Jakub Chodounsky from the C# Digest newsletter joins us this week. We talk about why he started the mailing list and how he's managed to build up a subscriber base of over 24k. We shared why he keeps it going and the benefits he's gotten from engaging with the .NET community even though as a CTO, he may not be actively cutting code anymore. We also go into some of these recent blog articles and talk about some open-source projects that he thinks is fairly neat.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Adventures in.NET. I'm Sean Clayboy, your host, and with me today, Wei Liu. Hey, Wei.

 

Hey Sean, how's it going?

 

Yeah, it's been a couple of weeks since we got you on the show to work

 

It's

 

with

 

been

 

me.

 

a while,

 

So,

 

hasn't it?

 

yeah, good

 

Yes.

 

to have you back. You've

 

Yeah,

 

just

 

things

 

been

 

are

 

having

 

happening.

 

too much fun, you know.

 

Is it? Yeah. What have I missed?

 

Well, some good episodes, good episodes. We talked about cross platform development and that was a good episode. Talk about Mac and pros and cons of that. So people

 

Hmm.

 

are interested in that. Check back, I think it was the last episode that got published, so that's out there. Yep.

 

Glad to be back.

 

Good, good. So let's bring on our host, our guest today. Is it, is Jacob Chodunsky?

 

Yeah,

 

Is that right?

 

that's the English pronunciation and let's go with that.

 

I'm

 

Let's

 

sorry.

 

go with that.

 

All right. All right. So, Jacob, what we brought you on the show today is to talk a little bit about an article we read that you wrote on Medium. It's talking about open source C-Short projects. And there's five that you wrote about. So let's start off, I guess, at the top of the list. But actually, before we do that, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? and how you got into development and what you do now and things along those lines.

 

Yeah, sure thing, sure thing. So yeah, so I'm Jacob. I'm working as a CTO of Hedge, a finance company based in New Zealand. And I'm also editor-in-chief for Bonobo Press that publishes programming newsletters. One of them is C Sharp Digest, one of the biggest newsletters for.NET developers. So that's what I do. I got into computers quite early on. I loved them since I was a small kid. I kind of remember going to the office with my dad on Saturdays and sort of playing games on his computer back in the day, building cities and SimCity type of stuff. And yeah, at some stage I kind of learned how to build websites. And I got kind of lucky because my neighbor... ran a software company and he was building desktop apps in Delphi. I'm not sure if that's still around but that's what he was doing and at the time his clients needed websites too. They were asking him to build a website. He comes to me and he asked me if I can build websites for them and I'm like 11 years old and kind of building these things for you know kind of feel like a big business. So that was great and Yeah, after a few years after that, one of my schoolmates was sort of this like programming prodigies type of person. And he was somehow working at Microsoft when he was very young, kind of 13, 14. And we sort of hang out with each other and he helped me to learn C++. And at the time he also introduced me to this like shiny new language called C-sharp. And yeah, we kind of jammed together, projects and things that we found interesting and it kind of went from there really.

 

Cool.

 

I wish I had friends like that when I was growing up.

 

Hehehehe

 

13 yard at Markshoff, that'd be pretty amazing, wouldn't it? I don't know, what did the kids at school think of that?

 

Sorry to say it again.

 

So what did the kids at school think of their classmates working from Microsoft?

 

Yeah, you know, like when you are kind of like 13, 14, it's not the coolest thing to do,

 

Okay

 

to be like working and be a programmer at the time. But yeah, we kind of found it cool and we just really enjoyed the creation of things and building stuff that was really fun. So yeah, it wasn't like your popular kind of sport sort of stuff, but yeah.

 

I think this is one of those rare occasions where we actually have two people from the Australia, New Zealand area on the show. It's not

 

Yes.

 

very common.

 

Yeah, you're outnumbered this time. So, Jacob, you said you run the C Sharp Digest newsletter. Do you wanna tell us how you got started, or why you started doing that?

