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- Newsletter 013 - June
Hi everyone! 👋
Welcome to the June edition of my newsletter! Sorry it’s a bit late again! My half-year-resolution is going to be to start writing this newsletter throughout the month - instead of right at the very end of the month! 😄
A bit of a slow month from a content-creation point of view this time I’m afraid. I was joined by Steve "ardalis" Smith to record a podcast episode (which will be published very soon); and I also hosted this quarter’s .NET Oxford lightning talk event, and did a talk myself. Both are detailed below. But no published podcasts or videos. I’ll try harder in July! 😊
I also was honoured to be invited to join the JetBrains Community Contributor program, and as part of it was sent some swag! A massive thank you to Rachel Appel for inviting me to the program 😊
Outside of dev stuff - my age got incremented YET AGAIN! 😲🎂 (insert age++ joke here). This also coincided with me having to order a pair of reading glasses! 🤓 I’m definitely getting older! 😧 On the plus side, I got treated to a birthday weekend away (without kids) by my wife, which included pubs, walks, and paddleboarding. And on another weekend, we got the tent out again, and a group of us had an amazing camping weekend… Four families (ten kids!); drinks; BBQs; and lots of sun! Both amazing weekends!
I also upgraded my home router setup and joined the shiny world of Ubiquity! Oh my goodness me - it’s amazing. Check out the UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra (needs switch and wifi access point too). The UniFi UI dashboard is amazing.
So all the above explains my slightly less productive month from a content creation point of view!
Table of Contents
The Podcast 🎙
As mentioned above, I’m afraid there were no episodes released in June. However, I did record the next episode, which should be out shortly! I was joined by Steve Smith (also known as Ardalias), to chat about Modular Monoliths in .NET. This should be out in about a week from when this newsletter is published.
I also have another group recording planned, where we’ll be talking about Umbraco. But this one definitely gets an award for the hardest recording to schedule where everyone is available! 🙈 Hopefully we’ll get that recorded this coming month too.
To be notified when the episodes drop, 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
YouTube Videos
No YouTube videos this month I’m afraid, so I’ll just leave the ones from last month here…
.NET Oxford
We had our quarterly .NET Oxford user-group lightning-talk event in June - and had a great set of talks! I’m afraid we did make the decision last year to stop recording them, so sadly most aren’t available to share here. We decided to stop recording because (a) there was a lot of extra stress and things to bring to record, and (b) we noticed a big difference in attendance when members knew it was being recorded anyway. But one of the speakers decided he wanted to record his himself though - so we do have one talk recording, which can be found here: Nick Darlow - Subtyping Primitives.
If you’re near enough to Oxford (UK) to attend, and fancy doing a lightning-talk at our next event in September, then drop me a message, and we’ll get that sorted. If you’re a new speaker, I’m more than happy to help with it.
My Dometrain Courses
Below are details of my Dometrain courses. There’s also a bundle that includes both courses that can be found here.
Docker for Developers
This course will teach you everything you need to know about Docker and containers. From what containers and images are; to how to build your own; to security and networking; docker-compose; and much more!
Kubernetes for Developers
Once you understand Docker, containers, images, etc - it’s time to move onto the next level and learn a container orchestrator - and Kubernetes has clearly won the battle here! My Kubernetes course is rammed-packed full of demos (pretty much all the way through), which are easy to follow along with downloadable YAML files and scripts. We start with the basics, then later move on to more advanced topics like services meshes and operators.
📰 News items and dev picks
Here are my dev picks this month…
Official OpenAI library for .NET - I have a hobby project that uses OpenAI, and I was using the OpenAI REST API. I then converted it to use Semantic Kernel instead, and LITERALLY a day later - this official OpenAI library for .NET was announced! 😆🤦♂️ I haven’t yet converted to this, as Semantic Kernel works fine for now. And I guess, keeping it with Semantic Kernel means it’s easier to switch between OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude - so maybe I’ll leave it as is 🤷 But good to know that OpenAI now has this library though.
DevToys - Wow! I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this app before! I’ve just seen it mentioned in this Reddit post. It’s an open-source desktop app that has everything under the sun! From JWT parsers; to certification decoders; to a regex tool; cron parser; base64 encoder/decoder; guid generator; URL encoder/decoder; timestamp converter; and much more!
.NET Aspire official learning path - over 3.5 hours of Microsoft Learn modules!
An update from David Fowler on the .NET eventing framework plans - Basically they’ve decided to delay the release to a subsequent version of .NET to ensure that they have both time and feedback to get it right, and also focus on other .NET 9 features.
10 Years of Kubernetes - Ps. did I mention I have a Kubernetes course available? 😉 (see further up this post!)
Dometrain Pro is now available as a 50%-off benefit for Pro and Enterprise Visual Studio Subscribers - My courses mentioned above are hosted on Nick Chapsas’s Dometrain platform, and Nick has been doing an amazing job growing Dometrain. You may have seen that as well as purchasing individual courses, there’s also a subscription-based offering. With this new announcement - if you’re a Pro or Enterprise VS subscriber, you’ll get 50% off the annual Dometrain subscription.
Øredev 2024 conference - Øredev is a developer conference in Malmö, Sweden. They’ve just released the line-up, and it’s looking pretty good! A lot of speakers, and quite a lot in the .NET category too!
JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey 2024 - It’s fairly long to complete, but there are prizes to be won!
Look ma, no Dockerfile! Publishing containers with the .NET SDK
Dev Comic pick of the month
This one was shared by a colleague on Teams. Does this ring true for any of you? 🤣 I googled the source and found it here.
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! 👋
