In today's (2025-05-27) chat, we will play with the GitHub Copilot Agent in Visual Studio Code. The agent is different than Copilot Chat as the agent will run commands on your machine, including compiling the project, adding files/directories, and directly editing files.

Will it do what we expect? Let's find out!

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others

https://weeklydevchat.com/

P.S. - The image for this post was created using Claude 4. I can't create png/jpg, at least not on the free account I'm using, but could create SVG that I had to convert to png for LinkedIn and other sites.

#weeklydevchat #githubcopilot #codingagents #visualstudiocode

The topic for the May 20th, 2025 Weekly Dev Chat is Innovation vs. Structure - When Culture Kills Creativity.

Does a playful company culture breed innovation while corporate structure stifles it?

Let's examine:
• BlackBerry: From Fregin's creative "movie nights" to corporate rigidity... and ultimate failure
• Twitter→X: From user-driven experimentation to Musk's centralized control
• Apple: Jobs' chaotic creativity vs. Cook's operational excellence

Questions to ponder:
• Can companies maintain creativity at scale?
• Is the innovation/structure tradeoff inevitable?
• What's your experience in different dev cultures?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Details on how to join can be found at our website:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat

The topic for the May 6th, 2025 Weekly Dev Chat is consolidating systems. Organizations often have data and business logic in several different databases and applications. They would like to have everything in one place, which is a noble goal but hard to achieve.

How do you consolidate these disparate systems? How do you avoid creating an extra system and avoid the XKCD standards problem (substitute standards with applications):

https://xkcd.com/927/

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Details on how to join can be found at our website:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat #consolidation #disparatesystems

P.S. - Image was created using ChatGPT, which has gotten better at writing text on images.

In this Weekly Dev Chat (2025-04-29), we'll be talking about how to teach programming & computer science today.

As the head of the computer science and IT department at your university or college, you have a unique opportunity to reshape the program with a generous budget approved by the Dean. Will you enhance existing methodologies or introduce a groundbreaking approach? What compelling topics will you prioritize to prepare the next generation of programmers and technologists? How will you inspire students to engage with this dynamic field?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

Details on how to join can be found at our website:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat

The topic for the 2025-04-15 Weekly Dev Chat is career twists and turns. Inspired by someone I know debating if they should take a position at a new company or stay with their current employer. That got me thinking about my own career path, and how 20-year-old me would never have guessed I would end up starting my own consulting business. 20-year-old me assumed I would be working in the game's industry.

Did your career path turn out how you imagined it when you were younger? For people just starting, where do you see yourself in five to ten years?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Details on how to join can be found at our website:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat #career #predictingthefuture

In this Weekly Dev Chat (March 25/2025) we will experiment with GitHub Copilot Workspace. It's a feature that lets you create PRs using GitHub Copilot that will create new files, edit existing files, and the like. I'll share my screen, and we can do some pair programming, err I mean, pair telling the AI what to do.

https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilot-workspace/

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Details on how to join can be found at our website:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat #github #githubcopilot #ai

Today we're discussing software development supply chains. For example, are your dependencies completely open source, or do you buy commercial libraries? Do you rely on tools like Balsamiq, or Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator? Are you deploying your software in the cloud or on-site? Do you sell your work in any of the app stores?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Details on how to join the Weekly Dev Chat can be found on our website:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat #devops #dependencies

Join us Feb 25th, 2025 as we discuss our worst software development habits. What is one software development best practice you know you should do but don't? A best practice you know you need to improve? Spoiler alert, for me it's logging. I always forget to add logging to my code and then struggle when a production error occurs, but I can't debug it in my development environment.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Details on how to join the Weekly Dev Chat can be found on our website:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat#softwaredevelopmett #bestpractices #badhabits

Today's (Feb 18, 2025) Weekly Dev Chat topic is Editors, IDEs, etc. Details below:

https://weeklydevchat.com/editors-ides-etc/

#weeklydevchat #develperproductivity #ide #codingassistants #plugin

The topic for the upcoming Weekly Dev Chat (Feb 11) is accessing data. How do you access the data your application needs, such as an ORM, raw SQL, 3rd party APIs, something else? Are you responsible for the security of the data, or is that someone else in your organization? How do you make sure data is shown to the correct users and not leaked?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Information on how to join this chat can be found on the Weekly Dev Chat website:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat #data #database #dataaccess #datasecurity

Today's (Feb 4, 2025) Weekly Dev Chat topic is about developer education.

Did your training prepare you for what you're doing? Did you take a traditional, formal route or an alternative one? What about your colleagues? If you had to do it over again, what would you do?

