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- Newsletter 026 - July
Hi, and welcome to the July edition of this newsletter!
Two big highlights for me this month in the dev space…
The first is that I had my MVP Award renewed for another year! 🥳 This’ll be my 7th year in the program. When I was first awarded, I wrote a blog post about it which can be found here.
The other highlight was that I was honoured to have been invited by Nick Chapsas to create a video on his YouTube channel! Pretty scary, given his 364K subscribers! 🤯 It’s about a new-ish concept called Model Context Protocol - which has exploded in a very short space of time! If you’re a developer (which I’m assuming you are if you’re reading this!) - then definitely look into MCP Servers - they’re quickly becoming HUGE!
As always, feel free to reply to this email to get in touch. Or ping me on any of the socials I’m on (see bottom of newsletter for links).
And if you get value from this newsletter - please do help me out and share on your socials and with your tech friends and colleagues 🙏
📰 News items and dev picks
Here are my dev picks this month…
Dotnet news
Aspire Roadmap (2025 → 2026) - Lots of goodies planned! Picking a good time to update my Aspire course (see below) is going to be tricky! 🙈
Aspire 9.4 released - A few days ago, the next version of Aspire was released.
dnx command - As part of .NET 10 preview 6, a new
dotnet tool exec(or dnx shortcut) has been added that works just like Node’s “npx” command - ie. to execute a .NET tool without installing it globally or locally.
AI news
ChatGPT 5 is expected VERY soon! - This is supposed to be a fairly big update. And it also aims to unify a lot of the different models. Currently, they have a bunch of different confusingly named models for different use-cases. It sounds like ChatGPT 5 will be more of a go-to model.
ChatGPT Agent Mode - ChatGPT has now added something called Agent mode. If you use a paid-for subscription, then you can click on the ‘Tools’ option in a prompt and choose “Agent mode”. This basically gives ChatGPT isn’t own “virtual computer” where it can open a browser and see it visually (not just text content); it can connect to different services; it has its own file system, etc. Basically you can give it longer-running tasks, and leave it to go off and do those things. I haven’t played with it too much yet - but I definitely plan on taking it for more of a spin this coming month. Here’s another link to a Verge article about it.
GitHub Spark - “a new tool in Copilot that turns your ideas into full-stack apps, entirely in natural language.”
ChatGPT Study Mode - A new feature in ChatGPT where, rather than it just giving you answers to questions, it will instead ask you questions and guide you through problems to help you learn. In a world where we’re starting to be able to just ask AI to both answer questions and do things for us - we’re in danger of us all forgetting how to learn, think, and remember for ourselves. This is a great move IMO.
Introducing the Awesome GitHub Copilot Customisations repo - This is a GitHub repository with a LOT of custom instructions and re-useable prompts for different technologies. For GitHub CoPilot - both can go in your project’s source-control (under a
.githubfolder). Instructions apply to all your prompts to inform Copilot on things like your team’s best practices and coding standards, etc. Re-useable prompts allow you to have prompts in source control, and you can even access them via slash commands “/” in the chat window. This repository is a great place to get ideas for prompts and instructions that you can modify to fit your team.A2A .NET SDK (31st July) - This has only just been announced, so I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. Looks interesting.
.NET Rocks - AI Concerns with Mark Seemann - I haven’t had a chance to listen to this yet (I plan to listen today) - but I suspect this will be a good one!
Introducing OpenCLI - A post by Patrik Svensson proposing a new standard for CLI applications. Patrik is the maker of Spectre Console, and has been on my podcast talking about it.
The Agentic AI Era at JetBrains Is Here - In this article, they talk about their new Junie coding agent.
Unitree R1 humanoid robot - $5900! - Given Tesla’s Optimus robot is due to be about $50k, and there are a bunch of others due with similar (some much more) priced models… the news feeds were pretty excited by this announcement. Whilst AI gets a lot of headline news, I think the average person is missing the speed the robotics industry is advancing lately. How long will it be before it’s the norm to have a humanoid robot walking around your house doing chores?
Others
Scott Hanselman's TEDx talk - A great talk by Scott, on the TEDx stage!!!
Dev Comic pick of the month
From a coding point of view, this type of reply is very familiar! I’m reading more and more lately about robotics doing surgery, which makes this answer a bit more concerning! 😬
Dev Tip - Create your own "prompt library"
Personally, I’m starting to use AI for more and more stuff - whether that be coding, or research, or whatever. The more context you give your models, the better job it will do. More often than not, a good prompt isn’t just a single sentence. It can be many paragraphs (sometimes a page or longer). And quite often, I have tasks that I do more than once, and even want to iterate and improve on the prompts over time. I’ve been a big advocate of developers having their own library of code snippets and code notes in whatever note-taking tool you use (I use Notion). I’ve now started to do the same, but having a “Prompt Library” too.
Sponsorship opportunities
I’m looking for sponsors for both the podcast and this newsletter. Details of podcast sponsorship can be found here. Feel free to reply to this email to discuss further.
The Podcast 🎙
Just one podcast episode dropped this month, and it was with Gui Ferreira, and we chatted about goal setting, time management, and productivity.
I haven’t planned the next episode yet - as I’m taking a short break whilst I catch up on my todo list, and also have various summer family trips planned.
In the meantime, remember that we have a Discord community for the podcast!…
Podcast Discord community
My Dometrain Courses
Below are details of my Dometrain courses. There’s also a bundle that includes both the Docker and Kubernetes courses, which 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.
JetBrains Rider
Rider is an amazing .NET IDE by JetBrains. This course is 6 hours of content - covering hotkeys, refactoring, navigation, debugging, git, testing, AI, profiling, remote collaboration, and much much more!
.NET Aspire
.NET Aspire is Microsoft's vision for how every .NET developer will develop systems. It is a cloud-ready stack for production-ready, distributed applications using .NET, and it makes it extremely easy to develop, run, and test your systems locally. With unmatched dev-time orchestration, integrations with third-party services, and excellent tooling, .NET Aspire aims to make working with the cloud and technologies like Docker and Kubernetes easier than ever.
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! 👋
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