tech

2023-11-09 · open the original ↗

• Venmo transactions are public by default and should be made private. Anyone you have transacted with can view your other transactions. The fix is Me icon → gear → Privacy → default to Private, which covers future transactions only; also open Past Transactions and choose "Change All to Private".

2023-11-04 · open the original ↗

• Dev Drives bring the ReFS file system to ordinary Windows 11. Hanselman says they shipped in the Windows 11 "October moment" (13 October), needing version 22621 or later, and are created under Settings > developer features as either a VHD or a real partition; he carved a 51,200 MB (the minimum) D: partition out of unallocated space on the same physical disk as his NTFS C: drive.
• The big gain came from Defender's async scanning, not the file system. His first Meadow Project Lab samples build (about 20 projects) took 49.95 s on both drives; only after he turned on "Dev Drive protection" (scan threats asynchronously on trusted Dev Drives) did the Dev Drive run drop to about 28 s, which he credits to the antivirus change "more than … the file system".
• Small, CPU-bound builds gain modestly; disk-bound work gains more. With async on, his Hanselminutes podcast site built in about 2.37 s against 2.71 s on C: (about 12% faster) and dasBlog in about 3.74 s against 4.5 s (about 18%); he warns that a Dev Drive only helps disk-bound builds, and his 32-thread machine's compiles showed as CPU-bound in Task Manager.
• Package caches and temp folders belong on the Dev Drive, not tools. Following Microsoft's documentation, he pointed a user-level NUGET_PACKAGES environment variable at D:, after which dasBlog built in 4.44 s against 5.89 s on C: (about 25% faster); he notes the same applies to temp, npm, pip, cargo, Maven and C++ caches, and says he believes Dev Home and Visual Studio will automate this in future.
• He reports 10–50% speedups and calls the test informal. He says this is one take and "not a lab", claims block copies on ReFS can be 80–90% faster (asserted, not measured on screen), plans to move all his source to the Dev Drive, and asks viewers who do rigorous, repeatable benchmarking to publish their own results.

2023-11-02 · open the original ↗

• Word can sort a document by its headings, carrying body text along. The headings must use a built-in heading style. In Outline view (View, Outline) he collapses the document to level 1 with "Show Level", selects every heading (shift-click, or Ctrl+A), and clicks Sort. Sort is in the Paragraph section of the Home tab. He sorts by paragraphs, as text, in ascending order. Each heading's body text moves with it, as Print Layout shows afterwards. Giard says he only just learned of the feature after about 30 years of using Word, and does not know how long it has existed.
• The same sort works on one section or on lower-level headings. He adds level-2 subheadings, made by pressing Tab in Outline view, under one level-1 entry. He then selects only those and sorts them alphabetically, leaving the rest of the document in its order.

2023-10-30 · open the original ↗

• Microsoft partnership comes in several distinct business models. Swanson, a Microsoft Partner Technology Strategist focused on co-selling, lists independent software vendors (ISVs), managed service providers, distributors and resellers, system integrators and consultancies, hardware OEMs, and builders of Xbox games and Windows apps. All of them start by joining the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program (MCPP).
• Co-selling with Microsoft requires a published solution, not just membership. She says a partner must be in the program, hold a solution designation and have published a solution; it can then submit leads that are routed to Microsoft account teams, and Microsoft sends leads back. Microsoft's tech team helps get there through an architecture design session and then a "build with" plan; solutions are published through Partner Center to either Azure Marketplace (software that runs in Azure) or AppSource (consulting offers, modern work and business applications).
• Benefits grow in tiers as the partnership deepens. By her account, signing up gives Partner Center access. Partners then buy an action pack (software licences) and/or qualify for a solution designation, which comes with fees and gives advisory hours through technical pre-sales and deployment services. Partners that co-sell more can become managed partners, managed by geography or globally, and advanced specializations require an audit by a third party.
• Certifications belong to the employee, so partners must retain staff. Swanson says this is often misunderstood: an exam she passes stays with her if she changes jobs, and at the annual renewal a partner must show the certified people are still on staff to keep its designations. She has seen partners use bonuses, parties and time-limited non-competes, and says keeping employees is probably cheaper than hiring new ones.
• Partners underuse Microsoft's architects and pre-sales roadmap discussions. She says a roadmap conversation can reveal changes coming in about three months. In a hypothetical she says she made up, a partner building on the latest SQL could ship with an upcoming feature built in, instead of publishing the week before it lands. Her starting points are partner.microsoft.com ("Become a partner") and learn.microsoft.com for exam prep and Partner Center guidance.

