Azure and GitHub - better together? While at the Copenhagen Developer Festival, Carl and Richard talked to April Edwards for a special .NET Rocks Live. April talked about how Azure and GitHub work well together, discussing Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions on the CI/CD pipeline side and how other services can interact. Lots of laughter and great questions from the live audience!

Data Science and UX should be the best of friends! While at the Copenhagen Developer Festival, Carl and Richard talked to Grishma Jena about her work in data science at IBM - and working closely with the UX teams to understand how customers use software and the opportunities to improve it. Grishma talks about the quantitative side of analytics regarding application telemetry, including the ability to predict when a customer is about to abandon an application. The conversation also digs into using modern machine learning to analyze quantitative data, such as comments in surveys - could you sort that kind of data by sentiment or actionability? Improve your UX with data!

What can you do with a Particle Photon? While in an aluminum Airstream trailer in a thunderstorm at the Copenhagen Developers Festival, Carl and Richard talked to Colleen Lavin about her work with the Particle Photon IoT device - and its many maker possibilities! Colleen talks about making it easy to start building a device - but the struggle with so many choices to actually pick a project. The conversation also digs into making production versions of your device so that they are smaller, cheaper, and very reliable - it's a fun time to be a maker!

How about some in-process messaging with no dependencies? Carl and Richard chat with Jimmy Bogard about his work with MediatR, a simple mediator pattern implementation in .NET. Jimmy talks about how MediatR emerged from his work with customer applications having controllers and/or managers that slowly got bigger and more complicated... and how they became difficult to maintain. Using the mediator pattern to break down those blocks of code into more manageable chunks needed a bit of tooling that was cut and pasted from project-to-project until MediatR was born!

How can a large language model help your application? Carl and Richard talk to Brian MacKay about his work with large language models, including ChatGPT - and others! Brian talks about how LLMs continue to evolve and the limitations they have. But identifying language inside your applications can be powerful, and Brian talks through a few scenarios his company uses in production today. Work could you be taking advantage of today!

How much architectural ceremony is enough? Carl and Richard talk to Jeremy Miller about his minimal approach to architecture when building software, including his products Wolverine and Marten. Jeremy talks about how good tooling can simplify architecture, ultimately by writing less code - so that you are writing only the code that is unique to your customer needs.

How is Chocolatey evolving? Carl and Richard talk to Gary Ewan Park about the latest with the open-source Windows package management solution. Gary discusses some of the differences between the various package managers for Windows these days, including WinGet. Each product has its niche, and Chocolatey has done a good job of evolving into a broader product, including Chocolatey for Business, to allow a view of applications installed across all your machines - and being able to push updates out to them.

How's your architecture game? Carl and Richard talk to Thomas Betts about being a better architect. Thomas focuses on the key aspect - communication! An effective architect can talk to all the stakeholders in the language of the stakeholder, whether that's speaking business with business stakeholders, coding with developers, and understanding the needs of the security and operations folks. All those aspects (and more) go into an effective architecture and then come the changes as the implementation challenges happen. The conversation also digs into the importance of documentation to know why decisions were made and how to change them as you respond to changing needs and landscapes.

Large Language Models like GPT-4 are all the rage - how do we use them well? Carl and Richard talk to Amber McKenzie about the challenges and concerns around LLMs, especially regarding the data involved. Amber talks about the risks of creating products around LLMs while the technology is so young and constantly evolving, especially with how the general public reacts to conversational AI. Education is key, and constantly fact-checking - good advice for a lot of technology, but LLMs are making fact checking even more important!

Microservices or Monoliths? Carl and Richard talk to Layla Porter about choosing a middle ground between microservices and monoliths, with modular monoliths. Layla talks about the pushback from the community around microservices and the insistence that there is "one right way." Monoliths have their advantages until they are a problem - but that doesn't mean that re-architecting everything is the right way to go. Chipping off parts of the monolith into satellite modules strikes a balance of flexibility and scalability - and opens the door to accessing the power of bus architectures when needed!