Årets hacks och tricks från Swetugg Conference

My main takeaways from the Swetugg Conference in Stockholm 2024

Disclaimer: I have not yet tested all of the mentioned technologies myself, but I hopefully will have time for that soon ;)

This year's hype and buzzwords

• Bicep: Infrastructure as code
• Gen AI: of course
• Having the coolest terminal theme

Better code reviews

https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-1/

https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-2/

https://mtlynch.io/code-review-love/

.Net Aspire (preview)

New framework from Microsoft to make orchestration of cloud-native apps simpler.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/aspire/get-started/aspire-overview

https://github.com/dotnet/aspire

Example

https://www.youtube.com/live/kAF9No5KZrg?si=YpZ_FdxA4I1QxFBX&t=1170

Related

Azure Container Apps:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-apps/overview

Testing

Playwright

Microsoft's browser testing tool, similar to Selenium and Cypress

https://github.com/microsoft/playwright

Playwright Testing service

Running Playwright tests at scale

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/playwright-testing/

Azure testing

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/load-testing

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/chaos-studio

Accessibility

Microsoft Accessibility Insights:

https://accessibilityinsights.io/

Microsoft Clarity

Free session recording and heatmap tool, similar to Hotjar

https://clarity.microsoft.com/

Related

Bicep linting:

https://dev.to/lakkimartin/adding-linting-validation-and-what-if-to-bicep-templates-in-azure-devops-2cjp

PSRule for Azure:

https://azure.github.io/PSRule.Rules.Azure/about/

Gen AI

Prompt context compression

Compress the prompt history to minimize the amount of tokens sent on each consecutive request. I could not find a similar approach online yet. Ask OpenAi to compress the text into a format that does not need to be human-readable.

Embedding models

OpenAi has released new embedding models that are both cheaper and more powerful.

https://openai.com/blog/new-embedding-models-and-api-updates

Bribe the AI

You can actually "bribe" the AI to get better results, examples here:

https://medium.com/@jordan_gibbs/a-comprehensive-guide-to-bribing-chatgpt-cfbefefc49a0 (partially pay-walled)

Azure Assistants

Create tailored AI assistants directly in Azure or by using the API.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/concepts/assistants

Open AI cookbook

Example code and guides for using the OpenAI API, the examples also contain lots of notebooks (see below)

https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook

Other stuff

I will never get tired of ridiculous Apis:

https://api.chucknorris.io/

VS Notebooks

Create or use interactive courses or why not document your API using Notebooks?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/educator-developer-blog/using-visual-studio-notebooks-for-learning-c/ba-p/3580015

Azure durable functions

Create stateful, chainable and long-running functions

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/durable/durable-functions-overview?tabs=in-process%2Cnodejs-v3%2Cv1-model&pivots=csharp