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Newsletter 008 - Dec 2023

Newsletter 008 - Dec 2023

Dec 31st 2023

Dan Clarke
January 02, 2024

Hi everyone! 👋

Hope you had a great Christmas and New Year’s celebrations! I did - hence the December edition of this newsletter being a few days late! 🙈 So instead of being the last edition of 2023 - it’s the first edition of 2024!

My first big goal in 2024 is my next Dometrain course. Last year, I created my first-ever course: From Zero to Hero: Docker for Developers. In January, I’ll be working on my next course - which will be another “From Zero to Hero” course - this time on Kubernetes. I’m a huge fan of Kubernetes, and am really looking forward to creating and releasing this course. It’s a big topic, but I feel I can make it a lot more digestible than a lot of existing content currently does.

The Podcast 🎙

There were three episodes released in December…

Episode 63: Chocolatey - with Gary Ewan Park

In this episode, I was joined by Gary Ewan Park to chat about Chocolatey, and what it’s been like as a developer working on it.

unhandledexceptionpodcast.com/posts/0063-chocolatey

Episode 62: Speed mentoring and the power of Community - with Mia Gordon

In this episode, I was joined by Mia Gordon to chat about speed mentoring! I was recently invited to a speed mentoring event that she organised, and it was such a fun event and great idea and concept - that I invited her onto the show to chat about it! We also spoke about the power of community, and how big a difference it can make to your career and life.

unhandledexceptionpodcast.com/posts/0062-speedmentoring

Episode 61: Platform Engineering and IaC - with Shahid Iqbal

In this episode, I was joined for a second time by Shahid Iqbal, this time to chat about Platform Engineering and Infrastructure as Code!

unhandledexceptionpodcast.com/posts/0061-platformengineering

I really enjoyed chatting with Gary, Mia, and Shahid - all great episodes, and definitely worth checking out!

I also recorded an episode with the GitKraken team, where we chatted about developing a Git client. This should be out in the next week or so.

Remember to click subscribe in your favourite podcast app. The links can be found on the podcast website.

Also, remember that we have a Discord community for the podcast!…

Podcast Discord community

Also, I’d like to give a massive thank you to our sponsor, TrackJS for sponsoring the podcast! 🙏

TrackJS makes finding and fixing client-side errors simple - automatically detecting bugs on your website and giving you a clear view of how the user got to the error.

Dometrain Courses

Docker

Want to learn Docker? My Docker course will teach you everything you need to know! From what containers and images are; to how to build your own; to security and networking; docker-compose; and much more!

From Zero to Hero: Docker for Developers

The skill every developer needs to have!

http://www.dometrain.com/course/from-zero-to-hero-docker

Kubernetes!

(coming soon!) (see details in the opening paragraphs of this newsletter)

News items and dev picks

Here are my dev picks this month…

.NET Aspire - preview 2 - Aspire was announced at .NET Conf a few months ago (one of the topics I chatted about with Scott Hunter on the podcast). It was a preview release, not full GA. And they’ve just released the next preview version after feedback from the community.
MonkeyType - This is basically a typing speed test - so I’m not sure exactly why it’s so addictive, but it definitely is! I heard about this from a tweet by Joseph Woodward. My top score so far is 91 wpm…
Midjourney v6 - The next version of MJ is now out! You can turn it on by either typing /settings and selecting V6 from the dropdown menu (to permanently use v6); or by typing --v 6 after your prompt to turn it on on a prompt-by-prompt basis.
Human brain-like supercomputer with 228 trillion links coming in 2024 - Quote: “Australian scientists have their hands on a groundbreaking supercomputer that aims to simulate the synapses of a human brain at full scale.”
Semantic Kernel 1.0 - Quote: “Semantic Kernel is an SDK that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, and Hugging Face with conventional programming languages like C#, Python, and Java. Semantic Kernel achieves this by allowing you to define plugins that can be chained together in just a few lines of code.”
Tesla Optimus Gen2 Robot - The hand movements are pretty impressive! Shame it looks like it needs the toilet when walking! 🙈
10 years of Avalonia - Quite a milestone! Which makes it even more embarrassing that I’ve never found the time to play with it! I really must give it a go this year - I’ve heard a lot of good things about it!
ML.NET 3.0 - Quote: “ML.NET is an open-source, cross-platform machine learning framework for .NET developers that enables integration of custom machine learning models into .NET applications. ML.NET version 3.0 is now released, with lots of new features and enhancements!”

Dev Comic pick of the month

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to write any SQL - thanks to EF for code, and using LINQPad instead of SSMS! But I saw this posted on Threads, and it brought back memories! 😆

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 next edition! 👋

My socials…

Twitter
Discord
Mastodon
LinkedIn
Threads (rarely used)
BlueSky (rarely used)