A lot of debates are going on about AI and there are many vocal proponents as well as opponents of this technology out there. I consider myself to be somewhere halfway between those extremes. While I think there are definitely dangers to using AI, I also think that a person can use it to greatly enrich their life. My main observation about AI from the past couple of years is: Most people use AI to…
Robin Hobb is one of my favorite writers and her Realm of the Elderlings is my all-time favorite fantasy series. When friends or acquaintances find out that I love fantasy and ask for a recommendation in the genre, it’s always her and this series of hers that I recommend first - almost regardless of who is asking. Since she has many books in this series, it might not be obvious at first…
Making decisions can be both easy and difficult, depending on one’s personality. I consider myself an analytical thinker and (largely because of that) a rather good decision maker. Of course, that doesn’t mean I never struggle with hard decisions. But when that happens, I have a couple of proven techniques to support me. In this post, I’d like to describe those techniques in hope…
That’s right, it is. Batocera.linux is a truly amazing open-source project. A friend of mine set a trap for me this summer, mentioning that he had discovered an interesting Linux distribution for retro gaming. He had a lot of fun with it and recommended I give it a try too. I was rather busy at the time, it seemed like a lot of work to get it running, so I put it on my to-do list and, of…
I’ve recently moved this blog from GitHub Pages to GitLab Pages . Honestly, it started to become a bit awkward to have it hosted on the biggest competitor’s platform, while working at GitLab for more than a year now. From now on, both the code and the content of this website will be available here . During the migration, I’ve decided to also upgrade the Jekyll theme powering the…
Last week, I had the privilege of being invited as a guest to Eficode ’s DevOps Sauna podcast . It was great fun recording the episode, so I hope you’ll enjoy listening to it equally! For links to the episode on different streaming platforms and show notes, please visit the episode’s website .
While working on an ASP.NET Core project, I bumped into the following challenge: I had to implement a feature that makes it possible for an admin user to create new, non-admin users for a website. To achieve this, I had to create new users with random passwords that would comply with all the requirements configured in ASP.NET Core Identity’s options. Please note that creating users manually…
(The title is a slight reference to Paul Graham’s excellent talk titled “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” . Personally, I really love it. It’s a highly recommended read, especially for young and clueless people.) If you ask me, three years is a lot of time. Since I am leaving Microsoft soon and this is the third fiscal year that I’ve spent as a consultant at…
This tutorial heavily depends on the configuration mechanism provided by configuration builders , which is only available in .NET Framework 4.7.1 and later. The tutorial also assumes that you already host your web application on Azure App Service. Key Vault is a very handy Azure service that you can use to avoid storing credentials in your code and in your version control system, thus reducing the…
Last week, I had the privilege of being invited as a guest to the Azure Podcast. It was great fun recording the episode, so I hope you’ll enjoy listening to it equally! For show notes and mp3 download, please visit the Azure Podcast’s website . You can also find the podcast on many platforms, like iTunes or Spotify .
To put this post in context, let’s assume for a minute that you are developing a chatbot with the Microsoft Bot Framework that integrates with some unsupported channels (for example, Viber or your very own native mobile application) using the Direct Line API. In this case, there’s a very high chance that you’d like to test and debug the bot end-to-end in a test environment (be it…
This blog post is about the new Global Availability version of the QnA Maker service. You can read the announcement at the Bot Framework blog. During the past week, while working with one of my customers, I faced a challenge that seemed easy at first glance but proved to be a much harder nut to crack when I started to look into the details. I spent a good portion of a day figuring this stuff out,…