Recent content on Michael Dugmore
Personal views only (not my employer’s). This is a snapshot of my current thinking as we all learn AI - examples are from personal projects and experiments on non-critical systems. The Idea Vibe coding (which I dont actually like the term for all Agentic Coding, but it is what people use now) used to feel like a novelty. You describe what you want, the model fills in the syntax, and you ship…
I didn’t really keep notes while I was reading these. This is basically me looking back and going, “oh yeah… that one”, and trying to remember what actually stuck, I have also missed a few others, which I will update if I get the time. Not a massively curated list, but there’s a theme (as usual): health, habits, money, tech, and why things work the way they do. Exercised: The Science of Physical…
A couple of months ago I nearly replaced my personal laptop. My daily driver is a 9-year-old Dell Latitude 7280 . On paper the hardware is fine, but running Windows 10 it felt dead. The fans were constantly spinning, the system was sluggish, and the battery life had dropped to a useless 30 minutes. Since the machine is too old for the official Windows 11 upgrade path, it was effectively living on…
We moved an API from Azure Functions to Azure Container Apps and expected logging to “just work.” Instead, AppTraces stayed empty while ContainerAppConsoleLogs_CL filled up. This is the story of how a custom logger quietly bypassed Application Insights, how we proved the platform still worked, and what we changed to fix it. Note: I’ve intentionally omitted/substituted any subscription IDs,…
Disclaimer: LLM Agents wrote the code and the bugs. The ideas and most of the wording in this blog series are mine, but edited by LLMs because I am an engineer, not a copywriter. I’ve reviewed it to ensure it sounds like me, but if you spot weird phrasing, blame the robot. Over the Christmas break I built a simple weekly family planner for my partner, my son, and me. I wanted to solve for the…
Disclaimer: LLM Agents wrote the code and the bugs. The ideas and most of the wording in this blog series are mine, but edited by LLMs because I am an engineer, not a copywriter. I’ve reviewed it to ensure it sounds like me, but if you spot weird phrasing, blame the robot. Prefer the short version? Start here: I Built a Family Planner We Actually Use (and It Costs £0/month) The planner is at its…
Disclaimer: LLM Agents wrote the code and the bugs. The ideas and most of the wording in this blog series are mine, but edited by LLMs because I am an engineer, not a copywriter. I’ve reviewed it to ensure it sounds like me, but if you spot weird phrasing, blame the robot. Prefer the short version? Start here: I Built a Family Planner We Actually Use (and It Costs £0/month) Family data falls into…
Disclaimer: LLM Agents wrote the code and the bugs. The ideas and most of the wording in this blog series are mine, but edited by LLMs because I am an engineer, not a copywriter. I’ve reviewed it to ensure it sounds like me, but if you spot weird phrasing, blame the robot. Prefer the short version? Start here: I Built a Family Planner We Actually Use (and It Costs £0/month) I’ve built software for…
Disclaimer: LLM Agents wrote the code and the bugs. The ideas and most of the wording in this blog series are mine, but edited by LLMs because I am an engineer, not a copywriter. I’ve reviewed it to ensure it sounds like me, but if you spot weird phrasing, blame the robot. Prefer the short version? Start here: I Built a Family Planner We Actually Use (and It Costs £0/month) My brain can hold an…
Note: This post was a braindump of ideas, then refined a little using LLM’s, but have tried to minimise its the use as we all see way too much AI slop on the web now. I just to made it a little more coherent than my braindump. From Autocomplete to Autonomous Agents: My AI Journey I’ve been experimenting with AI since the GPT-2 days, playing with early versions that felt like slightly…
There’s a unique satisfaction that comes from loading up your bike with everything you need and setting off into the unknown. A few years ago, some friends and I got hooked on the idea of gravel cycling – exploring bridleways, forest tracks, and quiet lanes away from the traffic. We perhaps dreamt of dusty, sun-baked American-style gravel roads, but quickly discovered the UK reality often…
Okay, let’s have a real chat. Does anyone else feel like keeping up with AI developments is less “lifelong learning” and more like frantically treading water while a giant wave labelled “AI Everything, All The Time” looms over you? Seriously, blink and there’s a new model, a new framework, a new library, some breathless think piece declaring my entire skillset…
Alright, let’s talk about MediatR. You’ve probably heard the news – the popular .NET library, often the go-to for CQRS-style patterns, is shifting towards a commercial license for commercial use. Now, fair play to the maintainer for sustainability, but it definitely got me thinking. Do we really need a library like MediatR for decoupling our commands and queries? Often, the answer is…
For years, AutoMapper has been almost a default choice for handling the tedious chore of mapping objects in .NET. Got an entity you need as a DTO? AutoMapper. Need to turn a command into an entity? AutoMapper again. It promised to slay the dragon of boilerplate mapping code, and honestly, for simple stuff, it felt pretty good. But things change. AutoMapper’s creator recently announced that,…
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