 

Yeah, it probably ties nicely into the question that you asked me why I kind of wrote the article about the open source projects. I'll kind of give you a background why I started the newsletter and how it happened. Like I wasn't super intentional about it, but I always kind of like learning and sharing stuff with people. And I was working for this big corporate company. And... I just started sharing stuff that I found interesting at the time with my team. You know, like at the time it was kind of Eric Lippert's articles, like Fabulous Adventures in coding when he was writing a bit more, or the kind of MSDN magazine that's probably discontinued by now. And I just shared it with my team, you know, five people kind of send them interesting stuff that I stumbled upon. And I did it every week and they were really, really into it. They really liked it. Kind of we used some of that stuff in our work. building WPF applications and stuff like that. And suddenly it was a big company and suddenly other people from the company kind of came to me and were asking if I can share the stuff with them too. So I kind of like the list kind of grew and I started doing that at one stage I left the company but I kind of carried on doing it. And it was probably almost 10 years ago and that's kind of the origins of C Sharp Digest. So the... It kind of goes back to passion of sharing stuff with others.

 

So is it actually a company? Is it actually like something that makes money or like?

 

It makes money now, but it definitely wasn't built with that intention from the beginning. Yes.

 

But how does it make money?

 

So the model that I'm using with, so I don't run just C Sharp Deges, but I run a few other newsletters too. And kind of like a tech leadership react and kind of general programming space. And currently what I do is, it's sponsorship based. So I share cool stuff with the readers. I share stuff that I find every week with the readers. That's free for them, for the audience. And I get approached by companies that are seeking that audience, usually with dev products like JetBrains or GitLab, things like that. And they want to get in front of that audience.

 

So far our listeners want to sign up for the newsletter. I think I found it at what? C sharp digest.net.

 

Yeah, that's it. That's the one.

 

Yep, yep. So sharp spelt out. So C S H A R P digest.net. So please sign up if you're not already a member of the list there. So yeah.

 

So what were some of the challenges that you had to, in building this user base? Like, did you have to write your own articles at the start and things like that? Did you have to find other.NET developers to post their articles?

 

Yeah, so challenges. I think the biggest challenge in this space is to, it's a weekly newsletter. And the biggest challenge is to be consistent. I think you might know it from publishing the podcast.

 

Hmm.

 

It's kind of about showing up every week and do the thing. And do the thing for 10 years. I think the consistency is really important. So just do that every week after week is probably the biggest challenge and probably why most people fail if they... try to do stuff like that. So if you are not passionate about kind of sharing stuff with others and you can't really do it for money, it needs to have something else because, you know, I've been doing it for 10 years and I haven't run a business on top of it for maybe like seven or eight years, really. So that's probably the biggest challenge. With the audience building, I was kind of lucky in the sense that I wasn't seeking large audience. I started with very small people that I knew in person and it kind of grew from there and I was just happy to share it with a small group. And organically, if you do it for a long time, the group just gets bigger and bigger.

 

So are there any articles that really kind of stick out in your mind as some of the best and the most popular for the readers of the Digest?

 

Oh yes, it's actually quite cool to have insight into what people find interesting. And you can find quite a lot of writers that kind of go in time and they are very active in one year and very popular, then they kind of stop. You know, like I mentioned, Eric Lippert was great at the beginning, but then ProLive got in the way and he focused on switching jobs and doing something else. The moment I think, well, he's kind of becoming less active, but I think his name is Michael, Michael Spitt, I would say. He's kind of writing this sort of low level.NET stuff, kind of performance-orientated. He might actually be working with Eric Lippert in the company, but that's kind of what sticks with me. I think Andrew Lock is writing some really good content quite consistently. Yeah, yeah.

 

So the most popular topics for people to read about tend to be what?

