Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned -  * Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code, has called giving Claude a way to verify its work probably the most important thing for getting good results.  * “No member of the team has a full mental model of Claude Code in their head, nor do we think anyone needs to. Rather, when anyone wants to learn about a piece of the codebase, they ask Claude to generate an explainer about that exact slice. It only takes a few minutes and the explainer is always up to date.” -  Addy Osmani * Claude Cowork is now just Claude.  * Oracle will offer Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) via its cloud infrastructure platform, marking the first time specialised AI accelerators will be available on a hyperscale cloud platform outside of Google’s ecosystem. TPUs are processors designed by Google to accelerate machine-learning workloads. They offer an alternative to graphics processing units.  * AI Spin-off - Using sensors developed for self-driving cars, ...

This Week I Learned -  * According to AI-ML guru Andrew Ng, these are the four most important AI engineering skills: Building and deploying AI applications Software engineering fundamentals Using coding agents Shaping the build * GitHub has rebuilt Copilot review around an agentic architecture that gathers broader repository context, uses tools, produces findings, and can hand fixes to another coding agent. This is substantially more than autocomplete added to old review. - The GitHub Blog * Shadow AI refers to consumer-facing AI applications and standalone agents deployed across your organization without IT visibility or approval. These agents can operate autonomously on user devices, creating blind spots in your security and compliance posture.  Microsoft now ships specific discovery, monitoring and governance for unmanaged AI agents. Shadow AI blocking currently apply only to managed Windows devices enrolled with Microsoft Intune. * AI can boost learning productivity,...

The Track Order page on Jiomart e-commerce website shows a 502 Bad Gateway error page revealing it is hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform & uses "Microsoft-Azure-Application-Gateway/v2" as its load balancer/reverse proxy. This is of course, public knowledge for many Azure-hosted sites (easily detectable via headers, DNS, or tools like Wappalyzer). The 502 Bad Gateway default error message from Azure Application Gateway (v2 SKU) is shown when it can't communicate properly with the backend server (e.g., invalid response, timeout, or misconfiguration). In security best practices (e.g., OWASP guidelines), avoiding detailed server/proxy info in error messages is recommended to follow the "principle of least information" as it slightly reduces fingerprinting (identifying exact tech stack for targeted attacks). For better user experience and minimal obfuscation, custom error pages in Azure Application Gateway (supports 502 and 403 errors) can be configured or t...

A couple of decades ago, technical books were the primary way to learn new technologies, until ebooks and video tutorials took over. Physical books still hold a special charm for me, especially when I want to study without distractions. Among the Azure books I’ve read, my favourite is Learn Azure in a Month of Lunches by Iain Foulds, which I read during the Covid lockdown. I enjoyed it because it has all the  ingredients I expect in a good technical book . It doesn’t force the reader to read between the lines and is well supported by clear illustrations and screenshots. I liked it so much that I now use it as a benchmark to rate other technical books. I started reading Microsoft Azure in Action (2025) by Lars Klint to catch up on newer services and features and to see how they can be applied to real-world scenarios. Written by a Microsoft Azure MVP from Australia, the book is a practical, hands-on guide designed to help developers and engineers navigate the vast landscape of Micr...

This Week I Learned -  * "Software testing methodologies such as Test Driven Development (TDD), a test-intensive approach that involves first writing rigorous tests for correctness and only then making progress by writing code that passes those tests, are an important way to find bugs. But it can be a lot of work to write tests. (I personally never adopted TDD for that reason.) Because AI is quite good at writing tests, agentic testing enjoys growing attention." - Andew Ng * "An LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal." - Simon Willison *  Free Hands-On Microsoft Azure Labs   *  Xipu Li on the future of programming -  If you're learning to code today, please don't stop. But don't make coding your only skill. The developers who thrive in this new world will be the ones who understand users, markets, and business models as well as they understand technology . If you're already a developer or building a company, focus on: Better user understa...

This Week I Learned -  *  Confluent Cloud is a fully managed, cloud-native Kafka service that provides features like on-demand cluster creation, data generation, real-time stream processing, and account management. It is deployable within seconds, accessible across all major public clouds, and offers a free start with cost-effective pay-as-you-go pricing that scales with your growth. * Azure Local, formerly Azure Stack HCI, is a comprehensive, Azure-integrated hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution that leverages Hyper-V as a component within a broader, cloud-centric framework.  * Data centers and cloud computing are responsible for 1 percent of the world’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions * OpenAI has become one of the world's biggest renters of cloud servers * Roo Code is an AI-powered autonomous coding agent that lives in your editor. It gives you a whole dev team of AI agents like coding partner, a system architect, or specialized roles like a QA e...

Gartner defines cloud-native application platforms as those that provide managed application runtime environments for applications and integrated capabilities to manage the life cycle of an application or application component in the cloud environment.  Cloud-native application platforms are designed to facilitate the deployment, runtime execution and management of modern cloud-native or cloud-optimized applications without the need to manage any underlying infrastructure. LEADERS Amazon Web Services Microsoft Google Red Hat  Salesforce (Heroku) Alibaba Cloud CHALLENGERS Cloudflare Huawei VISIONARIES Netlify Platform.sh Render NICHE PLAYERS Vercel Interesting insights I gathered from the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services report: Alibaba Cloud launched one-click AI application templates with ModelScope and Hugging Face integration, and introduced an AI gateway for unified, multivendor LLM orchestration and API key management. AWS recently introduced ...

