.NET Rocks!

What can you do with a Particle Photon? While in an aluminum Airstream trailer in a thunderstorm at the Copenhagen Developers Festival, Carl and Richard talked to Colleen Lavin about her work with the Particle Photon IoT device - and its many maker possibilities! Colleen talks about making it easy to start building a device - but the struggle with so many choices to actually pick a project. The conversation also digs into making production versions of your device so that they are smaller, cheaper, and very reliable - it's a fun time to be a maker!

Jimmy Bogard, creator of MediatR, talks about how the mediator pattern emerged from his work with customer applications, breaking down blocks of code into manageable chunks. He discusses the challenges and reflections of software evolution, open source projects, and the boundaries of appropriate use.

How can a large language model help your application? Carl and Richard talk to Brian MacKay about his work with large language models, including ChatGPT - and others! Brian talks about how LLMs continue to evolve and the limitations they have. But identifying language inside your applications can be powerful, and Brian talks through a few scenarios his company uses in production today. Work could you be taking advantage of today!

Jeremy Miller, expert in minimal architecture and creator of Wolverine and Marten, discusses the benefits of a clean architecture, challenges of open source projects, and bloat in code. He also touches on starting a new company and the future plans for his product.

How is Chocolatey evolving? Carl and Richard talk to Gary Ewan Park about the latest with the open-source Windows package management solution. Gary discusses some of the differences between the various package managers for Windows these days, including WinGet. Each product has its niche, and Chocolatey has done a good job of evolving into a broader product, including Chocolatey for Business, to allow a view of applications installed across all your machines - and being able to push updates out to them.

How's your architecture game? Carl and Richard talk to Thomas Betts about being a better architect. Thomas focuses on the key aspect - communication! An effective architect can talk to all the stakeholders in the language of the stakeholder, whether that's speaking business with business stakeholders, coding with developers, and understanding the needs of the security and operations folks. All those aspects (and more) go into an effective architecture and then come the changes as the implementation challenges happen. The conversation also digs into the importance of documentation to know why decisions were made and how to change them as you respond to changing needs and landscapes.

Large Language Models like GPT-4 are all the rage - how do we use them well? Carl and Richard talk to Amber McKenzie about the challenges and concerns around LLMs, especially regarding the data involved. Amber talks about the risks of creating products around LLMs while the technology is so young and constantly evolving, especially with how the general public reacts to conversational AI. Education is key, and constantly fact-checking - good advice for a lot of technology, but LLMs are making fact checking even more important!

Microservices or Monoliths? Carl and Richard talk to Layla Porter about choosing a middle ground between microservices and monoliths, with modular monoliths. Layla talks about the pushback from the community around microservices and the insistence that there is "one right way." Monoliths have their advantages until they are a problem - but that doesn't mean that re-architecting everything is the right way to go. Chipping off parts of the monolith into satellite modules strikes a balance of flexibility and scalability - and opens the door to accessing the power of bus architectures when needed!

Databases continue to evolve! Carl and Richard talk to Ted Neward about multi-model data stores - which, these days, are most databases! Ted talks about how SQL and NoSQL are not that different - it's only a query engine. But how do you store your data? Today multi-model databases store data with multiple storage engines, and so can store your data in the most appropriate form. There are lots of choices, and it's worth digging deeper into your existing data stores, as well as the new ones available!

What can we do to make testing easier? Carl and Richard talk to Dennis Doomen about Fluent Assertions, an open-source set of extension methods to help write better tests. Dennis talks about working on Fluent Assertions for over a decade and the great team of folks that have helped it grow. With tens of millions of downloads, you should check it out! The conversation also digs into how these types of open-source projects don't make money, even though they help many people. Could we fix that?