A visit from one of Scott Guthrie's Ninja Army! Carl and Richard chat with Rob Conery about his latest work with Microsoft technologies, including a VS Code extension for Copilot to understand Postgres databases! Rob talks about spending time in other programming platforms besides .NET to expand his horizons, which led him to create a tool called Viper.NET, similar to the tool from the Go platform, to help manage configuration. The conversation also visits and revisits the impact of GitHub Copilot, now with a free tier, and how it is helping software developers - and generating controversy!

How is your architectural intelligence? Carl and Richard talk to Thomas Betts about his thoughts on implementing AI-related technologies into applications. Thomas talks about stripping the magic out of AI and focusing on the realities - in the end, it's just another API you can call. The conversation digs into what useful implementations of large language models look like, as UX alternatives, summarizers, and tools for reviewing existing work.

It's a new year and time for an Energy Geek Out! Richard catches up on all the developments in energy generation over the past year, including solar, wind, wave, hydrogen, geothermal, nuclear, and more... the conversation also digs into the impacts of the cost of financing going up, the efficiency of different energy generation, and some of the new technologies on the horizon. There's been a lot of progress recently, including a new interest in nuclear power - how will this all play out?

The Space Geek Out for 2024! Richard talks to Carl about SpaceX breaking more records - the most flights in one year, including four test flights of Starship and the Heavy Booster - including the extraordinary catch of the booster in IFT-5! 2024 also saw the first flight of ULA's Vulcan and the second. And then there's the saga of Starliner - and the fact that Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore will spend ten months on the ISS instead of the planned eight days. More missions to the Moon mean more delays for Artemis, and the International Space Station gets a plan for its deorbit in 2030. New space stations are coming, but with lots of financial problems - will they be flown before the ISS comes down? Then there are all the new interplanetary missions and the ongoing expansion of knowledge brought by the James Webb Space Telescope, changing our thinking about how the universe was formed! Another great year in space - and 2025 looks even more amazing!

What's coming for GitHub? Carl and Richard talk to April Yoho about the recent announcements from GitHub Universe and how they will roll out in 2025. The biggest topic, of course, is all the large language models coming to GitHub - there are a bunch of copilots! April talks about original GitHub Copilot, Copilot Workspace, and Copilot Chat - so many options! Now, you can choose your language model to move beyond OpenAI. And there are other changes at GitHub, including EU residency, new features in the enterprise cloud, and new instrumentation - 2025 looks awesome!

How can event modeling help you build better applications? Carl and Richard talk to Adam Dymitruk about Event Sourcing and Event Modeling, including the new book Understanding Eventsourcing. Adam talks about thinking through business workflows as an approach to event sourcing, where new data is constantly added, never modified. These data streams can then be modeled into different workflows following consistent patterns that make your application straightforward to build and maintain. It does take effort to change your thinking to the event source/model approach but with huge potential!

How do you understand the quality of your code? Carl and Richard talk to Richard Gross about his open-source tool called CodeCharta. Richard talks about various ways you can use CodeCharta to understand your codebase - whether it is complexity, number of changes, or number of coders involved - there are many visualization opportunities. This leads to a discussion about what problematic code actually is. Sometimes, too many people work in the same place, and sometimes, there is only one. Some complexity is necessary, and sometimes it's just refactoring. But what tools like CodeCharta provide is a way to focus on potential points of change and then see when the change has been successful - and you can even print a 3D model to have a physical copy of your code!

How are Azure Static Websites evolving? Carl and Richard talk to Stacy Cashmore about her work with Azure Static Websites, including an update to her book, which is coming soon! Stacy talks about adapting to the latest version of .NET, taking advantage of some of the new features in Blazor, and new Azure Static Website capabilities, including the new Data API Builder. The conversation also explores some of the gotchas, like challenges with SEO and dealing with authentication and authorization strategies.

Let's talk about .NET 9 with one of the platform's leaders! Carl and Richard talk to Glenn Condron about his experiences building .NET 9. Glenn talks about the usual improvements in every version of .NET, including performance, security, and stability. But the new stuff is where the excitement is, starting with Aspire. The conversation digs deeper into the origin story of Aspire and what the team sees as the future of building cloud-native applications with .NET. Then, a dive into all things AI - tools to help developers create applications, as well as how to include AI capabilities in your applications. And there's more to come - .NET 10 is only a year away!

Ready for more Rockstar? Carl and Richard chat with Dylan Beattie about the programming language known as Rockstar. Dylan talks about a joke that got wildly out of hand - back when recruiters were all about rockstar developers, why shouldn't there be a programming language? And then it happened - a language where the code looks (and sounds) like glam rock lyrics! And now there's a new version coming - more rocking to be done!

How do you balance the coupling in your application? Carl and Richard talk to Vlad Khononov about his book on Balancing Coupling in Software Design. Vlad talks about three aspects of coupling - information, distance, and volatility. When these aspects are out of balance, such as a pair of services that are distant from each other but highly dependent and need lots of information, development becomes difficult. Where information is high, keeping the distance low makes life easier. This led to a great conversation about Conway's Law and the idea that sometimes changing the team organization can lead to better application development! Check out the book!