2023-10-21 · open the original ↗

• A ZimaBoard takes 10 Gbps networking with almost no setup. The host plugged a 10-gig network card into the ZimaBoard's PCIe slot, where it was detected and configured automatically, linked it through a UniFi Switch Flex XG to his Windows PC and core switch, and measured more than 5 Gbps with the one-click OpenSpeedTest app from the CasaOS app store; the whole job took under 15 minutes.
• The 10-gig card runs hot in the ZimaBoard. The host measured the network card at up to 112°F during the test.

2023-10-20 · open the original ↗

• The host recommends the Gen 3 router only for some users. New Starlink customers should get it outright; existing users already running a Gen 2 with the Ethernet adapter into a third-party router, and RV, camping or temporary-event users, gain nothing; heavy home users with many devices, and those meshing several Starlink routers, may see better speed and range.
• Gen 3 is sold separately, with a per-customer purchase cap. It costs $199 and Starlink allows up to three; Starlink invited customers into a "limited launch" of the router by email on Tuesday, October 17th; one unit plugs into the dish and the other two serve as wired or wireless mesh repeaters. The host does not know whether Starlink is bundling Gen 3 with dishes yet, and assumes it will become standard.
• Starlink's wireless specs are a substantial step up from Gen 2. Per Starlink, it moves from Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 6, from 3x3 to 4x4 multi-user MIMO, and from 128 to 235 supported devices; the claimed range gain is hard to measure, though the host finds it plausible from the larger antenna. The environmental rating rises from IP54 to IP56, still indoor-only.
• Two built-in Ethernet ports are the host's biggest Gen 3 advantage. Gen 2 had no port and needed a separately sold accessory that was often out of stock or delayed; Gen 3's ports take wired devices or hand Starlink to a third-party router such as UniFi or Omada, ditching Starlink's Wi-Fi.
• The host advises hardwiring additional Gen 3 routers rather than meshing wirelessly. The two ports let two more routers be wired back (strictly access points, not mesh) up to about 100 m (328 ft) on Cat5e or Cat6. Gen 2 routers can mesh to a Gen 3 but stay Wi-Fi 5; Starlink's placement notes warn that more than three nodes can degrade mesh performance, and the host would move to more robust third-party access points beyond that.

2023-10-18 · open the original ↗

• Good leaders' first job is making people feel safe. Andrews draws on Stephen Porges's "neuroception", the sense of safety or danger, and Daniel Siegel's hand model of the brain: under threat we "flip our lid", and the midbrain takes over (fight or flight) or the hindbrain does (freeze and shutdown, dorsal vagal in polyvagal theory). His case is that cooperation and productivity come only from the prefrontal and cerebral cortex, so threats such as rolling layoffs hurt the work itself.
• His ten-dimension model gives ten interconnected leadership principles. The dimensions are safety, identity, messages, agency, positive social connection, environment, mission and purpose, body and brain, human needs, and strengths, and he says all are important and linked. His evidence is his own life: diagnosed autistic at 33, he had no friends until high school, and a strength in computers led him to the Philly .NET user group, speaking and the MVP award, and through them to community, purpose and income.
• Organizations should plan around capabilities rather than fixed roles. Andrews argues that junior/mid/senior developer ladders assume everyone moves toward big-picture work. A progression along detail work, or keeping a strong individual contributor out of management they don't want, would avoid the Peter principle.
• Leaders set the team's emotional tone through how they communicate. He holds up Fred Rogers's care over the messages children receive. A panicky or yelling boss unsettles staff's nervous systems, and "managers know, leaders listen and learn"; feedback framed as "a great start, here's how we can do it better" lands better than "do better". Giard adds that he wants fast feedback on mistakes, as in agile.
• Hiring for "culture fit" is inherently discriminatory. Andrews calls this view possibly controversial: culture fit looks for the workplace equivalent of genetic uniformity and is easily swayed by unconscious bias. A manager who says he can tell fit in 30 seconds is judging on gut instinct before the cortex engages, and he cites visual AI products that failed on black skin because the teams lacked diversity.