 

Yeah, so in the C-sharp space, I try to like always, what's always popular, it's kind of tips to improve your productivity, you know, like the Visual Studio, kind of like how to be better using Visual Studio. Performance stuff is really, really popular. Like if people dig down into, you know, garbage collection or kind of like really deep dive into, I don't know, like why list at... is working like that and why the performance is like that. That's very popular. Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't say like the sort of hot topics of like Kubernetes and Blazor and that stuff is super popular. It's kind of mixed because you have a base that has a chance to work with it and then you have a probably a larger base that's doing your classic line of business applications that need to... you know, do the crowd apps and can't really use that. And they are looking more into stuff that's relevant to them that they can use in their jobs to be better.

 

I think I totally understand the whole thing you said about you can't really do it for the money and just kind of for love. Because it does take like, I know like aside from doing this podcast, you know, I also do other community work as well. You know, I've run a few meetups and things like that. And you know, I've got a blog and stuff and it does take a little bit of time. So yeah, and I really always appreciate people who do that as well. But yeah, what do you think you personally have got out of it then? Like, do you think

 

Hmm.

 

it's helped your career at all and things like that?

 

Yeah, so, um... Uh, so...

 

Like for me, it's definitely helped me with my, firstly with my career, I guess. I guess it's a good brand thing, but it's also helped me in building a passion for some of the technologies that I've been learning as well over the years.

 

Yeah, like definitely it helps you to learn the technology that you want to learn. Like it kind of keeps you up to date. Like I see it as a part of my job. So I work as a CTO, so kind of be in understanding where the trends are going, what other people are doing is great. It's great. So it kind of helps you with that side. I wouldn't say that it helped me in my career in sort of getting a better job or stuff like that. I don't think. think so. I don't think people are looking at it when they are hiring really. But it helps you to be more up to date pretty much. And just reading the newsletters helps you with that too. The other thing that's really cool, it's not really helping your career but like personal satisfaction for me is to... I'm not sure how to call it, but like spreading the word about cool stuff. You know, like you mentioned, it takes a lot of time to do something outside and you don't often have a time to promote it. You know, like, so, so the example of the open source projects, um, I might be kind of making assumptions, but those people are hackers. They kind of hack together a project, but they are not really going after and marketing the project. And you can kind of play the role and amplify their message and share it with wider people and give them wider reach. And it's quite a good superpower to have. And I think it really kind of helps the original authors too and to get in front of more people, they can actually get more out of it too. And that's a very satisfying thing to do.

 

I think it's amazing how sometimes we think about that the IT industry and how much a lot of stuff is free, how much people contribute for free. It's really one of those industries where it is kind of, like it is definitely based on passion and you kind of, throughout your career, no matter how passionate you are at the start, you're gonna need something to actually keep motivated. And I feel like creating communities Meeting other people that are passionate kind of really helps you as well throughout, you know, your own journey. So

 

Yeah, and it can kind of, because throughout your career, you will have those highs and lows and like doing things like that can help you to get through the lows. That's actually the reason why I sort of wrote the article about open source projects, because as a CTO, I don't really code much. I'm more in a, you know, like an email client and spreadsheets and meeting rooms, but you know, I'm a coder at heart, so. I kind of miss it and I was kind of feeling down a little bit and I was like, I'd like to hack something together, but I don't really have time. So at least I can kind of see what cool stuff other people are doing. And it inspires me to, you know, uh, do, do do stuff in, in, um, in my job too. And then I can, I can give them that, that wider reach like, so, you know, I can write a quick article and give them a bit more exposure so they, they, they can get more benefit from what they were doing too.

 

Yeah, absolutely. I think like for me these days, I actually don't do that much C sharp programming anymore. I'm more in the cloud program now. I guess I do a lot more Azure and things like that. And sometimes a lot of the stuff what I do is just about kind of keeping one foot in the camp because I, you know, like I've got a coding background, but I don't ever want to kind of lose that. So it's kind of always good to. Like even when I appear on this

 

Mm.

 

podcast, or if I go to the meetups and meet a whole bunch of people who are programmers and stuff, it's just good to kind of keep in touch with them and then not lose that skillset.

