Bienvenue! Welcome!
My goal is to help you work faster.
I must speak and teach until I hear 10 people say, "That thing you taught me? I used it! And it saved me time!"
(Ahem ... although maybe blogging slower than I'd hoped. Ugh, coders' repetitive stress injury.)
So check out the tutorials. Play with code. Tell me about your triumphs.
Microsoft wishlist
18 May 2026
Hi, Microsoft! Here’s that wishlist I approached you about toward the end of the day at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit:
Continue ReadingObservability Summit 2026 conference talk
17 May 2026
I presented “Secure by Design: Rethinking Test Credentials for Synthetic Monitoring” at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (“CNCF”) 2026 Observability Summit (“#O11ySummit”).
Continue ReadingOpen Source Summit 2026 conference talk
17 May 2026
I presented “Tiny Repos, Big Impact: Level Up Through Open-Source Teaching” at the Linux Foundation’s 2026 Open Source Summit (“#OSSummit”).
Continue ReadingHow to switch Visual Studio license assignment from individuals to groups
13 May 2026
So – you’ve been dutifully opening the Visual Studio Subscriptions Admin Portal, adding individual users, removing them when they leave, and generally keeping the whole thing running? Yay – very happy it works. But there’s a slightly more enterprise-friendly way to assign Visual Studio licenses using Entra security groups, if your identity provider is Microsoft Entra ID (formerly known as Azure Active Directory).
Continue ReadingMinnebar 2026 recap
04 May 2026
Session notes from the Minnebar conference’s 20th anniversary, May 2, 2026 below.
Continue ReadingAzure Managed DevOps Pools cross-contamination
09 Apr 2026
Azure DevOps (“ADO”) Managed DevOps Pool (“MDOP”) agent VMs let you privately network Azure Pipelines without having to self-host your own long-running VM, but if you set the agentProfile kind parameter to Stateful instead of to Stateless, then they wouldn’t be fully ephemeral. So you’d still have the problem that sequential workloads on the same VM could be exposed to residual state from prior runs. It’s a heck of a lot shorter VM time-to-live (“TTL”) than your average self-host – no more than 7 days – but if you set the TTL long enough, you could end up with an afternoon job still seeing an environment variable named HELLO set to world, even though it was a morning job that set that value. Cross-contamination vectors may include:
I haven't had a desktop query tool in years
09 Apr 2026
I just noticed someone on a huge monitor working in a query tool – the kind where you type out the query up top and surf an Excel-like spreadsheet down below – and realized that it’s been a while since I needed one of those installed onto my machine.
Continue ReadingMusic, bird brains and LLM math
08 Apr 2026
Wanna go really trippy about philosophy and LLMs? Check this shower thought about “what if language itself is sorta deterministic?”:
Continue ReadingPyramid summaries for LLMs
08 Apr 2026
This notion of Pyramid Summaries for, as Simon Willison puts it, “providing multiple levels of summary, such that an LLM coding assistant can enumerate the short ones quickly, and zoom in on more detailed information as it is needed,” is interesting, because I’ve done forms of it intuitively for a long time when using LLM coding assistants:
Continue ReadingLet LLMs remember what mutation testing is
01 Apr 2026
A colleague sent me Sushant Singhal’s Gartner webinar “Use AI Mutation Testing to Improve Software Quality”, and while I’ve only had a chance to skim the slides, not listen in full, I have a few thoughts:
Continue Reading