The LinkedIn Learning short course Building AI-Ready Applications with Azure Databases and AI by Muazma Zahid, Principal Group PM Manager at Microsoft provides an overview of creating AI-ready applications using Azure's data and AI services. The code related to the course is in GitHub Codespaces .  Highlights: Key services Azure offers - Azure AI Search is a search as a service solution that integrates AI capabilities to enhance search results. It can analyze and understand the content of your data, providing more relevant and accurate search results.  Azure AI Studio is an integrated development environment for building, training, and deploying AI models.  Azure Data Services provide the infrastructure for storing, processing, and analyzing large amount of data. Azure offers a variety of database services, including Azure SQL Database , Cosmos DB , PostgreSQL , and MySQL . These databases are optimized for AI workloads providing high performance scalability and sec...

The Lock Screen on my Windows PC has started showing notifications with weather, air quality, stock information and today, Traffic status. Clicking on the notification led me to the Bing Maps Traffic page. I was pleasantly surprised to see a new service name - Microsoft Traffic and within the Traffic portal, the Insights tab contained useful local information that seemed better than what's on Google Maps. I was curious about how this is built and after exploring a bit, I found that there are Bing API endpoints that are available for anyone interested in customizing this traffic information for their own applications.  Going by the documentation, the geographic coverage for India is relatively better than for most countries with coverage for Road Data/Routing, Traffic & Geocoding though not for Truck Routing. The Bing Maps API which powers this Traffic status feature will be replaced by Azure Maps .  Azure Maps is expected to bring many of the Azure security and comp...

Gartner defines strategic cloud platform services (SCPS) as standardized, automated, public cloud offerings integrating infrastructure services (e.g., computing, network and storage), platform services (e.g., application, data and value-added services such as AI/ML) and transformation services (resources to help customers adopt cloud-oriented IT delivery models). Image - Gartner Insights I found interesting from the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services report: The eight SCPS providers & global hyperscalers featured in this Magic Quadrant control over 97% of the total CIPS market. While AWS has maintained profitability and a leading global infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) market share of over 42%, its growth rate relative to its key competitors slowed in 2023. Azure public cloud market share is 26%. GCP's overall market share stands at 11.5%. Oracle's strategy of positioning OCI as the top cloud for Oracle software i...

This Week I Learned -  *  Decision tree for Azure Compute Selection in 2018 & 2024 [Image Credit: Microsoft] *  I think EA (and in fact all computing since the very beginning of computing) has always been about “Digital Transformation”.  -  Gideon Slifkin *  How many EAs does it take to change a light bulb ?  None, that's implementation. "EA: We herd the cats to develop the plans."  *  AI is the coming together of two forces that have become more powerful over the last few decades. The first is increasing (and cheaper) computing power, often coming into smaller and smaller packages; our phones are now computationally more powerful than the very first personal computers. The second is the cumulation of data, both quantitative and qualitative, especially with social media accelerating personal data sharing. *  The threat to your job or profession, from AI, will be greater if your job is mostly mechanical, rule-based and objecti...

Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner,  Lydia Leong's point of view -   Image generated by Copilot An increasing number of cloud mass migrations are technical successes but business failures -- that is, the applications work, but organizations haven't gotten their desired outcomes. This trend is the result of multiple different types of shifts in the market, and both customers and vendors are at fault. But cloud repatriation (mass migration reversal) is not a thing -- no enterprises are deciding to bring their workloads back on-premises after exiting their data centers in favor of cloud. Instead, organizations endure, revisit or redo ("remigrate") their post-migration situation. The most common missing desired outcome is TCO reduction, and there are four key things to blame: 1. Poorly-conceived migrations (FOMO on provider migration deals, resume-driven migrations, etc.) 2. The deterioration of the cloud MSP ecosystem (useless cloud provider MSP partner badging program...

This Week I Learned -  * The role adversity plays in tech innovation - "If IE6 had died faster, JavaScript would not be as big. We always had to patch things for it using JavaScript. CSS was held back by it and JavaScript was the way to get things working, instead of platform-native tech doing the job." -  Christian Heilmann   * Platform enabled Disaster recovery capabilities will no longer be available for Azure App Service web apps beginning 31 March 2025. Microsoft encourages subscribers to implement commonly used disaster recovery techniques to prevent loss of functionality or data for their web apps if there's a regional disaster. Backup and restore capabilities are included in Basic and higher pricing tiers. * " Chat With RTX " is a Windows-only application from NVIDIA that can scan local files the user points it to and provide the answer with context. Your private data stays on your PC. *  4-part video series for DP-600 exam prep from Microsoft Exam Read...

This Week I Learned -  *  Hard and soft skills for developers coding in the age of AI : Prompt engineering Code reviews  Testing and security  Communication  Problem solving  Adaptability  Ethical thinking  Empathy * With AI gathering context of legacy code and processes within your repositories, GitHub Copilot Enterprise can help maintain consistency and best practices across an organization’s codebase when suggesting solutions. * Parts of a URL - Source: url-parts.glitch.me *  briefsky.app is a free, open source frontend to a weather app that can be configured to use a variety of weather providers *  piped.video is a privacy-friendly YouTube frontend *  Emoji Combiner is an online tool to combine any two emojis to form an entirely new emoji. * Google Cloud was the first hyperscaler to eliminate network data transfer fees in a move to support an open, interoperable ecosystem in January 2024. Two months later, AWS responde...

This Week I Learned -  *  Azure Migrate application and code assessment tool for .NET (or AppCAT for short) allows you to assess .NET source code, configurations, and binaries of your application to identify potential issues and opportunities when migrating an app to Azure. AppCAT is available in two “flavors” – as a Visual Studio extension and as a .NET CLI tool.   *  On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models  - a 12 page report from the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) at Stanford University  *  The only way for paid subscribers to report an OpenAI issue is through their chatbot developed using GPT-3 at help.openai.com * The expanding use of artificial intelligence could also influence how we book online, what happens when flights are canceled or delayed and even how much we pay for tickets. * As of 2022, the number of developers on GitHub in India was more than eight million . More than 10 million software p...