Development

Understanding AI and Prompting Techniques Part 1 # Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly evolved from science fiction to an integral part of our daily lives, transforming how we interact with technology and reshaping industries worldwide. Whether you’re using ChatGPT to draft emails, asking Copilot to write code, or generating images with DALL-E, understanding how to effectively communicate with AI systems has become an essential skill. In this first part of our series, we’ll explore foundational concepts of AI, machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI, then dive deep into the art of prompting-the key to unlocking AI’s full potential.

This month at Stir Trek 2025, I presented on Dev Containers and GitHub Codespaces, demonstrating how these tools streamline both local and cloud-based development workflows. The session covered the essentials of creating portable development environments, customizing containers with features and extensions, and launching Codespaces directly from your repository. A lively Q&A followed, with attendees asking about strategies for running and working with multiple containers. Below, I’ve distilled those discussions and provided a deeper dive into shared container configurations across multiple projects-including folder structures, Docker Compose setups, VS Code workflows, and advanced tips you can apply in your own work.

Last week, I spoke at the Copenhagen Developers Festival about using GitHub Codespaces for cloud-based development. This is an amazing conference with an incredible lineup. I’ve done this talk plenty of times, sharing how flexible and convenient cloud development environments can be. But this time, things didn’t go as planned.

I had a real world example today that I wanted to share about copilot helping me with a coding problem. A friend reached out asking if I knew regex. Its been a bit, but I was happy to help because I thought we could figure it out.

This is part 2 of the Containerizing .NET series. You can read the series of articles here: Containerizing .NET: Part 1 - A Guide to Containerizing .NET Applications Containerizing .NET: Part 2 - Considerations Considerations # Welcome to the second installment in our series on containerizing .NET applications. Building on the foundation laid in our first article-where we introduced Dockerfiles and the dotnet publish command-this piece delves into pivotal considerations for transitioning .NET applications into containers. As containers become a cornerstone of the ecosystem, understanding these factors is critical for developers aiming to enhance application deployment in containerized environments.

This article is part of the Festive Tech Calendar 2023. For more articles in the series by other authors, visit https://festivetechcalendar.com/. Dev Containers can revolutionize the way we approach development environments, offering a fast, consistent setup across different projects. As a developer who uses Dev Containers in VS Code for various projects, I’ve experienced firsthand the benefits of having an environment that’s ready to go as soon as I clone a project.