2023-10-16 · open the original ↗

• A remote RV park delivered good Wi-Fi from point-to-point-fed Aruba access points. At the Crater Lake RV park in Oregon, the service came from an omnidirectional antenna on a 30 ft pole, distributed to Aruba access points on light posts and purpose-built posts, many fed by Ubiquiti point-to-point links such as a NanoBeam with a switch in a box. The host measured above 100 Mbps all weekend, sometimes up to 300 Mbps up and down.

2023-10-14 · open the original ↗

• Generative AI still needs human curation, even at scale. Turner, VP of data at the consultancy Kin and Carta, says predictive and generative AI overlap but differ in their maths: generative AI becomes part of the product and can surprise with new combinations. One client is letting it generate output for a million products, and he says that cannot be done without human curation; he prefers to treat "hallucinations" as wrong best guesses from probabilities.
• Projects should start from a shared data foundation, not a model. He says the work begins with listening to the client, then building a data platform that many solutions can use. That means agreed definitions (what is a customer, when a sale counts, what the geographies are), a data dictionary, stewardship, governance and quality checks. About 90% of the time goes on cleansing and preparation, and the product on top is then a much lighter lift.
• Waiting for clean data is a mistake, because it never arrives. Turner says the bigger and more successful the company, the more embarrassed it is by its data, and the stock consultant answer is two years of preparation. His answer is that acquisitions and new sources keep adding mess, so build governance to manage it. Data literacy matters too: one data point challenged in an executive meeting with no provenance can taint the whole data programme.
• AI feedback loops push organizations toward more of the same. Once a model is deployed it changes the system that produces its training data, so over-reliance narrows toward a single optimum. He argues that organizations need deliberate exploration of options the data does not suggest, such as a geography with no data yet, or they will miss the other "mountaintops".
• Security inside Azure is the headline for enterprise generative AI. Kin and Carta has been a Microsoft partner from the start, and Turner says running OpenAI and Azure models in a secure Azure environment is table stakes, because the model may see every document. If you load every Word document and PowerPoint into an LLM, he warns, you may learn things about your organization you didn't know. He says AI is not right for every problem, but cloud access gives an opening even to a mom-and-pop shop.

2023-10-13 · open the original ↗

• Too many sound devices is the usual cause of lost audio. Hanselman made the video after his son couldn't tell where his sound was going: headphones, Bluetooth, HDMI monitors with speakers and virtual devices (Oculus, NVIDIA Broadcast) all show up as outputs. Right-clicking the taskbar volume icon opens the output picker. To find the right device, he switches between devices while clicking the volume slider to make it beep, or plays music.
• Rename devices and disable the ones you never want. Devices can be renamed and given icons in the modern Sound settings. The older classic dialog is under "More sound settings", or Win+R and mmsys.cpl, and there he used "Don't use this device" to hide the speakers on his three HDMI-connected Dell monitors. His warning: disabled devices disappear, so you have to remember you turned them off.
• Set the default device and the communications default separately. He found NVIDIA Broadcast set as his default communications device for Teams and Zoom and moved that to his headset, leaving his 5.1 speakers as the main default.
• The same controls apply to inputs, so disable stray microphones. On his gaming PC he disabled the front mic jack and his Logitech Brio webcam mic, so a call or recording can't quietly pick the wrong microphone.
• A third-party volume app beats the built-in per-app mixer. He recommends EarTrumpet, a free third-party app from the Microsoft Store by Rafael Rivera and others (he thinks it is also on GitHub). It replaces the taskbar volume icon with per-device and per-app volume, respects devices you have hidden, and still links to the legacy Windows dialogs.

