Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  *  Supabase is an open-source Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) built around PostgreSQL. It is a Firebase alternative that can help you set up a backend in less than 2 minutes. * Add the possibility of an Internet Service Provider-level blocking of a service to the list of things you should debug when your code isn't working. Now if your perfectly working code accesses some paid premium AI-Model APIs suddenly throws errors, you'll be losing tokens while you figure that it was in fact your ISP that was glitching.  A subset of users based in India accessing Supabase over JioFiber, Reliance Jio's fiber-to-the-home broadband service, faced routing/block issues. Supabase’s own infrastructure was fully operational but users on JioFiber (and some other Indian ISPs) couldn’t connect to Supabase services like Dashboard, Auth, Edge Functions, Postgres in ap-south-1, etc. The root cause turned out to be ISP-level DNS resolution failure. The ISP’s DNS serv...

Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich are seasoned tech veterans and iconic figures in the Microsoft community. They share candid conversations about emerging trends and topics relevant to IT professionals through their podcast and on YouTube's channel.

Today's AI coding tools look like fierce competitors, but they're all built on each other's work.  Today’s AI-powered IDEs like Cursor, Windsurf, Kiro and many others all stand on the giant shoulders of open-source work contributed by companies that once battled each other in the browser wars.  Windsurf, for example, is a fork of Microsoft’s VS Code. VS Code itself runs on Electron, which is built on top of Chromium and Node.js. Chromium comes with Google’s V8 JavaScript engine and uses Blink, a fork of Apple’s WebKit.  So even when Google, Microsoft, GitHub, and Apple compete publicly, their code ends up powering each other’s tools behind the scenes. Open source has turned “tech rivals” into “reluctant collaborators,” whether they planned it or not. The AI Model Dependencies The same pattern exists with AI models. Competing IDEs use each other's models, hosted on each other's clouds. GitHub Copilot (Microsoft) uses : OpenAI models (GPT-4.1, GPT-5 family) - hosted o...

21 Lessons 00:00:00 - Introduction to Generative AI and LLMs [Pt 1] 00:10:36 - Exploring and comparing different LLMs [Pt 2] 00:31:34 - Using Generative AI Responsibly [Pt 3] 00:40:54 - Understanding Prompt Engineering Fundamentals [Pt 4] 01:04:08 - Creating Advanced Prompts [Pt 5] 01:21:06 - Building Text Generation Applications [Pt 6] 01:36:37 - Building Chat Applications [Pt 7] 01:50:10 - Building Search Apps Vector Databases [Pt 8] 02:08:08 - Building Image Generation Applications [Pt 9] 02:30:32 - Building Low Code AI Applications [Pt 10] 02:46:55 - Integrating External Applications with Function Calling [Pt 11] 02:56:06 - Designing UX for AI Applications [Pt 12] 03:08:38 - Securing Your Generative AI Applications [Pt 13] 03:16:49 - The Generative AI Application Lifecycle [Pt 14] 03:29:12 - Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Vector Databases [Pt 15] 03:40:03: - Open Source Models and Hugging Face [Pt 16] 03:51:32 - AI Agents [Pt 17] 03:59:26 - Fine-Tuning LLMs [Pt 18] Relate...

This Week I Learned -  * Message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS) solve problems but also introduce new ones (ordering, deduplication, backpressure). Nothing is more abused than Redis as a primary database. Understand trade-offs .  *  Roboflow provides the means to label, train, and deploy computer vision solutions. It offers a Free Plan with 15 credits per month to try it and get started. * Currently 45+ services are available in the AWS Free Tier  to both existing and new AWS customers indefinitely unlike some others that are free for the first 12 months. * Skype Joins Windows Phone in Microsoft's Graveyard of Forgotten Innovations -Founded in 2003, Skype’s cheap audio and video calls quickly disrupted the landline industry in the early 2000s. Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion after outbidding Google and Facebook. Microsoft will retire the two-decade-old internet calling service in May 2025. * Dark Patterns & Dirty Tricks in Smartphone Apps - The Di...

