful! A curated list of great EF documentation/ tutorials.
• Getting Started with Windows Terminal (Kayla Cinnamon) - Uh! I didn't know the preview version was also that easy to get. Pretty cool.
• Jump Start your Developer Skills with Visual Studio Code Coding Packs (Jen Looper) - So simple and yet so powerful! It's an awesome idea.
• How to Create a Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment (CI-CD) Solution for a Docker Project (Frank Boucher) - Shameless plug. It's a simple solution, but I'm pretty proud of it and it does the job marvelously.

Podcasts

• Épisode 84 - Le bonheur de s’entraîner (Grand écart) - I'm not a runner, but I like (or use to) move and be outside. This francophone podcast is really motivating, and interesting.
• Eating Frogs with Brian Tracy (The Productivityist Podcast) - I just found this podcast. I liked that book when I read it a few years ago. It was nice listening to this episode talking about it. Brought back great ideas.
• Épisode 5 - La Chasse aux Sorcières (Les Pires Moments de l'Histoire) - Okay, THIS IS A MUST. Seriously is yo understand French, it's both educational and funny. Great job!
• 2020 sucked - A year-end wrap-up with Scott's Wife, Mo (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I'm so glad Mo accepted to comes on the show once more. This dynamic is very interesting. I need to make my wife listen to this episode and to my daughter too (she studying to be a nurse).
• 628 - How to Be Confident, Not Arrogant (Modern Mentor) - The line between those two is easy to cross. I appreciated the reflection time about it, that this episode offers.
• The Infinite Game with Dr. James Carse (A Bit of Optimism) - The Infinite Game, a great book that I read last year. It was awesome to listen to Simon talk about those ideas with Dr. Carse.
• #187 – Building a $38k/Month SaaS Business as a Solo Founder with Jorda O'Connor of Closet Tools (Indie Hackers) - When you like learning, and that you are not afraid to work hard, a little idea can bring you really far.
• 0251 – Joel Quimper – Microsoft Graph (Visual Studio Talk Show) - Why Microsoft Graph? It's all in this episode (in French). Great show once more.

Miscellaneous

• Attention Matters More than Time (Josh Duffney) - So true. The balance is hard to find, but let's keep trying to be better at it.
• What’s New in Microsoft Teams | December 2020 - Wow, a very impressive list of new features. I'm looking forward to testing a few of them.

~Frank

Reading Notes #447

Cloud

• Azure CLI Oct 2020 release (Lomis Chen) - Nice new features in our favorite CLI

• Using Azure Identity with Azure SQL, Graph, and Entity Framework | Azure SDK Blog (Mickaël Derriey) - A great tutorial that explains a lot. All those little details in the development phase of production that will make our lives more simple or safe

Programming

• Don't ever break a URL if you can help it (Scott Hanselman) - Wonderful post that explains and shows how to provide a great experience to our readers even if we modernize our website.

Miscellaneous

• Windows Terminal Tips and Tricks | Windows Command Line (Kayla Cinnamon) - Great post that does a quick tour of the key features for Windows Terminal.

• 7 Ways to Boost Your Self-Confidence and Become a More Empathetic Leader (Maria Ross) - Nice little tips, even just to be more comfortable in your own skin.

• Upgrading the Storage Pool, Drives, and File System in a Synology to Btrfs (Scott Hanselman) - I've been joggling with this idea to have a local NAS since I also have a lot of video files... Thanks for sharing.

• What’s new in the Windows 10 October 2020 Update (Aaron Woodman) - Nice list of improvements and new features.

Books

Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers with Word of Mouth 

Author: Jay Baer

A good book filled with good stories. I personally like it when they deconstruct like this winner journey or factor that makes those ideas, plans, actions different. The idea of a talk trigger is good and it was nice that the creation, lifetime, and death of a talk trigger was also cover in the book.

~Frank

Reading Notes #445

Every Monday, I share my "reading notes". Those are a curated list of all the articles, blog posts, podcast episodes, and books that catch my interest during the week and that I found interesting. It's a mix of the actuality and what I consumed.

You think you may have interesting content, share it!

Cloud

• Azure Machine Learning helps customers stay ahead of challenges (Erez Barak) - A nice post to get us inspires to start our journey.

• Azure introduces new capabilities for live video analytics (Jason Hogg) - The custom vision was already as impressive as a service. So easy to use and powerful. But now in a video...that's incredibly cool.

