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Azure & DevOps Podcast Episode 359 - Philip Japikse: Catching up | with host Jeffrey Palermo.

feed.azuredevops.show/philip-j

feed.azuredevops.showAzure & DevOps Podcast: Philip Japikse: Catching up - Episode 359An international speaker, Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, MCSD, PSM II, PSD, and PST, and a passionate member of the developer community, Phil has been working with .NET since the first betas, developing software for over 40 years, and has been heavily involved in the Agile community since 2005 as well as a Professional Scrum Trainer. Phil has taken over the best-selling Pro C# books (Apress Publishing), including Pro C# 10, is the President of the Cincinnati .NET Users Group (Cinnug.org), and the Cincinnati Software Architect Group, founded and runs the CincyDeliver conference (Cincydeliver.org), and volunteers for the National Ski Patrol. During the day, Phil works as the CTO & Chief Architect for Pintas & Mullins. Phil always enjoys learning new tech and is always striving to improve his craft.   Topics of Discussion: [2:53] Why Phil still loves writing software after 40-plus years.  [5:39] The difference between being a consultant and supporting code long-term. [8:27] Agile roles and user experience. [8:40] Embedding engineers in the business to avoid “telephone game” decisions. [11:30] “Move fast” vs. move efficiently — real-world cautionary tales. [13:40] Using Figma for business rule diagramming before writing a single line of code. [14:52] Releasing 4 x per week and getting rapid feedback. [16:49] NASCAR, motocross, and the connection of slow builds of how software teams avoid friction. [18:41] Measuring team efficiency, and how Phil eliminated emergency production fixes by mandating quality. [22:00] Feature flags, PBI coverage, and the team’s shared ownership of the code. [26:09] AI in legal tech: where it works, where it doesn’t. [34:56] The architectural shift created by LLMs, vector databases, and agents. [39:42] AI is not the goal — it’s just a tool for solving the right problems. [44:03] How Phil uses GitHub Copilot’s agent mode to streamline development. [46:03] Final thoughts: “It’s not about the tech. It’s about making someone’s life better.”   Mentioned in this Episode: — New Video Podcast! Email us at . (Sponsor)   Want to Learn More? Visit for show notes and additional episodes.

When you see "increased efficiency", translate that to "increased fragility and parasitic load".

When you read about "redundancy", what they really mean is "resiliency".

The real world is bursty, uneven, inconsistent, error-prone, heterogeneous. It is not amenable to assembly lines. Efficiency predicated on eliminating those forms of waste cannot survive common system shocks.

And we're in a period of enormous system shock.

Continued thread

I think I've reached a compromise I'm happy with for managing the (very few) bits that require privileges in my patch reporting program.

I'm going to skip the functionality by default, and users can opt in to the behavior where the program assumes you've setup a sudoers entry on managed systems yourself with NOPASSWD:, restricted to the one command it needs.

I've made this as explicit, rigid, and extensible as I could, wrapped it in the form of a Sudo Policy, and made it configurable globally _and_ at host level.

Good Enough for Me(tm)

#Python#Unix#Linux

I'm wrapping up the last tasks before I can release my neat application that gives you aggregated reporting of updates on hosts over ssh.

I've been writing nightmare abstractions to handle the case where some package managers need sudo to refresh metadata from repositories (Debian, for instance). I personally just do NOPASSWD for the command in sudoers on my stuff.

The nightmare comes from password prompting. I'm at the point where I have half a mind to just... not do it?

And instead require users to setup sudoers like that if they want to sync repositories on systems where it's needed. I'd of course document it nicely.

Is that insane? As a user would that just make you go "URGH" and fiercely uninstall everything before emailing me a picture of your middle finger?

#Python#Unix#Linux

I've been primarily on bsky but I also like the idea of mastodon. I haven't had time to sit down and really make it work for me, but I'm moderately optimistic.

Hello, world. I'm Golly, and I'm going to be posting about being a software developer and devlogs about making a text game that's currently just called "the merchant game". Fingers crossed this goes somewhere.

I’m adamantly _not_ a fan of LLMs trained on scraped publicly-available data, and that goes double when used for coding. And so many of the examples people put forward for using it to code are along the lines of “I asked it for an app to do X, and was up and running super-quick!”

That seems like a templating issue to me. My current day job is mostly #Rails, and its generators (built-in and extensible) allow for automating a lot of the boilerplate building models, migrations, etc. Sure you still need to do some customization, but even with the “LLM success stories” there’s always a bit where they say “I had to tweak a few things, but it worked!”

So would it be a crazy idea to have a collection of templates and or code snippets to do some task in some framework/environment? Tag it for easy search, etc. i.e., if I needed OAuth in my Rails app I could search “oauth rails” - maybe “oauth rails_8” if I know I want the latest major framework version. Integrate the result with my app, and move on.

I can see plenty of issues. For one thing it’d be basically stackoverflow, but with gists that are a bit more organized. So someone would still have to understand what was going on. But if they’re copying answers from SO or anywhere into their code without first looking at the _why_ of how it supposedly fixes the issue, that’s the first problem to address.

More generally, it’d be great if framework and other teams would put out these kind of things on their own, so someone finding them could be reasonably sure best practices had been observed. But having done dev and doc writing for decades, I know how overwhelmed everyone gets.

#SoftwareDev
#FuckAI