 

Yeah, for sure, for sure. I have a, I'm a CTO of a company that doesn't do.NET. And I switched stacks eight years ago to Ruby because I wanted to be in the web space and kind of startup community and build startups. And that's the stack that was good at the time. But funnily enough, like I kept going with a C sharp digest and kind of kept my foot in the door as you are saying. And we built a startup. Five years ago, we started building a startup and it got recently acquired by a company that's.NET based and suddenly the keeping the foot in the door became very valuable because part of my job is integrating that startup based on the Ruby into a C Sharp and.NET code base. And having that background is really, really beneficial to my day-to-day right now. So you could say that like I didn't use C Sharp skills for like last eight years, but keeping... Keeping the food in the door is very valuable and you never know when you're gonna need it.

 

Yeah, I can say that what I've really enjoyed about doing the podcast is meeting some of the, you know, the important members in the community, you know, like, like John Skeet or Jimmy Bogart or Mark Miller, those kinds of people and getting to know them and ask questions of them that you're always curious about, you know, you read articles that they've read or use some of their software and things like that. You're always you're wondering, you know, How did they come up with this and how did they go about it and these types of things when you get a chance to meet them and ask those questions it's really kind of satisfying there.

 

It's pretty amazing to kind of hear the backstories behind all those kind of people and their work, what they are doing.

 

I think the biggest thing of meeting these people was actually just finding out they're just regular folks. You know, like they're not like superhuman kind of thing with like ultra intelligence. You know, they're just people who've just, you know, they're just really passionate about what they do and they've just done it for many, many years and just become really, really good at it.

 

Yeah, it's the consistency of kind of showing up and writing the article or publishing the newsletter or doing that podcast that kind of gives you... If you do it long enough, you will get better at it and you will just become top of your field.

 

So most of the articles that you have for your newsletter, are these submitted to you for inclusion or do you go out and find them and then add them in? How do you go about that?

 

Yeah, so I get some submissions. So that's one stream of things. I personally curated them by hand, so I don't do any kind of big algorithm type of thing. But I actually built some sort of a search engine, you know, to scratch my coding edge because I don't code much. that pulls data from different sources, from RSS feeds, different communities. And that kind of puts them into one place, and then I kind of select the ones that I find the most interesting in the week. So it's pretty much handpicked each week from different communities and different blogs and different RSS feeds.

 

How many subscribers are you allowed to say?

 

I'm around 25,000 at the moment for C Sharp Digest. And the whole sort of my publishing empire is around 60,000.

 

Oh wow. That's crazy. Nuts.

 

OK, so should we talk about these open source projects that you recently posted about?

 

Sure, sure. I really didn't go too much into the depth of each one of them. I kind of like looked at what they are doing and what's cool about them. Some of them are useful, you know, in your day-to-day. Some of them are not so useful, like generating images of modern houses based on a really cool mathematical algorithm might not be that useful in your day-to-day, but you know a DevTool kind of Swiss knife type of thing that's... That's something that you might use more?

 

Okay, so let's see, the first one on the list looks like it's Markov Jr.

 

Yeah, that's the one that generates the houses with the really cool math behind it.

 

So it just generates

 

and you can use

 

like

 

it.

 

a schema for your house. So if you've.

 

Oh, not your house. It's probably more targeted towards a dungeon game sort of graphics type of stuff. It's just kind of for fun, maybe used in game development.

 

Okay, cool

 

Oh yeah, it looks like a little graphical things that can be used in a 3D game or something like that. Some of them actually, these images look a little more like MC Escherish, that type of stuff. So it can get pretty wild.

 

Yeah, definitely, definitely. It's really cool, really cool. And there's a... So that's, I think that's a project built on top of a library that Maxim Gunmin, I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly, kind of built first and then kind of built a thing that's using that language. It's really, really cool.

 

Is it? What language is this built in? I'm just trying to see what the...

 

All of them would be C sharp.

 

All of them, okay, cool.

 

Yeah, yeah.

