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Happy New Year, tech enthusiasts! 🎉

Welcome to the first edition of 2025! I hope you’re feeling refreshed and ready for another year of exciting developments in tech. This week, I’m sharing updates that will help you stay ahead, from practical tools to insightful guides.

Here’s what’s inside:

• GitHub Copilot Workspaces: Now open to all license holders

• The rise of fake GitHub stars and what they mean for credibility

• Tips for hiring great full-stack engineers

• Boost dashboard performance with .NET and PostgreSQL

• Connect to Azure without secrets using Visual Studio 2022

Let’s kick off the year with some actionable insights and updates! 🚀

New here? Subscribe here to stay updated. Let's dive in.

GitHub Digest

Workspaces are a great way to start with a prompt and get to working code quickly. During that process, GitHub collects information about your workspace, analyses your requirements, and proposes a fitting solution.

Including creating a workspace to run the proposed changes in, and a Pull Request to get it ready for merging.

This feature was only available by private invites and I was able to play with it for some while. Now, everybody with a GitHub Copilot license can have access to this feature.

When you star a GitHub project, you not only add it to your list of ‘favorites’, but it also signals something to the repository owner. It shows the popularity and gives some sort of credibility to a repo.

But similar to any like on a social platform, it can be easily misused. Recent research shows that a large amount of starts are actually fake.

They do not say anything about the quality of the repository, so make sure to do your research as well.

Have you ever wondered where those nice GitHub stickers come from? How they go from an idea to conception is shown in this Inside GitHub video.

Coding Corner

Recently I had to hire new full-stack developers for the team I was working with. I wrote down my experience with the interview process, explaining the way I performed the interviews and what we got out of it.

Assume you have been collecting data nicely in a table for some while. You stored all the data in a table, so you have all the details at hand.

Now the business wants you to display a nice graph on the homepage. Your query to fetch the data needs an aggregated view of the data, not just a list. This means your dashboard is slow as it needs to calculate the dataset each time.

Learn how to use PostgreSQL and background tasks to create optimized views specific for these use cases.

Azure Updates & Insights

You do not want your secrets to be lingering around, even on your own machine. So use this feature in Visual Studio 2022 to connect to Azure resources without secrets.

.NET Nook

The L in SOLID is of Liskov Substitution Principle; so how does this relate to.NET 8 constructs?

You might know how to watch for changes to a file using the FileSystemWatcher implementation. But this only works when you are actively running and monitoring the file. What if you want to detect changes to files when you are not running?

In that case, the USN journal can be used to query for changes to files and directories.

Closing Thoughts

Thank you for reading this week’s edition!

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