Programming

• How to use, open, resize, and split Panes in the Windows Terminal (Scott Hanselman) - Tabs are so useful! And now it's native...awesome.

• 10 Azure DevOps – Work Items Tips & Tricks that you should know (Abhijit Jana) - Nice post. Did you know all those?

• GitHub Docs are now open source (Janice Niemeir) - Open-source documentation is the best. Faster updated, often more accurate and complete... And all of it at one URL easy to remember fantastic.

• How to use autocomplete at the command line for dotnet, git, winget, and more! (Scott Hanselman) - I love that shell/ terminal series... Learn something new each time.

• Writing JavaScript tools in other languages – a new trend? (Dr. Axel Rauschmayer) - Javascript or not javascript... I'm surprised how the opinions are so strong.

Podcasts

• #23 Fatal Conveniences™: Caffeine: Consuming Coffee With Caution (The Darin Olien Show) - Apparently not a usual episode ( I don't know it was my first one), but really interesting deep dive into the coffee world; the effect, origin and more.
• Podcast Crasher – The Binge Factor: Pat Flynn On Building An Online Business From a Podcast (Feed Your Brand) - This episode it the counterpart of another episode that happens on Pat Flynn show. Really interesting topic I don't think about my content that way... Maybe I should, a little.
• #54: Yihua Zhang - From Fitness to Coding [S03-E12] (The Solo Coder Podcast) - WHen you like what you are doing I think it shows. It doesn't mean you will always be a super start, but at least you will be happy and most of the time it will be really good for your career. Fantastic story, inspiring.
• Microsoft Identity for Developers (CloudSkills.fm) - Nice episode I think Identity/security is a really hard topic to abort, and those guys are doing a great

Miscellaneous

• 40 Microsoft Teams tips and tricks: from novice to expert. - Great tips for beginners to advanced Teams users.

~ Have a nice week!

Reading Notes #436

The suggestion of the week

• Learn Durable Functions with .NET Core and C#, stateful Serverless (Chris Noring) - A fascinating tutorial that teaches us how to get started with Azure Durable Functions and also explains how they work.

Cloud

• Azure Functions and App Service Authentication with Auth0 and other OpenID Connect providers (Anthony Chu) - A nice post that explains how to configure our function with the CLI.

• Using Key Vault and Managed Identities with Azure Functions (Damien Bod) - A very resourceful and tutorial post. The perfect place to get started.

Programming

• Bootstrap 5 alpha1 is here..! What is NEW? (Charuka herath) - Nice update.

• Securing Blazor WebAssembly Apps (Andrea Chiarelli) - A nice post with all the code.

• Windows Terminal Preview 1.2 Release (Kayla) - Very nice update of an open-source project...It's nice to see that.

Podcasts

• Stop Pushing Down Your Emotions (Developer Tea) - I think a lot of people are doing that, me included. Very interesting podcast about a real situation.

• How the OBS Project changed video forever with lead Hugh Bailey (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I was trilled to listen to this podcast. I'm a regular user of OBS and it was wonderful to learn more about this project. I will definitely be lurking on the GitHub side...

• 480: Get Noticed Without Selling Out, with Laura Huang (Coaching for Leaders) - Interesting discussion. I never realize how “Be yourself” wasn't really useful...

• Episode 219: Remote crickets and Manager Careering (Soft Skills Engineering) - A really nice episode. Great topics answering diverse questions. One that kept my attention was about the magic manager and the time management...

• How to Improve Time Management with Angela Proffitt (Influencer Entrepreneurs with Jenny Melrose) - A few great tips to improve our efficiency at managing time. It's always good to have new ideas and ear how others are doing.

• #49: Erin Doyle - Beautiful Code and Accessibility (The Solo Coder Podcast) - A beautiful, very inspiring episode about how to make the world a better place for all.

Miscellaneous

• Azure DevOps Roadmap update for 2020 Q3 | Azure DevOps Blog (Sidi) - That looks pretty neat

• How to make separate Work and Personal Profiles with the New Microsoft Edge on Beyonce's Internet (Scott Hanselman) - The profiles are really awesome and very useful. I'd say it's a must.

• Microsoft is working on an Azure-powered Cloud PC service ( Mary Jo Foley) - Interesting..

• Sort Data With ASP.NET Core and Query Strings (Khalid Abuhakmeh) - A very cool tutorial with all thee e required code. Pretty cool.

• Top 7 OBS Studio Tricks for 2020 – and you won’t believe #4 (Jeff Fritz) - A wonderful list of accessible tips to improve our stream.