 

Just going to get the repo now. Yeah, that

 

Okay.

 

looks alright. Ooh, and then we've got DevToys.

 

Uh...

 

What does that do?

 

Yes, so the DevToys kind of gives you kind of the useful tools that you would use in your day-to-day development. It's by Etienne Badoux. Hope I'm pronouncing it correctly. You know, all those kind of encoding, regex, testing, formatting, JSONs in one place.

 

Oh yeah? Cool.

 

Yeah, so it looks like converters and encoders, decoders, formatters, generators, some graphics, a color blindness simulator, I like that one. I'm always frustrated when I go to a website and they use red and green and they're kind of the same tone and I can't tell the difference. That's always handy there.

 

Yeah, is it an actual standalone app or is it something that you

 

Yeah,

 

plug into?

 

yeah, that would be a standalone app.

 

Hmm. I always find it like, like in my previous job, especially I've met a lot of non-technical people. I always tell them that, like, even if you're not technical, everyone should learn like a little bit of, I don't know, PowerShell or JavaScript, because it can almost always kind of benefit you a little bit, like even if you're, even if all you're doing is just like typing documents in Word and just going on. you know, websites and that stuff, you know, there's always gonna be some little use case that you can have that if you're a little bit technical, it's gonna help you enormously. So, this might be something I could, you know, maybe forward to them.

 

Yeah, definitely. For me, it's because I'm not on Windows day to day. I'm using Mac as my daily driver. And I have quite a lot of these tools in my terminal. It's a good alternative for the Windows developers to have these things too, where

 

Hmm.

 

the culture is not that terminal heavy.

 

Hmm. Although it's becoming more terminal heavy these days, isn't it? Which is good.

 

Угу, точно. Точно. some great

 

Okay,

 

work with

 

uh.

 

the WSL2 and stuff like that.

 

Yeah.

 

Okay,

 

Third

 

then.

 

in the list, Microsoft Power FX.

 

Yeah, that's a bit of a crazy one. So that's a custom language written with C Sharp. And it's made for writing spreadsheet formulas. So it's kind of this experimental thing. Just kind of a cool thing to look under the hood and see how these things are built and how you can kind of leverage them in writing DSLs and stuff like that.

 

I think Microsoft actually uses, this is the same Power FX I'm thinking of. I think Microsoft does use this pretty extensively in their Power Platform. So they've got this thing called, like a Canvas app, which is kind of like a low code solution, I guess, where I guess non-technical people can, in theory, go in and kind of, it's kind of like the Windows forms of the internet kind of thing. And I'm fairly sure they use a thing called Power FX to drive it in the background, so. Actually, yeah, looking at the GitHub, I think this is that technology. So yeah, it's very kind of Excel-ish kind of thing that the formulas that they use.

 

Is it kind of from the family that's like under the power BI and stuff like that?

 

Yeah, so Power Platform has got Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Apps. I mean, they're kind of related, but you don't have to use them all together type thing. The

 

Mm-mm.

 

whole thing is they're supposed to enable kind of citizen developers to be able to be productive. And things like that.

 

Yeah, that kind of shows my ignorance here and the inability to try it out really, because I just kind of looked under the hood and I kind of found it really cool what it can do and kind

 

Hmm

 

of look at the code, but I'm actually not sure about the adoption, so that's great that you can kind of, it's actually used that widely. That's amazing.

 

I didn't know it was an open source language though.

 

Mmm.

 

It sounds like it would be pretty fun to wanna on an afternoon to go through it and see how it's actually written and things like that. So, yeah.

 

Yeah, one of the questions you asked me, I think, Sean, was where I find these things. One of the cool things that Microsoft went through is the transition to open sourcing stuff and you can kind of see what new features are being built into C Sharp from their GitHub repo. And it's one of the things that's really cool to check too for the new content and to keep people kind of on top of that to see what's kind of coming.

