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- Newsletter 027 - August
Hi, and welcome to the August edition of this newsletter! Sorry that this edition is a little later than normal - I’ve been away on a much-needed family holiday in Turkey ☀️ Had a great time, but always good to get home too! Although I do miss the weather - we came back to lots of rain! 😬
Hope you enjoy this edition, and 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 🙏 (at-mention me, and I’ll repost).
📰 News items and dev picks
Here are my dev picks this month…
Dotnet news
.NET Bounty Program now offers up to $40,000 in awards! - “The .NET Bounty Program now offers awards up to $40,000 USD for vulnerabilities impacting the .NET and ASP.NET Core (including Blazor and Aspire).”
.NET Foundation - Board Nominations - The nomination period was only from August 1st - 15th, and voting will open in October.
Announcing the NuGet MCP Server Preview - Let AI models (inc GitHub Copilot) query nuget. Interesting for dependency management 🤔
AI news
OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5 - I’m guessing this isn’t news to anyone! Especially as it was released at the start of August, and this edition is late anyway. It doesn’t feel like “new” news anymore tbh, but still a big August news item. As soon as it was released, it quickly appeared in the main IDEs and editors. For me, it was immediately available in GitHub Copilot in both VS Code and Rider. There was also a post from the Visual Studio team a few days after, saying it was available there too. The model has had mixed reactions - especially as some were speculating that this would take as much closer to AGI, and it seems that GPT-5 is a much smaller jump than those people expected. There was also backlash that the older models were immediately removed, and since then, OpenAI have re-enabled those models under a “Legacy models” section.
OpenAI’s gpt-oss - Around the same time, OpenAI released their gpt-oss models. Note that the name “oss” implies open-source, but they refer to it as “open weight”. This is because the training data isn’t provided - just the models (hence the weights are open). The models are available on Hugging Face.
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 - Their upgrade to Claude Opus 4.
Gemini CLI GitHub Actions - Leverage Gemini from within your GitHub Action pipelines.
Introducing Warp Code - I’ve been hearing a lot about Warp Terminal lately. Still not given it a go though! (if you have, please do reply to this email and let me know what you think). They’ve now announced Warp Code. I must admit, I’m unclear where the line blurs between Warp Terminal, and the Warp 2 “Agentic Development Environment” announced in June, and this Warp Code. It certainly all looks interesting though - I’ll have to find time to have a deep dive into this and fully grok it (then perhaps do a YouTube vid on it all!).
GitHub Copilot coding agent now available on every page of GitHub - Click the buttons to the right of the top search bar, and prompt away, so kick off various tasks! 🤯
Others
The Great SSL Certificate Panic - This was news to me! Sounds like the short-lived SSL certificates that LetEncrypt users are used to will soon (by 2029) start applying to everyone! At least it’ll force everyone to automate the process.
New podcast - “VS Code Insiders Podcast” - Hosted by James Montemagno and Pierce Boggan.
PowerToys 0.93 is here: faster Command Palette, new dashboard UX and more
Dev Comic pick of the month
I love this ChatGPT version of the original “compiling” XKCD 😆
I can certainly relate! Thanks to Martin (a work colleague) for sharing this with me.
Dev Tip - Raycast
I’ve only recently heard of Raycast - mainly because, up until now, it’s not been available on Windows. It’s basically one of these “alt-space” → launcher-popup apps, which allows you to VERY quickly launch any apps, or perform various other commands, like searching for files, opening websites, etc.
In April’s newsletter, the devtip was about Microsoft Powertoys, which includes a similar launcher called the Command Palette (which is what I was using). I recently got an invite email to try the beta version of Raycast on Windows, and wow, it’s amazing! It’s INSANELY fast - whereas I found Command Palette to be a bit chuggish. Although I’ll caveat that by saying that the latest Powertoy’s release notes do mention performance improvements (I haven’t compared and contrasted though). So maybe experiment for yourself to see which you prefer - both are free.
The Windows version is invite-only at the moment - feel free to drop me a message and I’ll invite you.
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 🎙
No episodes this month, I’m afraid. I’m taking a short break to catch up on my todo list and also enjoy some family time. Don’t worry - it’s certainly not going away though!
I’m also considering making the episodes shorter - ideally about half an hour-ish. The editing time is by far one of the most time-consuming elements of doing the podcast, and decreasing the episode lengths will greatly help with that.
In the meantime, remember that we have a Discord community for the podcast! It would be great to see you there :)
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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