Things that happened

• From a technical point of view, the main thing that happened in January is that I got access to Claude Code and have been playing around with that. I hope to write up my thoughts soon.

Things I learnt

• I’ve published a number of short Today I Learnt blog posts. I’ll link to them below so won’t repeat them here.

Things I've read / watched / listened to

These are my own reflections from the content, not necessarily the main point of the content.

• The AI-Ready Software Developer #18 – “Productivity”. You Keep Using That Word. – Codemanship's Blog

  • This points out the misaligned incentives in the software industry, which I've noticed over the course of my career so far, and applies the insights to the impact of AI coding.

• Walking Skeletons, Delivery Pipelines & DevOps Drills – Codemanship's Blog

  • I love the idea of deliberately practicing starting new projects. I'm comfortable with the DevOps aspects of this but have long been aware I have never set up authentication from scratch on a greenfield project (though I have made substantial changes to existing authentication, like changing to a different authentication provider). I can imagine there could be a few things like that which I tend to take for granted, and might take a bit more effort than I'd expect if I were to create something substantial from scratch.

• Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

  • This is a very interesting approach, allowing LLMs but giving clear rules about accountability.

  • Learning was, in this case, inversely correlated with LLM usage. This seems like bad news for me and my career (and other developers who have leaned into using LLM coding agents). I need to think more about this. What's the smart use of LLMs for me to ensure I still learn and stay sharp over the long term?

Things I've published

• TIL installing a .NET SDK can break .NET MAUI builds

• TIL Rider can show a diff of a directory between two branches

• TIL the format for pasting environment variables into a Rider run configuration

• TIL C# property overrides are separate for getters and setters

• Deleting nul files created in error by Claude code

• Finding a bug by checking git history one commit at a time

• TIL about typescript typing as const

Things I haven't published

Most ideas I have for blog posts never see the light of day because I don't find the time to write them. Here's what I didn't get round to.

• First impressions of Claude Code after using GitHub Copilot

• TIL why C# classes sometimes have multiple Dispose methods

• TIL how to get a git diff between 2 branches within a folder