 

Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing that's good about Microsoft these days is they actually really listen to the feedback and all that stuff on their repo. So if you have a bug or even if you have like, if you raise an issue on GitHub, they will actually like, you know, the product people will actually respond to and things like that, so. Big emphasis

 

Yeah,

 

on

 

I

 

that.

 

think the PowerApps platform, I kind of call it, you know, the office suite of

 

No.

 

application development kind of thing.

 

Hehehehe.

 

So it's kind of along those lines, trying to make it easier for everyday people

 

Yeah.

 

to build applications.

 

So what's the

 

Next

 

fourth

 

on the

 

one?

 

list, WPFUI.

 

Yeah, so that's a cool one. It's a free toolkit for building WPFL applications. And it's really well designed. It's by Leszek Pomian. And I think he built it as a part of a project for, so he built an app for monitoring your computer too. And he built this UI kit to use it in his app. So you know. You are building an app, so why not build a complete UI kit that you can share with the community too? It's really amazing and really well designed.

 

So what is a UI kit? What does that entail? Like, does it just allow you to, you know, is it like a CSS framework type thing? Like, you know, material design?

 

Sort of like a bootstrap for WPF. You don't

 

Ugh.

 

have to be... You are using ready-to-make controls that you don't have to be a great designer for. Because if I'm speaking for myself, if I was trying to make a nice looking app, it would be a disaster. But if you can put together those components, it will look good.

 

Yeah. Didn't we have that- Sean, didn't we have that guy on the show? I can't remember his name now. He was really, really into WPF. It was like a few months ago.

 

Uh, that,

 

Yeah.

 

yeah, Kevin,

 

Was it Kevin?

 

Kevin Boss.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah. He wrote that. The. draw the blank on a material design for WPF and

 

Oh,

 

XAML

 

that's right.

 

and things like that, so

 

Yeah.

 

yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I shared Kevin's library on one of the issues of the newsletter, because I came across it too.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah, Kevin was a co-worker of mine. So I recently moved to a different company, but yeah, still keep in touch with him. And he lives, I don't know, about 90 miles from me. So not too bad.

 

Good to see the WPF community is still relatively active.

 

And let's see, we got P2P Remote Desktop. That's interesting. I've recently started working with more of a cloud PC environments, things like that. So what's a P2P remote desktop do for me?

 

It's pretty much a team viewer situation, but free and built in C Sharp. That doesn't require you to install anything. So really, a really cool project. And I think Miroslav is writing a whole set of kind of P2P tools, which is, which is quite cool as well. And most of them are open sourced. So it's not just the remote desktop, but he publishes and builds on top of much larger ecosystem that he built.

 

So this allows you to basically like, RDP into someone else's computer.

 

pretty much without any configuration or installation and as an open source project.

 

Oh, okay. So what, but you'd have to open up ports and stuff like that, I'm guessing, right?

 

Yeah, definitely, definitely, like you need to connect somehow.

 

Yeah. Okay. Cool.

 

So this doesn't have some sort of intermediary service that facilitates the communication between the two. So

 

No.

 

the same application is gonna act as client and server. and you just have to be able to specify who you want to connect to.

 

Yeah, like you would put your destination, you would start it and it would connect the two machines. Again, kind of speaking from, you know, like going through the project and looking through it and not being able to try it on a Mac.

 

Hmm. I always find it amazing

 

It looks like

 

that

 

there

 

someone

 

is.

 

put in that much effort to build something like this, didn't it?

 

Exactly, exactly.

 

It looks like there is some way to set up the UDT protocol in order to bypass most of the firewall rules. So there would be some server as the go between the two to set up that P2P connection between the two. But people are free to look at the code and make use of it if they have some sort of need to do that.

 

Hmm.

 

Cool. And it looks like you had one extra project that you threw in as a bonus, Glaze VM. So, I'm gonna go ahead and do a little bit of a demo.

