AI Do's and Don'ts For Developers
Dev Leader Weekly 48
TL; DR:
I am announcing BrandGhost!
LLMs can generate ideas, refactor, and help debug
Don’t blindly trust them!
Don’t share company data!
EXCLUSIVE ARTICLE IS NOW ARCHIVED
This newsletter issue has an EXCLUSIVE article but it’s now archived on my website. You can read it here with a paid subscription:
https://www.devleader.ca/2024/06/15/ai-dos-and-donts-for-developers-dev-leader-weekly-48/
What’s In This Issue
Announcing: BrandGhost
At the time of writing, I have been consistently publishing content online for 17.5 months. When I restarted my Dev Leader brand at the start of 2023 I told myself to consistently publish and not give up — even if it might seem slow or hopeless at times. I knew that the only way I could do this is if I systemized my content creation and focused on valuable evergreen content. Hoping for virality has never been a strategy.
The start of 2023 looked like:
Working as a Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft
Trying to launch a nutrition SaaS
Prepping for our wedding
Struggling to keep up with my 3x YouTube videos per week
But I focused on systems and consistency. Over my content creation journey I’ve been able to scale my content system to:
3 short form videos daily
3 long-form YouTube videos per week
1 software engineering interview per week
At least 1 live stream (1-2 hours long) per week
1 newsletter article per week (you’re reading it)
Up to 6 blog posts per week syndicated across 5 other platforms (only stopped to work on BrandGhost)
Multiple posts every day across LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube, Substack, Reddit, Discord, and more (if you can believe it)
Did I mention I was able to create 3 C# courses and train for a bodybuilding show while doing this too?
Along my journey, I’ve had many large creators message me and say “How the hell are you able to create so much content”? And the truth is, if I had BrandGhost already instead of having to build it, I’d be doing much more.
My goal is to provide BrandGhost as a platform to help creators of all sorts focus on the high-value aspects of being a creator and making the mundane parts feel effortless. When you invest in your evergreen content strategy, you can let this carry your brand as you focus on more scale — or simply use the free time to do other things you love.
Read more here: https://brandghost.ai
Join me and other software engineers in the private Discord community!
All of my weekly vlogs are now on YouTube which are accessible via membership!
Remember to check out my courses, including this awesome discounted bundle for C# developers:
Weekly Recap
Coding ASP.NET Core Exception Middleware – Live Coding in C#
This was a livestream while getting content together for YouTube. This stream focused on setting up error handling middleware for ASP NET Core!
Handle ANY Exception On Routes – ASP NET Core Middleware
How is it that ASP NET Core servers don’t crash when there’s an unhandled exception on a route thanks to a web request? Surely… they don’t have a big try/catch block behind the scenes?!
Surprise — they do. Fortunately for you, we can leverage middleware to hook into that and handle exceptions that bubble up from routes in our own way!
In this video, I’ll walk through my own use case for wanting to have error-handling middleware and how you can incorporate such a thing in your own ASP NET Core applications.
Stop Being Unkind To Yourself – Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA
This was an AMA livestream focused on why you should practice being more kind to yourself. You can read more about it here: https://weekly.devleader.ca/p/stop-being-unkind-to-yourself
An Exercise in Refactoring – Live Coding in C#
I’m joined by Rosario Martone as we navigate some code that desperately needs to be refactored!
It’s An Alien Invasion In Blazor! – Interview With Mohamad Dbouk
Don’t worry though — the aliens won’t hurt you. I confirmed this with Mohamad Dbouk when we sat down to discuss his journey in software engineering and he surprised me with an awesome little demo of a Blazor game!
Not only was this the very first show-and-tell code we got to see from a guest on the channel, but Mohamad had other very insightful things to share.
One of my biggest takeaways?
You can have an amazing and fulfilling career without having to chase down higher and higher levels. In fact, by being honest with yourself about where your passion is and how skilled you feel you are, you can have an excellent trajectory AND have a very rewarding career.
Thank you so much for the chat, Mohamad!
Intercept ANY Minimal API Response in ASP NET Core
Is middleware the answer to this?
You want the ability to intercept any response that your ASP NET server is about to send back to the client… Maybe you want to package up every response object in a nice little envelope for more consistent API consumption?
Or what about our friend: IEndpointFilter?!
Let’s check out how IEndpointFilter can help us accomplish this goal of packaging up every API response we have coming back from our ASP NET Core service!
DYNAMICALLY Load Settings With IOptions in ASP NET Core
Stop right there! Stop it! Stop hardcoding your values into your ASP NET Core applications!
Seriously though — we have a better way. We can leverage our appsettings.json file in combination with IOptions to pull values out of our configuration. This allows us to avoid having to rebuild an entire application to change values.
But what if your app is already running?!
Don’t worry — there’s a solution for that. Stay tuned in this video to see how we can go from hard-coded values to IOptions to dynamically loading those same settings on the fly!
As always, thanks so much for your support! I hope you enjoyed this issue, and I’ll see you next week.
Nick “Dev Leader” Cosentino
social@devleader.ca
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