How do you keep up with current trends? Corporate training or on your own? Are credentials important?

Did you specialize or generalize? What trends do you see?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Information on how to join this chat can be found on the Weekly Dev Chat website:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat #education

Join the Weekly Dev Chat on Jan 28th, 2025 for some ensemble hacking on the PicoCTF platform. The goal is to solve one problem, but if things go well, maybe we can solve a couple. Like previous ensemble sessions, I will share my screen and get suggestions from you, the ensemble, on how to solve the problem.

PicoCTF: https://picoctf.org/

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Information on how to join this chat can be found on the Weekly Dev Chat website:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

P.S. - I love the retro feel of the AI-generated image for today's chat.

#weeklydevchat #picoctf #cybersecurity

Weekly Dev Chat (2025-01-21): Office Environments

What's your current workplace situation? What's been your best experience? Worst?

What would you prefer:

- open floor?
- cube farm?
- private office?
- remote/hybrid/onsite?
- pack a lunch/cafeteria/nearby
- restaurants?
- background music?
- headphones?
- desktop or laptop?
- one/two/n screens?

Is your home computer more powerful than what the company provides?

Where is office life heading?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Details, including how to join the discussion, are below:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat #officespace #remote

Weekly Dev Chat (2025-01-14): Bold Predictions for 2025

In this chat we will review some 2024 developer’s surveys and then make our own bold developer and technology predictions for 2025. What do you think will happen in 2025? How much of an impact will AI have this year? Will a big tech company fail this year and/or will a new big tech company raise up? What new hardware will come out this year? Will a new job title be created this year, such as how prompt engineer became a job title last year?

What is your bold prediction for 2025? If you can't make the chat feel-free replay to this message.

2024 Surveys:

- Stack Overflow 2024 Developer Survey (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/)
- JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem Report 2024 (https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2024/)
- Cloudflare Radar 2024 Year in Review (https://radar.cloudflare.com/year-in-review/2024)

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Details, including how to join the discussion, are below:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat #2025predictions #developersurveys

The Weekly Dev Chat is back after the holiday break! I hope everyone had a good holiday break and the first two weeks of 2025 are treating you well.

The topic for today's chat is Archiving 2024, Embracing 2025. The New Year is a global reset. Like getting a new computer and deciding what applications are worth reinstalling and picking new applications to try for the first time. Archiving the work you want to keep and letting go of files that no longer benefit you when you reformat your hard drive.

In this chat we will reflect on 2024 and what we are looking forward to in 2025. Was 2024 a good year for you? Why or why not? What are your plans for 2025? Any goals or resolutions? The usual New Year's questions.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Details, including how to join the discussion, are below:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

#weeklydevchat #newyear2025 #resolutions #archive2024

The topic for the last Weekly Dev Chat of the year (2024-12-17) is giving, generosity, and kindness, inspired by the upcoming holidays. What acts of kindness have you initiated or something kind someone did for you? Something that made yours, or someone else's, life better.

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Details below:

https://weeklydevchat.com/giving-generosity-and-kindness-2024-12-17/

#weeklydevchat #giving #generosity #kindness #seasonsgreetings

2024-12-10 Weekly Dev Chat topic: Values: Advent of Code Mob Programming. I’ll share my screen and we will jointly try to solve a couple of the problems.

https://weeklydevchat.com/advent-of-code-mob-programming-2024-12-10/

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others.

#weeklydevchat #adventofcode2024

2024-11-26 Weekly Dev Chat topic: Values: What do you value more than money? What are some of your core values that you bring to your work?

Everyone and anyone are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others:

https://weeklydevchat.com/

P.S. - The Weekly Dev Chat IRL is Nov 26th. Assuming you are reading this on the 26th, you can still register via this Meetup link:

https://www.meetup.com/edmontonunlimited/events/304567658

#weeklydevchat #values

Do you like chatting about software development with other local developers? Then you are in luck as the Weekly Dev Chat In-Real-Life (WDC IRL) is on Nov 26th (Tue) at 7pm at the Strathcona Library just off Whyte Ave. It's like the virtual version of WDC but in 3D!

Everyone and anyone, including you, are welcome to join as long as you are kind, supportive, and respectful of others. Use the link below to register and get all the details:

https://www.meetup.com/edmontonunlimited/events/304567658

#weeklydevchat #irl

Ever wonder how tall the participants at the virtual Weekly Dev Chat are? You can find out at the in real life (IRL) version on November 26th. Registration and details can be found on the Meetup event below. Looking forward to seeing you IRL!!

https://www.meetup.com/edmontonunlimited/events/304567658

#weeklydevchat #irl