This Week I Learned -  *  A list of free APIs * The Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub offers free access to top-tier AI models via Azure, such as OpenAI GPT-4, along with up to $150,000 in Azure credits. It also provides personalized guidance from Microsoft specialists and numerous other benefits. The program is accessible to anyone with an idea, without the necessity for funding. Perplexity AI is one of the benefactors of this program * Blackbox AI can generate summaries for up to one-hour-long videos using just a link.  * ChatGPT sports a 'thumbs down' feature for feedback, yet it seems to strut without a 'like' button, almost as if it's certain all its replies are applause-worthy. * ChatGPT is now more expressive about what it is doing while generating a response. The screenshot below seems to indicate that an interest in the Telugu language and culture has been noted, and future responses may be contextualized accordingly. * In FY24, Hyun Shik Park, the Chief...

Many software vendors now provide proctored certification exams focused on Generative AI, including: Oracle Databricks  NVIDIA  AWS GitHub Read on... Oracle University AI Certifications Race to Certification 2025 learning and certification challenge running from July 1 to October 31, 2025 offers an opportunity to earn free professional certification exam attempts for the following AI related exam titles: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2025 AI Foundations Associate | 1Z0-1122-25 (On-demand, 15 attempts) Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2025 Data Science Professional | 1Z0-1110-25 Oracle AI Vector Search Professional | 1Z0-184-25 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2025 Generative AI Professional | 1Z0-1127-25 The courseware is also free. Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate The Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate certification exam assesses an individual’s ability to design and implement LLM-enabled solutions using Databricks. ...

This Week I Learned - *  GW-BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language developed by Microsoft from IBM BASICA in 1983. It was bundled with MS-DOS operating systems on IBM PC compatibles by Microsoft. Since it was included with most versions of MS-DOS, it was also a low-cost way for many aspiring programmers to learn the fundamentals of computer programming. With the release of MS-DOS 5.0, GW-BASIC's place was taken by QBasic, a slightly abridged version of the interpreter part of the separately available QuickBASIC interpreter and compiler package. *  Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is distributed in a manner that allows its users to run the software for any purpose, to redistribute copies of it, and to examine, study, and modify, the source code. The FOSS movement's "free" part originates from Richard Matthew Stallman, who noted the lost freedom to users on the decline of the public domain ecosystem and the growth of a copyrighted p...

This Week I Learned -  * Announced at Microsoft Build : All ChatGPT plugins work w/ Bing or Copilot Bing is the default search experience for ChatGPT Azure OpenAI Studio Windows Copilot Microsoft Fabric, a new platform for analytics *  GitHub builds GitHub with GitHub - GitHub builds GitHub using the full range of capabilities from GitHub Copilot to GitHub Projects, from GitHub Codespaces to GitHub CodeQL. * Microsoft Graph enables you to integrate with the best of Microsoft 365, Windows, and Enterprise Mobility + Security services in Microsoft 365, using REST APIs and client libraries.  * Password spraying is an attack that attempts to access a large number of accounts (usernames) with a few commonly used passwords. Traditional brute-force attacks attempt to gain unauthorized access to a single account by guessing the password. * Spear phishing is a specific and targeted attack on one or a select number of victims, while regular phishing attempts to scam masses of peopl...

Microsoft Learn has Beginner series for many web & Cloud technologies  including the following: Beginner's Series to: JavaScript - 51 videos, 2020 T-SQL for Beginners   Python for Beginners - 44 videos, 2019 More Python for Beginners - 20 videos, 2020 Even More Python for Beginners - Data Tools - 31 videos, 2020 Azure SQL for Beginners - 72 videos, 2020-2023 Azure Database for MySQL - Beginners Series - 16 videos, 2022 Beginner's Series to: Serverless  - 16 videos, 2021 Beginner's Series to: Django - 24 videos, 2021 PWA for Beginners - 4-chapter, 17-video tutorial that walks you through building your own Progressive Web Apps that can run cross platforms and combine the best of web and native features, 2022 Beginner's Series to: Node.js - 26 videos, 2020 Java for Beginners  - 23 videos, 2022

