You’ve got a middleware. It reads a comma-separated list of allowed hosts from configuration. Or maybe it loads a dictionary of route mappings, or parses a set of feature flags into a lookup table. The config value can change at runtime and you need to pre-process it into something your middleware can actually use on every request.

How hard can it be? 🤷

Lately, I’ve successfully self-hosted a decent private chatbot and even run a near real-time voice-to-text model locally. So I thought: why not try running a local coding model? I have a pretty decent gaming rig, so it should be able to handle it, right?

Well, it turns out: not really. I spent the whole weekend trying to set up a local coding model and ran into a pile of issues. The models are huge and hungry. Even with my gaming rig, I was barely able to get it running, and it was extremely slow. I ended up dealing with more technical issues than coding tasks.

One of the most common questions I get asked is: “Which AI model should I be using with GitHub Copilot?”

Open GitHub Copilot today and you are greeted with a dropdown menu that looks like a wine list. Sonnet? Gemini? Opus? GPT-5? 🤯 It used to be simple, but now it can be paralysing.

Which one is best? It depends on what you are trying to achieve, how complex the task is, and how you want to manage your credit usage.

My rule of thumb is simple:

• Start cheap to think and iterate.
• Pay for certainty when the blast radius is big.

Voice assistants used to be simple, reliable helpers. Well, maybe not truly reliable. They weren’t perfect, but for years, you could count on them to set a reminder, add a calendar event, or play your favourite playlist. They quietly made life easier, even if they never lived up to the sci-fi hype.

Now that the Windows 10 May 2020 Update is finally available to everyone, without requiring to join the Windows Insiders program and install preview versions, it’s finally time to embrace WSL2.

WSL2 is the second iteration of the Windows Subsystem for Linux which finally allows running linux virtualized inside Windows. This new version brings real virtualization using a real linux kernel, but, compared to a traditional virtual machine, it runs on a lightweight hypervisor getting close to bare-metal performance.

This will also be used by Docker under the hood, boosting the start-up time and general performance of our containers. Sweet! Furthermore, with WSL2, VPN connections automatically propagate to linux correctly, which is great news when working from home.

So, let’s stop talking and get to update our Ubuntu 18.04 WSL environment to Ubuntu 20.04 running on WSL2.

Logs are a key element for diagnosing, monitoring or auditing the application’s behaviour, so if you are either a library author or you are developing an application, it is important to ensure that the right logs are generated.

Would it be nice if there was an easy solution to write tests for it? Let’s start a journey through the best approaches to tests logs when using Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.

GitHub Actions are a great free tool to have continuous integration of your opensource .NET library for free, directly into GitHub, saving you from setting up other tools and linking accounts. Setting it up can feel a daunting task but, if you follow this guide you are going to be able to set it up in 10 minutes!

I often get asked if it is better to have a global.json in a .NET project (not necessarily .NET Core) to define a specific .NET Core SDK version and, unfortunately, if you need a short answer you will get from me the typical engineer answer: it depends! Here is the full answer so you can decide what suits best for your needs.

HttpClientLab turns the HttpClientFactory into a lab, so you can mock the HttpClient to write tests.

Recently I had to install Python 3.4 on the Raspberry Pi, which is not part of the current distribution as it is based on Debian Wheezy which includes Python 3.2.3.

The following steps allow you to install Python 3.4 with pip and sqlite support, without messing with your other Python versions.