Just Five Mins!

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays or whatever you want to call it! A couple of links from the show: https://hanselminutes.com/922/education-should-be-free-with-freecodecamps-quincy-larson Blinkist: Best Book Summaries - Black Friday Deal   Until the next time, take care. Get full access to Just Five Mins! at www.justfivemins.com/subscribe

Go on! you need this! Wow, I know this gets used everywhere, but you have to say, his enthusiasm was right there, along with a rather sweaty shirt :)  But does he care? probably not since he is a billionaire, right? Well, replace "developers, developers" with "AI, AI" - I just don't have the time or skills to do a clever video rework! But goodness me, AI does seem to be moving at a pace.  Of cours...

A heavily Microsoft slant for this one! Where do I begin... well, have a listen, and if you really want to know more I have summarised the overall .NET conf stuff below :)   .NET Conf 2023 Keynote - Welcome to .NET 8 Introduction .NET Conf over the next 3 days, hear from team, partners, and the .NET Community about what's new in .NET and things people are building with it. Goal: build a unified de...

Okay, so I re-watched " Das Boot " again recently and, of course, immediately thought, "what would this look like with cats?": So, there it is!  I enjoyed the theme music to Das Boot too, but it then reminded me of a techno version from the early 90's can you believe?   Anyway, what the heck does this have to do with the subject at hand?  well, "Das Prompt" came to mind for some reason! or "prompt...

Okay, you might not be as old as I but surely you remember Blondie! Heart of Glass But heart of glass is what we are talking about today - when talking about all of this data we are creating! Where does that data go?  how is it stored?  well, in most cases, the data is stored on hard disks (SSD or otherwise) and for backups/long-term storage it is mostly still down to tape!  yes, the 80's cassette...

Another browser?  Well, a browser with some nifty tricks up its sleeves perhaps!  It also still uses the chromium engine, so no worries about another browser compatibility war! The browser company has developed a new bundle of AI-powered features called Arc Max. The goal of Arc Max is to make the internet experience faster and easier for users. Some of the features of Arc Max include 5-second prev...

Okay, I am not sure they sell Wispa chocolate bars internationally, but worry not, this podcase has nothing to do with chocolate (sadly!). Use Whisper AI to transcribe audio from video/different audio formats in any language and produce the text of the audio We are talking Whisper AI from the good folks who brought (and totally destroyed our world! :) ) ChatGPT to the unexpected masses. Read to th...

So, is it game over for Docker?  probably not! What is Podman then? "PodMan is a container engine that helps us with developing containers, managing both the containers and the images, and deploying containers." On the surface, very similar to Docker i.e. Podman runs containers from images just like Docker.  However: Daemon-less Approach PodMan uses a daemon-less approach, unlike Docker. Docker re...

Well, if you don't get the joke in the title gif/images, then perhaps this will help (yes, it is an old movie but still very funny!) .  I the "Airplane" movie is still one of my favs! So, vectors and what the heck they are all about.  Well, of late, vector databases have been getting a lot of visibility as well as established database vendors (Postgress etc.) adding vector database functionality....

Oh, I wish they had called this Bunee! So, another week another framework!  But this one is clever, I think.  BUN is a drop-in style replacement for NodeJS.  Aims to be much faster and includes a lot of things out of the box including its own package manager/bundler along with native support for tests and SQLite. Because BUN has pretty much full compatibility with NodeJS, you can use NodeJS module...

Yes! you can run (some!) Azure AI services locally! Rather than repeat, I have a blog post here to explain a little more . Get full access to Just Five Mins! at www.justfivemins.com/subscribe

So, you want to quickly build a web page or web pages? You might be familiar with Squarespace, Wix, Webflow etc. all of which use these visual designers to help you quickly build the webpages you desire. The only issue is you are locked in to their platform hosting and of course monthly/yearly subscription costs. Webstudio is a really neat open source version - very much like Webflow and currently...

There really is no limit what you can do these days - even without JavaScript! Once again, I have been inspired (aka stollen!) by a video from FireShip.io , this time about something called HTMX.  It is HTML on steroids (without the nasty side effects of JavaScript :) ) Sprinkle in a few HTML attributes and you have a new way to build modern web apps without touching a line of JavaScript.  HTMX ev...

