Bruno Peeters Technical Blog

On 22 October 2024 I joined the talk of Scott Hanselman in Veldhoven. This evening was organized by the .Net Zuid user group. The atmosphere was nice and the talk was interesting, entertaining and up-beating. In this blog I want to share the things I took away from this evening.

Start blogging even you think nobody will ever read it

Scott talked about the fact you should think of blogging, even if you think nobody will ever read your posts. The reason I started blogging, was I wanted to have a place where I can drop my ideas and findings having a central storage for this. It also forces my to really go deep into a subject, as you really have to understand the subject well when you want to write about it.

Writing without the worry that nobody will ever read your blog is also a good starting point. This get’s the stress out of your new project. Trying to attract (a lot of) people to my blog, wasn’t something I was busy with in the first place. Even still now. If someone liked what I wrote and found it helpful, that is just nice. Looking at the statistics I get about 15 visitors a day on my web site. That is even more than I thought initially.

When you start blogging, start small. A lot of people start enthusiast blogging, but after the first blog, the next blog will appear four months after that or even much later. I also see that happening when it comes to my blog. Even though I kept it small, due to circumstances it is sometimes hard to make time to work on your blog. To overcome these gaps, Tim Ferris works for a certain time on certain types of work. This also includes his blogging. During this time, he writes a lot of blog posts, to cover lets say the whole year. He then can release those blogs during the year to make certain his blogs will see the audience in a constant interval.

Make your development environment fun to work with

Scott showed that it’s fun to improve your development environment and make it more attractive. He showed plugins for Visual Studio code like Visual Studio Code Pets. Also Oh My Posh was shown, which allows you to pimp your command line.

I have to admit most of the times I tend to only use the default look and feel what comes with the tool itself. However, over the couple of weeks I also tried some of the visual additions within Visual Studio Code. For example other fonts and Oh My Posh. I have to admit, it made working with my tools somehow more fun due to the nice look and feel.

AI

AI is hot. Also Microsoft and Apple are investing in this. There are now coming computers on the market, which have a NPU (Neural Processing Unit) integrated next to the CPU. Those NPU’s are like what the DX was in the 386/486 time. The NPU in your computer can for example generate easily generate input for your working day, based on your agenda and documents for that day.

The benefit from a NPU is that it uses less energy to perform a certain task, compared to a normal CPU. Therefore it uses special instruction sets that could easier process the AI specific data. Also you can run a model locally, without having it to compute within the cloud. This will save energy, since it doesn’t require a big data center to crush your data.

The importance of integration tests

You have both unit tests and integration tests. During the evening it was clearly shown what integration tests can discover what unit tests can’t. Scott wanted to show the list of his podcasts, but due to the fact the local ISP blocked on of the plugins on his site, this section didn’t load. A live debugging session showed the root cause, which was confirmed by the integration tests. The integration tests simulated the external API’s he called on the website. It is fairly easy to create a test what would happen if such an external API wouldn’t respond or respond with an different answer your site would expect.

User groups

During such a evening, you notice the importance of an user group. I think the message will stick longer when hearing it in a live session, compared to watching it on for example YouTube. Also meeting old colleagues is fun or meeting like-minded people.