The following Org Chart comic was drawn by Manu Cornet and appeared in The New York Times in 2011. Cornet is a French programmer, cartoonist, writer and musician. Cornet worked at Google from 2007 until 2021. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft acknowledged the drawing thus in his book 'Hit Refresh' -"A cartoonist drew the Microsoft organization chart as warring gangs, each pointing a gun at another. The humorist's message was impossible to ignore [...] I told employees that renewing our company’s culture would be my highest priority." Popular LinkedIn contributor Alex Xu asked after how relevant is the drawing after more than 10 years and current and past employees of those companies have responded with their experiences .

This Week I Learned -  * Availability set is the first HA concept for SAP systems in Azure, that protect an application against unplanned downtime of physical servers and racks inside ONE data center (DC). It also offers planned maintenance downtime minimization. With the help of SAP on Azure PowerShell cmdlets it is possible to migrate SAP HA systems from Availability Set construct to Availability Zones to improve their infrastructure SLA from 99.9% to 99.99% while SAP systems stay online all the time or most of the time. *  NoSQL database technologies such as MongoDB (document), Cassandra (wide-column) and Gremlin (graph) are arguably the biggest and most transformative trend in the universe of databases over the past decade. Azure Cosmos DB is a multi-model NoSQL database, supporting all common NoSQL data models through open APIs, that is fully cloud based and offered as Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) *  The Google Cloud Architecture Diagramming Tool includes 10...

This Week I Learned -  * The ASM-based deployment model for Cloud Services has been renamed Cloud Services (classic). Cloud Services (extended support) has the primary benefit of providing regional resiliency along with feature parity with Azure Cloud Services deployed using Azure Service Manager (ASM). Cloud Services (extended support) also supports two types of roles, web and worker. There are no changes to the design, architecture, or components of web and worker roles. *  Azure Deployment Manager (ADM) allows you to perform staged rollouts of resources, meaning they’re deployed region by region in an ordered fashion. As part of this rollout, the health of your services is monitored, and if unacceptable performance degradation is detected, deployment automatically stops, allowing you to troubleshoot and reduce the scale of the impact. These tools are used internally by hundreds of Microsoft services to ensure safe, reliable deployments, ensuring high availability and...

This Week I Learned - * Generation 2 virtual machines are now generally available on Azure. Generation 2 VMs provide support for Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), UEFI boot architecture, and the ability to provision large VMs (up to 12TB) and OS Disks sizes that exceed 2TB.   * Azure AD DS lets you join Azure virtual machines to a domain without domain controllers *  Five critical areas when migrating your workloads to the Cloud : • Selecting the right computing option for your workload. • Choosing the cloud consumption models to best fit your requirements. • Reducing operating costs by leveraging application and data services available within the cloud platform. • Addressing security and management challenges. • Transforming your applications with new public cloud services. *  Foundational pillars of cloud-native systems: Automation Backing Services Cloud Infrastructure - PaaS, DevOps Containers Modern design - Twelve-Factor methodology,...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides a self-service deployment of fully managed OpenShift clusters. Run your apps on Red Hat’s OpenShift security hardened Kubernetes platform built on Azure infrastructure. Azure Red Hat OpenShift offers industry-leading SLA of 99.9% availability. * Azure API Management simplifies publishing of APIs as well as their consumption by clients. It allows for abstraction of APIs from their implementation. APIs are governed through policies, managed from a unified plane, optimized through caching, and published for frictionless consumption through a developer portal. *  Comicgen is a library built with JavaScript to create comics . * Pass certification exam AI-100 to become a Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate * The second edition of Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook [PDF] is free to download * Satya Nadella, had been recruited from Sun Microsystems Inc. in 1992, in part because his team’s manager wanted a...