Reading Notes #710

This week’s collection highlights several key advancements in Azure performance, the nuances of orchestrating multiple AI agents, and critical updates to NuGet security. These pieces offer practical insights for anyone looking to streamline their development workflow while maintaining a more secure infrastructure.

Cloud

• Azure Service Bus: Count your filters (Daniel Marbach) - Great deep post about performance. The architecture and number of filters can and will greatly affect the performance.

AI

• How I Work With 5 Coding Agents Simultaneously (Michael Shpilt) - Getting to multiple agents simultaneously is harder than we think. This post shares a few ideas that could help.

• Why your AI agent likes em-dashes and long sentences (Keith W. Boone) - I'm sure you want to know too, right?

• From generated code to trusted code with a unit-test agent - .NET Blog (Amaury Levé) - A very interesting skill to add to our toolbox.

• Why Empty Sandboxes Break Developer Experience (Oleg Selajev) - That's exactly what I was looking for! It will be much safer than a container.

DevOps

• Strengthening NuGet Supply Chain Security: Reducing API Key Lifetime - .NET Blog - Security first. It's a good evolution for NuGet. I don't publish packages these days but if you do, this is your cue for the upgrade.

~frank

Reading Notes #709

This week’s notes focus heavily on the practicalities of building reliable AI agents, specifically looking at how we manage their memory and governance. I have also included a few notable wins in Azure storage performance and some honest reflections on where our industry is heading next.

AI

• AI Governance: Runtime Enforcement, Not Runtime Advice (Karan Verma) - I'm impressed by our journey of using AI. Not long ago, we barely trusted it, and now it's running independently, and we think more about limiting what it can do. Nice second post o to a series.

• Computer use: How AI agents can automate almost anything | Red Hat Developer - Learn more about the different options that Red Hat AI offers and how they integrate with everything you may already have.

• Native Agent Memory for Microsoft Agent Framework, Powered by Azure Cosmos DB - Azure Cosmos DB Blog (Theo van Kraay) - That seems pretty cool! Attaching a serverless NoSQL database to our agent to get super memory.

• Squad 0.11.0: portable teams and a harder release train · Brady Gaster (Brady Gaster) - I have used Squad from the beginning, and it's great to see it evolving. Thank you for this update post! I wish the release notes (of all projects) were that clear sometimes.

• I've Spent 25 Years in Tech. The AI Gap That Worries Me Most Isn't the One You're Thinking About (Fabrice Lacroix) - Great reflection on AI for our business. Are we ready?

Cloud

• Faster blob copying in Azure Blob Storage (Mark Heath) - Some may think it's trivial, but when you hit big numbers, the way you copy makes a huge difference.
  

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 #708

I’ve gathered a few insightful pieces this week exploring smarter ways to manage AI costs, practical hardware setups, and the foundational logic behind better programming. Each link offers a different perspective on how we can refine our workflows and think more intentionally about the tools we use every day.

AI

• MCP Beyond the Chat Window: Build Diagnostics in CI (Jan , Yuliia) - Instead of copy-pasting the log, the promises of this MCP server are very interesting.

• Why Reusing AI Instructions Costs You More Tokens (Ken Muse) - This post shares great advices on how we must think when writing or planning skills and queries.

• Set up OpenClaw on your Raspberry Pi (Lucy Hattersley) - Tease about a very interesting post (available in the Raspberry Pi Official Magazine) more to come

Databases

• Learning a few things about running SQLite (Julia Evans) - Nice post sharing some useful lessons learned.

Programming

• The Power Of “Why?” (codemanship) - A great post that reminds us that asking the right question helps us understand the real need and build better solutions.

Miscellaneous

• The Knowledge You Give Away (Mark Downie) - A quote that hopefully makes us think.

• Microsoft reveals 15+ products losing support in 2026, check if you're affected (Abhijith M B) - It's worth having a look while you have time to plan something. Products will continue to work, but no more updates or support.

~frank