2023-10-12 · open the original ↗

• Proactive monitoring caught the intrusion; snapshots restored it without downtime. In mid-August 2023, Zabbix and Grafana rules flagged the FreePBX firewall being disabled on seven Crosstalk-hosted systems, then changed authorized_keys files; a cron job had added an admin user and keys, called a server in France, and given attackers root, while calls kept working. ClearlyIP blocked PHP execution through the phone apps port within a day or two, and servers were restored from pre-attack snapshots after hours, with customers emailed throughout.
• The likely initial vector was a DEF CON-disclosed FreePBX zero-day. On August 12th 2023, under a week before the hacks, a researcher with the handle "good pseudonym" showed at DEF CON 31 that a phone API could be entered with a registered phone's MAC address, the hard-coded password "login" and a spoofed Digium/Sangoma user-agent, then used for plain command injection into a PHP exec call. The host infers the link from the timing.
• The host argues Sangoma's patches and advice fell short. The researcher says he reported in early May, got one reply and then silence, and demonstrated his exploit still working against Sangoma's patched API. Sangoma's blog cites a September 5th 2023 fix and urges closing phone apps and enabling the responsive firewall; the host's servers were IP-locked or firewalled yet still hacked. A September 28th re-patch was rated "minor", and version 14 and earlier get no fixes.
• Sangoma apparently removed its bug bounty page rather than pay out. Sangoma's blog thanked Systems Research Group, which the host assumes is the same researcher, but as far as he knows paid no bounty; archive.org last captured the page in March, and a Ward Mundy post dated September 17th 2023 still linked it, suggesting removal before Sangoma's September 20th blog post.
• The host thinks FreePBX is stagnating and Sangoma should give it up. He notes no significant update since version 15 in 2019, an aging CentOS 7 base with old PHP and OpenVPN, and a vague FreePBX 17 on Debian; with almost 80% of Sangoma revenue from recurring services, he sees no incentive to compete with its paid products, and urges Sangoma to sell or donate the project, offering to take it over himself.

2023-10-11 · open the original ↗

• Automating Zoom's clicks made the technology disappear from worship. After the church's first Zoom service on Easter Day 2020, Skeet found Zoom had an SDK and had an alpha of "Zoom and Enhance" running by the next Sunday: one double-click spotlights a person, mutes everyone else and stops any video, or starts the screen share and plays a video. He says the aim of all his work since is that no one notices the technology, with no five-second pause between sermon and hymn.
• The church is its people, so remote worshippers must not be dropped. Skeet planned for stages from April 2020: 10–20% of people in the building, then about 50%, then 80–90% with 10–20% still remote. He argues the pandemic was a wake-up call: churches had been failing the housebound, the ill and those away for centuries, could only have fixed it in the decade or so before, and should now stop.
• He only bought hardware his own software could control. The old analog Allen & Heath mixer had 14 channels and about 150 knobs and buttons, and intimidated volunteers. Skeet replaced it with a digital mixer (audio over USB, control over Ethernet) and pan-tilt-zoom cameras, ruling out proprietary protocols without an SDK, because he found no off-the-shelf system that even controlled a mixer and showed hymn words. The resulting app, "At Your Service", has since gained DMX lighting (red and orange on the reader at Pentecost) and, at the request of another church with Iranian refugees, live transcription through Google Cloud Translate, read on phones with a five-to-ten-second delay.
• His biggest challenge was giving each user everything needed and nothing else. Services are prepared in advance, for example from home, and uploaded to Google Cloud Storage, so the person at the desk on Sunday only syncs and presents. A Stream Deck XL (32 buttons that are also small screens) and a Behringer X-Touch Mini give a glanceable mute panel; both talk only to his software, never to the mixer directly.
• The system fits his own church and does not yet scale. No other church uses it live yet; two are interested and two more are planning AV revamps he will advise on. It is C# and WPF in a private GitHub repo, configured by JSON files with no GUI, and he would like to open-source it if he retires, "give me 10 years". He wrote his own small MVVM framework to learn how WPF works, and says he would use a tested off-the-shelf framework for commercial work.

