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- Newsletter 002 - June 2023
Hi everyone! 👋 It’s that time of the month again for me to land in your inbox with another exciting(???) instalment of my newsletter! 📩
June was quite an interesting month, as I’ve taken time off working with my main client/contract to work on a Docker course! If you read the last edition of this newsletter, you might remember that I’m creating a course on Nick Chapsas’s new online training platform - Dometrain. To do this, I’ve taken a bit of time off to focus on it. Well, I am now halfway through that time period, and things are progressing well. A few ups and downs and learning curves - but I’m happy with it so far!
There’s also been an in-person .NET Oxford lightning talk event ⚡️; a new podcast episode 🎙️; a new YouTube video 📺️; a birthday 🎂; and a couple of family mini-breaks away down south 👨👩👦👦🏕️!
My Git talk also got accepted at DDD East Midlands in October. It’s just a 15-minute lightning talk - but given the sheer number of talks that got submitted vs the number in that agenda - I’m pretty chuffed! Now I just need to find and book a hotel!
Before we continue - if I could ask everyone a huge favour, and ask you if you could help me promote this newsletter (or the podcast or YouTube) on social media - that would be amazing! 🙂🙏
And feel totally free to reply to this email and reach out. Or you can find me on Twitter or Discord.
Audio woes!
Wow, an unexpected can of worms opened here! For the course content I’m doing, Nick commented that there was a background whining noise in my audio. I had a listen and couldn’t hear anything - it sounded fine to me. After a bit of toing and froing, and also asking other people - two things were discovered…
There is indeed some background interference in my audio setup that lots of people can hear (at the time of writing, I still haven’t worked out the root cause). But apparently, people can hear it in podcast episodes too - which isn’t good! I had no idea!
And secondly - I learnt that I have hearing loss and can’t hear frequencies that most others can! 🙁
For the former, I’ll continue to narrow it down and try to work out the cause. It’s the latter that really bothers me. One attempt at removing a range of frequencies from a wav to see if that removed the artefact, gave two wavs (before and after) - to which I couldn’t tell the difference, but apparently, there was a massive quality loss in my voice after removing that frequency range! This really surprised me how bad my hearing actually is! In the past, when playing with audio processing effects, like changing EQ - I’ve always found that it doesn’t make a huge difference. Now, I know that it’s because of my hearing issues. This is obviously very frustrating news, given that I create audio content, both with the podcast, YouTube, and this course. I’ve now booked a hearing test and will look into if any form of hearing aid can help.
The Podcast 🎙
The next podcast episode has now dropped, and I had a thoroughly enjoyable geek-out with Matt Hunt, chatting about CQS and big balls of mud!
As mentioned above in the ‘Audio Woes’ section - apologies about any background noise in my audio - I didn’t know it existed, as I can’t hear it.
I’m also considering decreasing the length of the podcast episodes moving forward. They take a long time to edit, and I’m struggling with time - so shorter episodes will make the podcast more sustainable.
Remember to click subscribe in your favourite podcast app. The links can be found on the podcast website.
.NET Oxford
June’s .NET Oxford event was an in-person lightning talk event. These are always my favourite events - having a lot of variation with different speakers doing shorter talks.
Most of the talks were recorded, with the exception of a couple where the speakers opted out. I did a 15-minute talk on “Git - Under the Covers”.
July’s meetup, which is this coming Tuesday, will be another in-person one. We’ll be joined by Chris Simon who’d be doing an interactive session using the Contextive VsCode extension, which is a tool to help discover a codebase's domain language. I believe this is a very interactive session with plenty of F#, and collaborative hacking! 🔥 I’m certainly really looking forward to it! 🙂
New YouTube Video - JetBrains Rider Tips and Tricks
A new YouTube video has also dropped, which is about the amazing Jetbrains Rider! Hopefully, you’ll notice a huge quality improvement in my video as I now use my new camera gear instead of my old webcam! 📷
Likes and subscribes are greatly help me with the channel’s growth! 🙏
News items and dev picks
Here are my dev picks this month…
AI Assistant Comes to Rider! (plus a video from Nick Chapsas demoing it)
LINQPad's AI preview features are now available in the latest LINQPad RTM! (plus a video I did about it when it was in beta)
Hackers Leak Over 100,000 ChatGPT Credentials on the Dark Web
gRPC benchmark results (checkout where dotnet_grp sits! 🔥)
Dev Comic pick of the month
This is an old favourite of mine. Many years ago I used to work in the games industry working on a huge C++ codebase, and compilation would take AGES!! Okay, we didn’t sword-fight on chairs during that time - but still, it’s very relatable! 😂
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 third edition! 👋
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