 

Yeah, it doesn't like six doesn't sound as great as five. You know, you kind of want to keep it on a number. That's kind of kind of cool. And bonus is always great. That's pretty much a Tiling Manager sort of. Yeah, I kind of mentioned I'm using Mac. Also using Linux every now and then. It's that sort of I3, I3 Tiling Manager. That's very popular on kind of Unix machines. built for Windows, which is really cool if you are into a lot of keyboard navigation and using lots of Windows that you want to see at the same time. Great for development if you want to see terminal and your editor and kind of use your keyboard.

 

All right, I'm going to have to see how this compares to like Power Toys, you know, the fancy zones set up that the Power Toys tools and utilities have in it. So looks like from some of the screenshots that they have on the website, it could be a little more flexible than what the fancy zones has. So yeah, definitely check it out if you like to set up different layouts of windows in each one of your screens. So what's kind of next for you, Jacob? What do you have planned for the future? Are you just gonna add more and more mailing lists? You've got a number, you've got a programming digest, you've got a tech lead digest, you've got a react digest. So are you doing more of that or are you just focusing mainly on the company that you're working with now?

 

Yeah, that's a good question. One of the things with the newsletters I didn't mention is that I run newsletters that are sort of helpful for me, that are relevant to the things that I'm doing. So I'm not kind of looking to build a lot of lists, and I'm not going to start a Rust newsletter because I just don't use Rust. Or what's next for me is to mostly focus on the quality of those newsletters and you know every issue should be better than the other, finding great content, give the kind of amplify the message for the writers and expose cool projects to the people. Yeah and try to find more people that would be interested in hearing about those things too. I think that's pretty much the goal, what I'm trying to do. And just keep going, like, you know, show up every week after week.

 

Do you get a lot of feedback from the audience of the newsletters? Like is there like a forum that people can kind of talk about the articles or something like that?

 

Yeah, I do get feedback. Because I built a publishing platform for it, I can customize it as much as I like. And I edit ratings for each issue and ability to put a comment for each issue. And some of them get good feedback. Some people get sort of angry about some opinion pieces that I might post. But that's kind of normal in the internet community. And yeah, yeah, yeah, I do get feedback. I kind of try to quantify it. Yeah, I haven't really experimented with creating a community, like a more active community, like having a Slack or having a forum or something like that, where the members could discuss between each other. But I think that also needs a certain type of personality, you know, like managing a community. on Slack is very different to managing a community over email. So really my goal is to focus on the content and writing and making the newsletters as good as they can be in the future.

 

Yeah, it looks like you have an archive going back to 2015. So there's all sorts of articles that people can go back and look through. You know, just because you sign up for the newsletter today doesn't mean you can only see what comes out in the future. So on the website, there is an archive list down at the bottom. So they can go back, go back to 2015 if you feel the need.

 

Yeah, and then before that I could dig up the blog posts and the emails that I was sending before that, before I had my publishing platform. Unfortunately,

 

Gotcha.

 

the nature of the internet is that like, probably half of the links will be dead by now, but you know, that's just people move domains, change the URLs, but that's life

 

Mm-hmm.

 

on the internet.

 

Yeah, that is, that is. So if people have questions and they wanna reach out to you, maybe to have one of their articles published, what's the best way to get in touch?

 

I think the best way is go through my website, cherdunsky.com. I'll probably best to link it into the show notes than spelling out my complicated name. And the other thing, obviously, if you'd like to keep up to date with the cool stuff that's happening in.NET, you should sign up to the C Sharp Digest at csharpdigest.net.

 

Okay, yeah, we'll definitely have links to all your Digest and everything. And all these open source projects that we mentioned that'll be in the show notes of this episode. So check those out. If there are listeners want to get in touch with the show, we'd love to hear from you. You can get me. I am on Twitter. I am at dotnet superhero. With that said, let's go ahead and move on to picks. Wei, what's your pick for this week?

 

Alright, so my pick for this week is a show that I've been watching called Umbrella Academy. So it's like another superhero show, but it's about a family of superheroes who have superpowers. But there's an element of time travel in there. So it's really fun, I think, for the first two seasons, although it gets a little bit ridiculous after that. But yeah, it's a show that I've... Yeah, I've enjoyed watching, so, it's my pick. Not yours.

