Things that happened
I was working on an intermittent bug, trying to find the precise conditions which cause it by reading through code. I make notes in Obsidian as I go. I think I need to get better at creating summaries and headlines which clearly communicate things I'm learning from the code. At the moment I'm good at recording all the details, and I'm good at creating overall summaries, but I don't do anything to create summaries in the middle. For example, perhaps the high level summary is that a piece of code uses a particular setting, and the detailed version lists all the method calls which the execution path takes. I could do with summaries of those code paths, saying things like 'this code gets this setting from the database' without spelling out how that works.
I've removed a few apps from running on Windows startup, and have instead written a batch script to open them. I run that script manually from a desktop shortcut and it opens the apps much faster than the Windows startup routine did. It was previously slow enough that I would sometimes be waiting 5–10 minutes for apps to open. Now they open in seconds.
I've started trying to consolidate my Keyboard Shortcuts across the different apps I commonly use.
My company has started holding in-person engineering discussions, and this month is the first time I was able to go to one. It was a good discussion, though I'll wait to see some concrete changes come out of the discussion before giving it an unqualified thumbs–up.
Things I learnt
I was surprised how badly Claude did trying to summarise 2 documents for me in preparation for a meeting. The process of going through the documents and creating my own summary was invaluable in preparing for the meeting, but until I'd done that I didn't know what information I wanted in the summary. Claude wasn't able to work it out, and also added (incorrect) information which wasn't in the documents.
I've twice asked GitHub Copilot to find the exact bit of code which did something, using Claude Sonnet 4.5 both times. I've been very impressed by the output — it has provided a markdown document with a lot of useful detail and code snippets, even though I hadn't specified any of this. I've not yet verified the accuracy of these documents, although (as always) they look plausible.
My company has started using Dependency Track for keeping on top of the libraries we depend on. I think it's a great idea, and it's a while since it was first suggested, so it's nice seeing it come to fruition. I knew nothing about it beyond the basic concept, but I was asked to set it up for one of our projects, so I had the chance to learn more about how it works.
A colleague wrote a SQL script using OPENJSON which I wasn't familiar with. It was interesting to see how this could be used to convert some JSON data into a table.
Azure DevOps pipelines can run based on a definition hosted in GitHub.
EF Core includes Filtered Includes. This has been available functionality for a while, but I wasn't aware of it. I sounds like a very useful performance improvement, and is definitely something I want to be mindful of when writing EF queries.
Things I've read / watched / listened to
These are my own reflections from the content, not necessarily the main point of the content.
Things other people said
Quote of the month
"My basic rule of thumb for LLMs is that I use them only in contexts where:
accuracy and reliability does not matter (some "creative writing" type use cases), or,
the nature of the task forces me to immediately verify the accuracy, and doing so is easy (such as some software development uses)."
Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian Apologetics? - lukeplant.me.uk
Things I've published
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.
How to manage email templates in Outlook
Asking GitHub copilot to explain code and comparing different models
Opening my startup applications faster on Windows 11