2023-10-09 · open the original ↗

• The robot was a free review unit, not a paid video. Hanselman discloses that Elecfreaks sent him the XGO Lite CM4 robot dog to review but did not pay him for the video. It runs on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module, which he says is squarely in his interests, along with block-based programming he uses when teaching at schools.
• The hardware is unusually well built for the price. He points to careful packaging and an all-metal body with many servos. It has a front camera doing on-device hand recognition on a 1.5 GHz ARM Cortex, plus a grabber arm he uses by remote control to pick up a red ball. It can walk or trot. Elecfreaks advises not letting the battery drop below 20%.
• Network setup works but should be easier. The dog joins Wi-Fi by scanning a QR code from the app or by connecting to a phone hotspot with a name it recognizes. He recommends a 2.4 GHz IoT network for compatibility.
• The programming tool lacks polish. The XGO Blockly editor is a fork of Google Blockly, Apache-licensed, so Elecfreaks needn't publish its changes, though he'd like them to. It loads from a bare public IP address and talks to the robot over WebSockets across domains. Chrome and Edge blocked that and Firefox didn't. He wants it cloneable to run locally or in a container, or else served with a domain name and SSL certificate.
• He rates it highly despite the steep price. His score is 8 out of 10. At $599 he calls it an investment, "2 Xboxes", and says it is limited only by your ability to program it in Python or blocks. He plans to give it to a local high school robotics team.

2023-10-06 · open the original ↗

• Building from the command line works but gives no editor help. Hanselman builds a console app with dotnet new console, dotnet build and dotnet run on .NET 8, then a release candidate. Editing in Notepad gets no syntax highlighting and no IntelliSense, which is why people use an IDE.
• A full IDE shows the project's logical structure, not its files. Visual Studio's Solution Explorer isn't a file view: it shows libraries, analyzers and the target framework. He also shows IntelliCode's starred machine-learning suggestions, IntelliSense and GitHub Copilot. The released Visual Studio wouldn't open the .NET 8 project, so he had to switch to Visual Studio Preview.
• The new extension brings full-IDE features into the lightweight editor. Until then VS Code had only a language server, he says, and showed the raw files, including bin, obj and the project files. The C# Dev Kit, the new official extension, adds Solution Explorer, a Test Explorer and Roslyn-powered code navigation, and installs the base C# extension and runtime with it. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Codespaces. You sign in with the same account as Visual Studio Community or a paid licence.
• His demo covers debugging and tests on a real project. He runs F5 debugging with breakpoints, watches and locals. On his Hanselminutes podcast site he browses project references and package versions, then runs the unit tests from Test Explorer. The same project opens in both Visual Studio and VS Code.
• He says it became generally available that day. It is installed by searching "C#" in VS Code's extensions, and he says it updates automatically. "Today" refers to the recording date.

2023-10-05 · open the original ↗

• Microsoft's OpenAI partnership long predates this year's product announcements. Lussier, who works with ISVs in Microsoft's Global Partner Solutions group (as does the host), traces it from OpenAI's founding in 2015 to CTO Kevin Scott, ex-LinkedIn, introducing Satya Nadella to OpenAI's CEO, then a first big investment in 2019 with an exclusivity agreement putting OpenAI on Azure. In 2020 Microsoft built OpenAI an AI supercomputer with 285,000 CPUs and 10,000 GPUs, top five in the world then but no longer, he says.
• Microsoft's own AI ran in parallel and is available now. Lussier dates Cognitive Services to 2016, when Project Oxford was rebranded, and says an "AI at Scale" division formed in 2020 also worked on large language models, partly with NVIDIA. He hopes OpenAI interest opens conversations about that full suite, noting that Azure OpenAI access is coming in staged rollouts while Cognitive Services need no wait list.
• Copilots over business data will change how users interact with systems. Lussier expects asking a system for "the top customer accounts in the last quarter" in conversation to be transformative, and says partners he works with are building their own copilots and adding roles such as prompt engineer.
• Adopting AI needs organizational change and a responsible-AI framework. Against the CEO who reads a magazine on a plane and wants it in weeks (the host's image), Lussier calls for change management, new skills and architectures, and legal teams rethinking terms. He cites Microsoft's framework of fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability, and on bias gives an AI image set of how Europeans see Americans in which every person depicted was white.
• The meaningful uses go beyond novelty demos. MediaValet, a Canadian digital asset management company, used Microsoft's facial recognition to identify individual chimpanzees across decades of the Jane Goodall foundation's images and videos. Microsoft added Inuktitut to its translation service with the government of Nunavut to help preserve languages, and Lussier points developers to Microsoft Learn's AI tracks and the Azure ChatGPT project on GitHub.