 

Okay. Yeah. My pick this week is actually cloud PCs. You know, one of the projects that I've just recently started working on the past past month, the company that I'm consulting for doesn't sound out laptops anymore. They just configure a PC for you up in the cloud. And you just connect up into there. And so they can have full control and don't have to worry about shipping a physical PC and all the security that goes along with that. And then of course, when the project's done and I don't need access, they can just tear down that cloud PC and they don't have to recycle a laptop or anything like that. So my pick this week is cloud PCs. Microsoft has them, Amazon has them. So, and they're actually pretty affordable. I mean, they could be anywhere from 30 to 60 or $70 a month. for a decent PC that's everything's up in the cloud and you just install everything there. And then of course you have the bigger storage and you can just put that stuff out into your, you know, your OneDrive or something like that or offload it locally if you need to. So it just connects up to into with remote desktop and you're using that. So PCK

 

I think that's certainly

 

works well.

 

the future of development, isn't it? Just, um, you know, like, especially if you need to take beefier as well, you know, you could always just up the up the specs a little bit if you're running some machine learning tool, whatever, and then, you know, you don't need it, you can scale down a bit as well. So it's good.

 

Yeah, you go to, I think maybe in the future, we'll go back to thin clients,

 

Yeah.

 

where there's really no, there's no power on your local desktop, it's just connectivity up to the cloud.

 

Yeah.

 

But with something like this, you could use a Chrome tablet, or Android or Apple tablet, things like that, and get the full power of a PC that's up in the cloud and use it that way. So just to hook up a Bluetooth. keyboard and mouse and

 

How are you finding the

 

you're

 

latency

 

good.

 

though? Is it pretty seamless, do you think?

 

Yeah, the one that they configured for me is on the East Coast and I don't have any problems. But of course,

 

Yeah.

 

you know, I'm, I'm on fiber. So it's, it's,

 

Oh, yes, right.

 

I wouldn't,

 

Yeah.

 

I wouldn't be the one to really know if there's a problem in coast, you know, you have a, a slow connection, then

 

Yeah.

 

you might have a problem. And you know, if you're out on the road and you're just using your phone, if it's 3G or 4G, you know, that might

 

Hmm.

 

be some problems, but you know, 5G should be able to handle it.

 

Mmm. Cool, cool.

 

Okay. All right, Jacob, what's your pick for?

 

Yeah, I have a couple. If I can do a couple.

 

Oh, absolutely.

 

My first pick is the billion dollar code, which is, I think it's on Netflix. It's a TV show about sort of this, like a Berlin hacking subculture where two guys develop this algorithm that then gets sort of potentially stolen by Google and they build Google Earth on top of it. And it's kind of about the lawsuit and... and the origins of that. So that's a very cool tv show, definitely recommending it. And my second pick is listening to Flight of the Concords, which is a New Zealand sort of a parody band and it will kind of give you a flavor of this sort of Wellingtonian specific sense of humor. It's very cool, very fun. So yeah, recommending those two.

 

Are they still going, the flight to the concourse? Cause I remember watching them like, I don't know if it was like 15 years ago, they had that really, they

 

Mm.

 

were really big, big TV show kind of thing, but are they still playing? Like, um.

 

Yeah, they recently did a show in London and it's kind of our favorite to listen to with the kids. So yeah, every now and then

 

Yeah.

 

they get together and they kind of do a show. And especially if you are in Wellington, they do concerts here every now and then because they are local.

 

Mmm, no, they're pretty funny.

 

Okay, thanks Jacob for coming on the show and spending some time with you and with us and letting us know about your newsletters that you write, some interesting open source projects, things like that. So it was great to have you on the show.

 

Well, thank you for having me. It was great.

 

Yeah, thanks Jacob.

 

Thank you. And we'll catch everybody else on the next episode of Adventures in.NET.