Just Five Mins!

Ahh yes, AI... just take a deep breath.

So, Prompt Perfect.  Why?  well, if you are playing around with things like ChatGPT, MidJourney and so many others, you will notice very early on that you do need to be quite specific in your asking to generate the desired outcome be that images/text or whatever.  This includes providing both positive and negative prompting.

Sure, you can persevere and keep trying, but who has the time?

Enter Prompt Perfect.  A sort of IDE for prompting, but not just a clever wrapper around ChatGPT it seems.

There is a massive shift at play, as we all know, but also emerging markets riding the wave of the current AI explosion.  I wrote a short article (mini podcast) about Vellum a few weeks ago.  Vellum received $5m investment for building prompts via an IDE and pipelining the process with GitHub integration and all sorts of things.

Also, there are prompt marketplaces emerging everywhere it seems!  yes, you can buy and sell prompts for goodness sake!  One example is Prompt Base

Anyway, I digress yet again!

Prompt Perfect is essentially a way to "design" prompts.  It has a beginner level where you can explorer basic prompts and Prompt Perfect will embellish/enhance the prompt to be more descriptive.  You can then move to the intermediate/advanced options where you can specify more settings and get "under-the-hood" so to speak!

But, for the finale.  Using Prompt Perfect, you can add parameters to a well defined prompt and turn that into an API.  You can then share that API or indeed sell it... if it is a restricted niche...

As promised, there is a prompt engineering institute!

What a strange world we live in! 

Well!

I have heard of PostgreSQL of course and even looked at it years ago only to think "oh, it is just another database" - which it is, but I hadn't realised how clever it is!  It has been around for years/decades of course!

Michael Stonebraker (aka King of the Databases) is behind it of course and I had forgotten VoltDB too which is worth a look and an episode at some point! (in-memory databases eh?)

• PostgreSQL is an open-source relational database management system.
• It was developed in 1986 at UC Berkeley under the direction of Michael Stonebreaker.
• It stores data in tables, columns, and rows.
• Uses structured query language (SQL) to read and write data.

• PostgreSQL is technically an object-relational database.
• It can create custom data types to store objects with properties.
• Supports advanced features like inheritance and polymorphism.

• PostgreSQL uses multiversion concurrency control (MVCC).
• MVCC gives each transaction a snapshot of the database, allowing multiple transactions to run simultaneously without traffic jams or locks.

Some amazing features for sure!

The official PostgreSQL link is here and also NEON which is a cloud-based serverless offering for PostgreSQL.

Most definitely a slow learner in this case!  Oh, and of course, Azure has a PostgreSQL offering too ;) just in case!

So, what is flutter?

Flutter is the multi-platform framework from Google to build apps on any screen.  It uses Dart as the programming language (very similar to Java/C# etc.).

From a Microsoft perspective, this is a similar idea to Xamarin or now MAUI.

One thing jumped out to make app designing/coding easy within Flutter is something called Flutter Flow.  Worth checking out as it provides a nice graphic UI experience to build apps for desktop/mobile etc. but also provides clean code - not some weird export that you cannot use elsewhere!

Just Five Mins you say?  this one tracks over a little!  

Too much AI indeed.  But, what is worth it to you?

ChatGPT (not to be mistaken for "catGPT"), as we know, was the game-changing AI release a few months ago now.  There have been so many new releases of other AI based ventures of late including Google Palm2 and Gemini as well as up-coming KOSMOS-1 (and 2 coming soon) from Microsoft all aiming to hit this multi-model sweet spot.  For example, being able to interpret images, music and other abstract data.

Here are the links for this JFM for reference and a deeper dive if you need to:

7 New ChatGPT Plugins

ChatGPT just levelled up big time

Okay, so we have "evolved" from green-screen terminals to GUI (Graphic User Interface) ways to execute commands and now for years really, we are back very much in the command line world.

Executing scripts or commands isn't difficult, but remembering them is!

WARP seems to be addressing this by offering a new take on command line terminals.  With WARP drive (yeah, that engage gif!) you can store your workflow/scripts/commands in a nice neat way, share with your team - oh and it is, of course, AI :)  Cannot quite remember that command to change permissions?  use AI! :)

Thanks to my good friend Tim who sent this through - WARP is written in RUST and Tim has plenty to say about that!

Tired of paying for Dropbox, Google Drive, Onedrive etc.?

Fear not!

You can create your own storage solution:

• In your own network/home
• Cheap Linux machine/windows machine
• Docker Container

There are lots of these solutions around, this one jumped out so check out the details.

Link to FileCloud here (Enterprise type features, but has a community edition)

NextCloud - aimed more at the home user

A link to the original video I watched - crazy, but useful and informative and way more in depth than my measly effort!

The true zombie effect... JavaScript will never die!

Even though Douglas Crockford said the best thing we can do with JavaScript is to retire it.  Look, i get it, JavaScript isn't brilliant, in some cases, but it is what it is and I can't see it disappearing any time soon.  The horse has very much bolted so much so you might want to start using "light years" to specify how far!

There have been so many attempts to replace JavaScript over the years.  I honestly thought Dart we do that job or any number of others, but here we are.

So, even though I have only touched briefly on this, Blazor!  yes, that word!  I did an episode or two-way back however, things are changing a bit in the new release of Blazor (I believe coming in .NET 8 especially).

So, Blazor.  It has been out for some time now and came in two main flavours, web-assembly (client/browser) and of course the server-side version.

I will probably do a separate episode for the Blazor updates.  Not that millions have already done videos/blogs but hey ho, no harm in adding to the internet!  The key "big thing" seems to be Blazor united - mix-n-match web-assembly with server-side/SSR.  But let's leave that for another episode!

Here is another link referencing "JavaScript should be retired" - just in case!

Yes, blockchain in your database! well, why not!

From distributed procurement systems to logistics and of course accounting based scenarios, having ledger (blockchain) tables at your disposal isn't a bad thing... well at least I don't think so.

But, why would you need this? what problem does it solve?

Here is a longer introduction:

(3) Blockchain in your database - by David Sheardown (substack.com)

Of course, there is also the official Microsoft site about ledger tables:

Ledger overview - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn

One more, a really good video overview that shows some use cases and demos:

Bringing the power of blockchain to Azure SQL Database and SQL Server with ledger | Microsoft Learn

Okay, giggles aside, this is a really slick way to visualise and work with JSON data.. but hang on, not just JSON but XML as well as others.

This reminds me a little of schema explorer by my good friend Tim.

When I first saw this, the website was only for JSON data it seemed.  However, upon returning to the site, I was presented with another editor view called Herowand (excellent names!).  Herowand seems to be the JSON editor AND an editor for XML, YAML and something called TOML :)  I had never heard of TOML but JSON and XML of course is my daily diet ;)

A very cool set of projects, open sourced and available on GitHub (I think written in NextJS unless I am wrong).

You can also use VS-CODE to add the viewer as an extension which is really useful or of course embed into your own product or website.  Read the license information as always though!  possibly consider becoming a patreon  if it is useful :)

Link to JSON Crack itself here

Link direct to Herowand for the combined JSON, XML etc. editor here

Link to the GitHub repo here

Today we are taking a QUIC look at some interesting changes to the very fabric of the internet... yes, HTTP!

Some new changes coming to help speed up mobile/cell internet and help with those pesky network switching annoyances!

Also, some fundamental security updates too of course.