Blazor: The Microsoft framework to create web apps (and more!) without JavaScript (but you can have some if you like :) ). I have already written a ramble that goes with this episode - take a look here if so Get full access to Just Five Mins! at www.justfivemins.com/subscribe

50th Episode!  yeah!!  that hardly anyone listens to ;)  Hey, can't take yourself too seriously right?   Anyway, the end of Stackoverflow as we know... sort of similar to the classic REM song - you must know it!  unless you were born after the year 2000 possibly! I wrote a little rambling blog post about a week or so ago about the rebirth of Stackoverflow.  I guess they had to pivot/innovate given...

Ahh yes, AI... just take a deep breath. So, Prompt Perfect.  Why?  well, if you are playing around with things like ChatGPT, MidJourney and so many others, you will notice very early on that you do need to be quite specific in your asking to generate the desired outcome be that images/text or whatever.  This includes providing both positive and negative prompting. Sure, you can persevere and keep...

Well! I have heard of PostgreSQL of course and even looked at it years ago only to think "oh, it is just another database" - which it is, but I hadn't realised how clever it is!  It has been around for years/decades of course! Michael Stonebraker (aka King of the Databases) is behind it of course and I had forgotten VoltDB too which is worth a look and an episode at some point! (in-memory database...

So, what is flutter? Flutter is the multi-platform framework from Google to build apps on any screen.  It uses Dart as the programming language (very similar to Java/C# etc.). From a Microsoft perspective, this is a similar idea to Xamarin or now MAUI. One thing jumped out to make app designing/coding easy within Flutter is something called Flutter Flow.   Worth checking out as it provides a nice...

Just Five Mins you say?  this one tracks over a little!   Too much AI indeed.  But, what is worth it to you? ChatGPT (not to be mistaken for "catGPT"), as we know, was the game-changing AI release a few months ago now.  There have been so many new releases of other AI based ventures of late including Google Palm2 and Gemini as well as up-coming KOSMOS-1 (and 2 coming soon) from Microsoft all aimin...

Okay, so we have "evolved" from green-screen terminals to GUI (Graphic User Interface) ways to execute commands and now for years really, we are back very much in the command line world. Executing scripts or commands isn't difficult, but remembering them is! WARP seems to be addressing this by offering a new take on command line terminals.  With WARP drive (yeah, that engage gif!) you can store yo...

Tired of paying for Dropbox, Google Drive, Onedrive etc.? Fear not! You can create your own storage solution: In your own network/home Cheap Linux machine/windows machine Docker Container There are lots of these solutions around, this one jumped out so check out the details. Link to FileCloud here (Enterprise type features, but has a community edition) NextCloud - aimed more at the home user A lin...

The true zombie effect... JavaScript will never die! Even though Douglas Crockford said the best thing we can do with JavaScript is to retire it .  Look, i get it, JavaScript isn't brilliant, in some cases, but it is what it is and I can't see it disappearing any time soon.  The horse has very much bolted so much so you might want to start using "light years" to specify how far! There have been so...

Yes, blockchain in your database! well, why not! From distributed procurement systems to logistics and of course accounting based scenarios, having ledger (blockchain) tables at your disposal isn't a bad thing... well at least I don't think so. But, why would you need this? what problem does it solve? Here is a longer introduction: (3) Blockchain in your database - by David Sheardown (substack.com...

Okay, giggles aside, this is a really slick way to visualise and work with JSON data.. but hang on, not just JSON but XML as well as others. This reminds me a little of schema explorer by my good friend Tim . When I first saw this, the website was only for JSON data it seemed.  However, upon returning to the site, I was presented with another editor view called Herowand (excellent names!).  Herowa...

Today we are taking a QUIC look at some interesting changes to the very fabric of the internet... yes, HTTP! Some new changes coming to help speed up mobile/cell internet and help with those pesky network switching annoyances! Also, some fundamental security updates too of course.   Get full access to Just Five Mins! at www.justfivemins.com/subscribe