Hi everyone! 👋 Welcome to my very first newsletter! 🎉🍻

Given I do various things in the software development space - I thought this would be a nice way of putting it all together in one place in a monthly digest. I enjoy writing - so why not! 🤷‍♂️

The plan is to include updates on what I’ve been up to (mainly developer community stuff) during the past month; together with a few links that I’ve found interesting; and also just my general thoughts and feelings on stuff within our industry.

Also, remember that email is a two-way thing! Feel totally free to reply to this email and reach out. Or you can find me on Twitter, and also on Discord (see below for Discord details).

And if you’re happy to - it would be amazing if you can help me spread the word about the newsletter on social media! 🙏 Here are my social media links - would love to hear from you!

Twitter
LinkedIn
Mastodon

Free time is a wonderful thing ⌛

I’d like to start off with a small apology! There haven’t been many releases with either the podcast or the YouTube channel recently. This hasn’t been a planned thing - time just got in the way. Some of you may know that I’ve been having a lot of back issues since last year (two torn lumbar discs). About four months ago I had a corticosteroid injection, which has made a huge difference and given me some mobility back. Since then, I’ve been going to the gym daily to try and strengthen up for when the injection wears off. The gym is making a huge difference - however, the downside is that I have even less time to do these extracurricular content-creation activities. I used to get up early to do these things - but now a lot of that time is taken at the gym. I will find a way to find more time to continue with both the podcast and the YouTube channel though - as they’re both pretty important to me, and I’m enjoying doing them.

The Podcast 🎙

Speaking of the podcast - the last episode to drop was actually at the end of April! I did say above that I was behind with all this!

I recorded the next episode earlier this week. This won’t be out at the time of publishing this newsletter - but should hopefully drop within the next week or so. I was joined by Matt Hunt to chat about CQS and big balls of mud! (we’ve all experienced that codebase!). To be notified, remember to click subscribe in your favourite podcast app. The links can be found on the podcast website.

And in the meantime - here’s a link to the last published episode, where I was joined by Tim Cadenbach and Matthias Jost to talk about their new .NET community - We Are .NET…

.NET Oxford

May’s .NET Oxford event was a virtual one. In it, we were joined by Zoltán Lehóczky for a talk on Orchard CMS! The recording can be found here:

June’s meetup will be an in-person lightning-talk event. And my lightning talk will be on “Git - Under the Covers”. It’ll be similar content to this YouTube video I did. For the full line-up of lightning talks, see the event on Meetup.com (link below). And obviously, if you’re close to Oxford - it would be amazing to see you there!

YouTube

If you weren’t already aware - early this year, I started a YouTube channel. I’ve been having great fun learning how to edit (Davinci Resolve is amazing! and free!). The topics are general software development topics - with a bias toward .NET, Docker, Kubernetes, Git, etc - which are my favourite dev topics.

Likes and subscribes greatly help me with the channel’s growth! 🙏

The last episode to come out was about LINQPad AI…

And the next episode will be about the amazing Jetbrains Rider!

Embracing Discord!

If you follow either the podcast or .NET Oxford - you may have noticed that we’ve recently switched over from Slack to Discord. I’ve gotta say - I’m very happy with that decision so far! One thing I really like is that joining a new server (by server, think ‘organisation’ or ‘group’ - not physical server!) - it isn’t like signing up to a brand new account (like it feels with Slack) - and your DMs are outside of those servers. So if you DM me on Discord - that’s global, and not related to any particular server. Whereas with Slack - each “thing” has its own DMs.

Here are the links to join both the podcast and .NET Oxford Discords:

Podcast Discord
.NET Oxford Discord

Would be great to see you there! 🙂

Another Discord community I would highly recommend joining if you’re a .NET developer is WeAreDotnet, which is the community that we talked about in the last podcast episode that I spoke about above.

Exciting news! I’m creating a course! 🤯

You may have seen on social media that Nick Chapsas has rebranded his training website to Dometrain, allowing him to expand and have courses from other authors. He’s been reaching out to different experts on various topics. And it was a huge honour (and surprise!) when he reached out to me to ask if I’d do courses on Docker and Kubernetes! 🤯

Earlier on in this newsletter, I mentioned a few times about lack of free time - so to do this, I’m going to have to take a period of time off my main client commitments to focus on it. Thankfully after chatting with them - they’re being super-supportive and flexible! 🙏

Lights, Camera, Action! 📷️ - Camera gear and lots of learning!

A combination of the newish YouTube channel, and the above-mentioned course - has meant that I really needed to prioritise improving my video gear and setup. Thanks to the podcast, I’m happy with my audio gear - but my webcam was certainly less than adequate! So I’ve just invested in a Sony A6400 with 30mm 1.4 lens, and am going through this course (thanks to Dan Patrascu for recommending it). I’m also learning a lot about lighting too! The difference in video quality is insane! I’m looking forward to publishing my next YouTube video so you can see the difference!

News items and dev picks

Coincidentally, I’ve timed the first edition of this newsletter really well - as we’ve just had this year’s Microsoft Build Conference - so I’m not short of picks to choose from!

Here are my picks this month…

• Built-in ChatGPT-driven Copilot will transform Windows 11

• Azure Developer CLI (azd) 1.0.0 release

• Dev Home for Windows Developers

• .NET at Microsoft Build - YouTube playlist

• Microsoft Build - Book of news

• Introducing Auth0 Templates for .NET

• Bing is now the default search for ChatGPT

• Introducing GitHub Copilot X

Sorry, I’m aware the links in this one are very Microsoft-heavy! Makes sense given we’ve just had the Build conference though! 🙂

Dev Comic pick of the month

This is an old one - but it came up in a standup conversation, and I’m sure we can all relate!

Please help me share this newsletter 🙏

If you’ve made it this far into the newsletter - I’m hoping that means you’ve
both enjoyed it and found it useful. If you can help me out and share with your developer friends at work and on social media, that would be amazing!

Again - feel totally free to reach out to me, and let me know your thoughts on the newsletter. And see you back in your inbox next month for the second edition! 👋