2023-09-28 · open the original ↗

• Schools should ask when to adopt AI, not whether. Rexach, who works on Microsoft's Philanthropies team in Chicago and taught secondary school through Teach for America, expects AI to change society as the dot-com era did, and argues that withholding it from students does them a disservice because the workplace they enter will not be free of it. She likens the resistance to the early pushback against Texas Instruments calculators; Giard adds internet search engines to the comparison.
• Responsible use means using AI to sharpen students' own thinking. Against the concerns she has read about (academic dishonesty, students skipping the think time of the writing process, data privacy), she offers a Hispanic Heritage Month unit: students draft their own questions for an imagined interview with Cesar Chavez, then compare them with what ChatGPT or Bing Chat suggests, to practise "the art of powerful questions".
• AI fits cross-disciplinary projects ending in a capstone artifact. Her example compares fan engagement for the Cubs and White Sox, combining math analytics with social-science research on neighbourhood demographics and transit, while teaching students to vet the sources behind a claim.
• AI use will become another citation, policed by plagiarism tools. She points to Turnitin-style tools schools already buy and supposes they may now filter for ChatGPT or Bing Chat output; she expects citing AI use to sit alongside MLA or APA references, as is already discussed for images made with Bing Image Creator.
• Teacher buy-in depends on professional development and hands-on time. She wants teachers trained through summer and institute-day sessions and given time to "play in the sandbox" with the tools against their unit plans, and argues AI can also take rote work off teachers; Giard's example is drafting a parent newsletter.

2023-09-26 · open the original ↗

• Any OpenVPN-capable proxy service can run inside UniFi Network. UniFi's VPN client tab takes the provider's .ovpn file plus account username and password, covering devices like a Roku, game console or smart TV that can't run VPN apps. The host demonstrates with Private Internet Access, which he says he has used for about five years, and links it through his affiliate link (quoted at $2.03 a month plus four months free); the video is separately sponsored by ZimaBoard.
• Generate the PIA config near you; streaming servers remain untested. In PIA's OpenVPN configuration generator he picked OpenVPN 2.4 or newer and the Linux platform (the only one he tested) and chose US West for latency. Hulu warned him off from the standard US West IP; PIA's "streaming optimized" US West and US East servers are meant for that case, but he says he has not tested them.
• Traffic routes send chosen devices or domains through the tunnel. A device rule routes all traffic from one or several selected devices (his iPhone) over the VPN client interface, which he confirmed by matching the public IP on whatismyip.com to the tunnel. A domain rule (privateinternetaccess.com, netflix.com) applies to all or selected devices, and other sites keep the T-Mobile Home Internet WAN IP.
• A dedicated VLAN and SSID makes every connected device private. He creates a network at VLAN 53 with its subnet's third octet matching the VLAN ID, a DHCP pool from .10 to .254 leaving .2–.9 for static devices, an SSID on top, and a route sending all its traffic through PIA. Routing and firewall changes can take a minute or two to take effect.
• The OpenVPN link is fickle, and new networks are open by default. "Test and save" never stops spinning; he waits a minute or two, leaves the page and returns to see the connection up, and re-applies the client when it drops. Every UniFi network can reach every other one, so he advises block-by-default firewall rules, covered in his previous VPN video rather than here.

2023-09-25 · open the original ↗

• Platform engineering complements DevOps rather than replacing it. Leonard, a partner solution architect at Microsoft and Giard's colleague, says that once an organization scales past one DevOps team, team A may build on Jenkins while team B picks Azure DevOps, leaving separate stacks that do the same job; platform engineering gives developers one unified platform instead.
• One platform team ends duplicated effort and uneven tooling expertise. That team supplies CI/CD, runtime (Kubernetes or otherwise), monitoring and observability consistently, so compliance and security fixes are applied once; in his role before Microsoft he saw security staff going from DevOps team to DevOps team with the same issues. Standardizing on one tool instead of GitLab, GitHub and Azure DevOps side by side saves cost. Asked by Giard whether one team can scale across a large enterprise, he says no single person or team can do it all, so the group's responsibilities must be defined up front and kept to.
• Self-service templates let anyone deploy a standard Kubernetes cluster. In a previous role his team wrote infrastructure-as-code templates behind a custom self-service portal, where developers could request a cluster, its version and add-on features, tweak it within set limits, and get it deployed without knowing how to deploy Kubernetes. He says they built it themselves a few years ago because nothing on the market did this.
• The approach is not limited to Kubernetes. He says the published discussion ties it to Kubernetes because of containers and microservices, but the same narrowing applies to event handling or databases: trimming a catalog of perhaps 50 database providers to around five that meet business requirements. He points to a CNCF white paper on platform engineering as a starting resource.
• Start nimble with one slice, not a big-bang rollout. He argues that imposing too much change at once makes enemies; begin with, for example, the CI/CD pipeline with security injected on top so teams no longer handle it, show the value, then expand.

