Reading Notes #707

This week's highlights bring together insights on evolving API security, the realities of integrating AI into your workflow, and tools that can help streamline the testing process. I selected these pieces for their practical advice on simplifying everyday development tasks while building more robust and resilient infrastructure.

Programming

• Web Application & API Protection: An Overview (John Brawner) - I knew many security tools existed, and obviously I use some. But I learned a lot in this post. WAAP emerged because WAF alone was not enough to address APIs, bots, DDoS, and modern cloud traffic patterns in a single runtime protection model.

• How to Turn a Postman Collection into a Maintainable pytest Suite (Mikhail Golikov) - Tests are important, so keeping them clean should be too. This post gives us a great example of how to build reliable tools to do exactly that.

• OpenAPI Code Generation with Corvus: Typed HTTP Clients (Matthew Adams) - Who doesn't uses APIs?! I need to try that today!

AI

• A new way to reflect on how you use Claude - This post shares a reporting tool to visualize our Claude utilization.

• Better tools made Copilot code review worse. Here's how we actually improved it. (Napalys Klicius) - Interesting story that shares experiments to improve AI when doing code review. How it failed and how it work, and how the same fix didn't do great in a different context.

Miscellaneous

• Your Laptop Is the New Production Environment (Karan Verma) - The title definitely caught my attention, and it's so true. First post of a promising series.

• AI is ready. Your APIs probably aren't (Matt Gray) - Postman has always been an interesting tool. I've been using something else for a while but am thinking about exploring it again!

• How GitHub gave every repository a durable owner - A nice behind-the-scenes story where GitHub shares the issues, failures, learning and success.

Sharing my Reading Notes is a habit I started a long time ago, where I share a list of all the articles, blog posts, and books that catch my interest during the week. 

 ~frank

Reading Notes #706

This week's collection highlights several practical upgrades for your workflow, ranging from cleaner C# patterns to more secure ways to manage AI agents. I’ve also included a few podcast episodes and articles that offer some much-needed perspective on productivity and community life.

AI

• Why AI Agents Need Isolation with Docker SBX (Karan Verma) - Power comes with responsibilities. It's well known (at least for Spider-Man fans), but more seriously, AI users have a simple way to stay safe. And now, with "the kits", it looks like it's even easier.

• Using AI to Build a Blazor App 1: Start With the Problem (Jon Hilton ) - It's so true that AI doesn't always do or act the way we expect. In this case, I wonder if a different model would have been better. In my experience, GPT is better at doing things compared to brainstorming.

Databases

• Fundamentals of Azure DevOps with SQL projects - Azure SQL Dev Corner (Drew Skwiers-Koballa) - This post provides all the details and pieces of config/ code required to get an Azure DevOps pipeline to work, no magic.

Programming

• Azure WAF - Never used yet Yarp, but nice to see a great example exists for when I will. Great solution.

• How to match names in C# without exact string comparisons (Nick Harrison) - Excellent post that shares many patterns and strategies (with code snippets) to optimize our research.

DevOps

• New: Versioned CLI and SDK Docs (Cam Soper) - That's a nice feature that more should implement! You pick your API version, and the documentation follows.

Podcasts

• Create a Happier Version of Yourself: Redirect Your Energy for Positive Thinking (The Mel Robbins Podcast) - I think this episode should be listened to by so many! It's a simple discussion between a son and mom, but so helpful for anyone.

• The space between the Commits with Zed and DeltaDB's Nathan Sobo (Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman) - I was happy to listen to this episode with Nathan and learn more about his projects: Zed and DeltaDB.

• Azure Container Apps with Paul Yuknewicz and Jan Kalis (.NET Rocks!) - Hmm, a very interesting usage of Azure Container Apps! I'll have to try that.

Miscellaneous

• 3 Tricks to Help You Stop Procrastinating (Suzanne Scacca ) - Need tips to improve your time management? This post is for you.

• Goodbye, forever, probably. (Salma) - Sad news for the communities, but at the same time, it's because of those same communities. This post shares a very sad portrait of the online world that affects many people.
  

~frank

Reading Notes #705

This week’s collection features a mix of critical .NET lifecycle updates and practical strategies for optimizing your database interactions. These selected articles offer helpful insights into everything from edge computing deployments to the evolving landscape of AI in modern workflows.

AI

• AI Raised the Bar (And Now We're All Tired) (Golnaz) - It's so true! So much can be done quickly today. An interesting question is: how do we avoid burning out resources and tokens? How, as human we stay smart? After all, life is a marathon, not a sprint!

Cloud

• How to Deploy Azure Local Small Form Factor (SFF) – Bringing Azure to the Edge (Thomas Maurer) - This post shares many information about what is possible to deploy on edge devices. It's not a how-to, however.

Databases

• EF Core LINQ Querying: Filtering, Projections, and Performance (Nick Cosentino) - This is a great post to quickly learn key principles and immediately improve the performance of our interactions with the database when using EF Core.

• EF Core vs Dapper in .NET: When to Use Each (Nick Cosentino) - Great post for developers or architects planning a future project. Both tools are great, so the decision factor depends on the context.

• Optimizing PostgreSQL on Azure directly in Visual Studio Code (Jesse Sullivan) - Interesting new tools in VS Code and Azure for PostgreSQL users. Curious to learn more about that Azure HorizonDB.

DevOps

• WSL container is now available for public preview (Craig Loewen) - This is great news; this will help improve deployment as now people can have an environmental test in WSL.

Programming

• Creating Dual Use Windows GUI and Console Applications (Rick Strahl) - I never thought about that complexity, and you would think that in 2026 it would be much simpler. Good to know!

• SkiaSharp 4.0 is here: announcing the first stable release - .NET Blog (Matthew Leibowitz) - Learn more about SkiaSharp that run under things like .NET MAUI and UNO platform. This new release should improve performance a lot.

• .NET 8 and .NET 9 will reach End of Support on November 10, 2026 - .NET Blog (Rahul Bhandari) - Time flies; it's good to have a reminder. This post includes a helpful timetable and references to help you migrate.

Miscellaneous

• Evaluating performance and efficiency of the GitHub Copilot agentic harness across models and tasks (Shibani Basava & Carlos Castro) - This is a nice post to learn a little about benchmarks.

~frank