.NET
Why Developers and Companies Hate .NET 9
- New versions release every year. The even-numbered versions are supported for 3 years (LTS); the odd-numbered for 18 months (STS).
- Many companies don’t have policies that permit updating to something that doesn’t have LTS.
- A separate company (Hero Devs) plans to provide never ending support. It’s a paid offering where the company patches older versions that Microsoft won’t.
The Fix for Your Database Performance Issues in .NET
The NuGet package Delta. You can apply it for the entire backend (app.AddDelta()) or you can apply it to specific endpoints. For the table in question, add a new column rowversion that has the data type rowversion (which is a timestamp). The performance improvement comes through caching on the browser level using ETags where the data gets returned as a 304. Basically Delta is hijacking the SQL connection to do a single DB query to ask whether the table has changed. Some of the comments mentioned this tool hides bad performance given the “hard hit” happens any time anything in the table changes.
When You Shouldn’t Use Await Async in .NET
Nick presented a scenario where there were 100K records, each of which had long strings (1000 words). The synchronous call (.ToList()) was 5 seconds faster than the asynchronous one (.ToListAsync()). Nick used a CLI tool called ultra (https://github.com/xoofx/ultra). The output of the tool can be loaded into the Firefox profiler. In short, async code scales better by not locking up the main thread. This use case is a known issue in EF Core.
AI
Set Your Team Up to Collaborate with AI Successfully
- Develop your AI augmentation strategy. “…assess how roles and tasks are likely to change, and which new skills employees must deploy to not just add incremental value beyond what AI will do, but to actually maximize the value that AI can bring.”
- Ensure that performance evaluation and management systems are focused on output rather than input. “Organizations have two options: They can either increase the expected outcomes, or reward employees for accomplishing existing outcomes”
- Help your workforce harness the skills AI is unlikely to master. “Therefore, organizations (and managers) must try to harness their employees’ curiosity, particularly their deep desire to learn and know.”
- Invest in (the often neglected) mid-level managers. “Indeed, it is not sufficient for managers to be good at their job, to have technical expertise, and to be good at allocating and managing resources. We now also expect them to understand AI, gen AI, AI ethics, diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, corporate advocacy, and climate change — and they should and be outstanding coaches.”
- Promote a healthy dose of AI-related experimentation. “Developing employees to leverage AI tools effectively is not just a competitive advantage; it’s a means to sustain workforce engagement, adaptability, and innovation.”
Sociology
Is Every Civilization Doomed to Fail?
The Greek philosopher Polybius described anacyclosis, a cycle where society “rotates through the three basic forms of government: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, and the three degenerate forms of each of these governments: ochlocracy [mob rule], oligarchy, and tyranny.” The Romans for a time arrested the cycle through combining the best elements of each of the three forms. My take is that, like the commenters said, we have a poor memory of history and thus we are doomed to repeat it. Also, the root of the entire cycle is greed.