2023-09-23 · open the original ↗

• Vector databases search by meaning and similarity, not exact content. Ekpo, a Microsoft partner solution architect covering data and AI workloads, says they convert text, images, audio or video into numbers, enabling image search on e-commerce sites and copyright detection on music services. For text, keyword search (the BM25 algorithm used by Lucene, Solr and Elasticsearch) misses "David left to get a meal" when the query says "food", whereas vector search matches the meaning.
• The index format depends on accuracy needs and available memory. Exact matching needs a sequential, non-approximating scan, as in facial recognition for passports or criminal investigations; inverted file indexes split data into buckets for memory-limited devices like phones; HNSW (hierarchical navigable small world) uses much memory but retrieves fastest, which he likens to zooming out of a map from Seattle and back in to a Florida street.
• At very large scale, use inner product on normalized vectors. He says Euclidean distance suits grouping similar items, while cosine similarity and inner product cover most cases; for scans across billions of records, normalizing vectors lets inner product reach the same result in fewer computational steps than cosine similarity.
• Production builds should use managed vector stores, not self-hosted ones. He names four first-party Azure options: Azure Cognitive Search (his first choice, offering hybrid keyword and vector search over HNSW), Cosmos DB's MongoDB API, its PostgreSQL-based API using the pgvector index, and Azure Cache for Redis. Partners including Elastic, MongoDB Atlas, Astra DB, SingleStore, Solr and Pinecone also offer one; he says self-hosting suits a proof of concept but diverts a production team from its business.
• His "RSVP" mnemonic describes retrieval-augmented generation. Reasoning engine, input signal, vector database, prompt template: the question is vectorized, matching chunks are retrieved into the prompt, and the model answers from facts it was never trained on, such as a partner's private insurance plans. His example is a rule allowing exercise only below 70 degrees, which the model can apply only once it is told it is 45 degrees.

2023-09-17 · open the original ↗

• Communication, not raw technical skill, sets technologists apart. Woodruff, in the field more than 28 years since 1995, says speaking and writing separate people in tech, calls himself not a particularly smart developer, and says he honed communication in consulting in Atlanta in the late 1990s. He argues everyone is a salesperson, selling themselves in interviews, to clients and to their own teams to build trust, and prefers "human skills" to "soft skills"; he says the heads-down "lone wolf" developer flourished in the 1970s–80s but agile and the emphasis on teams forced that type to change.
• Get involved in the tech community early. He says his first regret is joining late: he started a .NET user group in Lexington, Kentucky around 2005, at 35. He began speaking after seeing Mark Miller at a Delphi user group in Atlanta, despite a childhood speech impediment, speech therapy until 13, and avoiding public speaking until about 30.
• Go deep on something likely to last 20 years. Recalling career talks with a Michigan State computer-science freshman, he says that as a first-generation college student he had no model for a post-college career, and advises students to talk to people about career paths and find an area they genuinely care about. He warns that Silverlight experts saw it gone in five years; Giard counters that they still learned XAML, and that his own FoxPro start taught him SQL and relational databases.
• Pick three new things to learn every January. Past picks include F#, which he learned but has not really used, and speaking practice; this year (2023) they are Rust and the Mac operating system on a new Mac Studio, and he could not recall the third. He also urges attending conferences without speaking and reading business books and biographies, having just finished one of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
• Never be the smartest person in the room. He says he sits in the lower half of most rooms of developers, so associating with developers he looks up to elevates him; in turn, those who received help climbing should share what they learn and help the people coming behind them.