Create an AI Assistant with your own data

The current large language models, like GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o are great when you need some output generated based on data you feed in the prompt. Even the small language models, like Phi-3, are doing a great job at this. However, these models often don’t know a lot about the data within your company. Because of this, they can’t do a good job at answering questions that required data from your organization. Read more →

Smaller repositories on disk with Git sparse checkout

My disk was full the other day, so I needed to clean up. First the obvious stuff, like the Downloads-folder, the Nuget-cache, the bin- & obj-folders and the Temp-directory. Second, I used WinDirStat to figure out where the other biggest culprits of data-usage are to be found. One of the directories was the main project I’m working on, with a staggering 24GB in disk size! Obviously, we’ve created a lot of code in the past years, but not THAT much. Read more →

Why and when to use static classes and methods

A friend asked me a question, a while ago, stating: Hey Jan, One stupid question around which I have thought a lot and often get stuck while deciding. When to make a function static/non-static specifically the helpers or utility ones. I read 2 arguments All the functions that don’t need to use a state of the object, (don’t update any variable value of the object ) should be static. All the functions that should/can be test independently and have some logic. Read more →

Create Open API Schema (Swagger) during your automated build

A few years ago, I was assigned on a project with a friend of mine, Marnix van Valen and we needed to update our APIs in API Management with the latest Open API schema for each release. As we don’t like to do this work manually, it got added to our build- and release pipeline. I like this approach, as it removes the need to host Swagger / Open API compute on my own service and only static files need to be hosted in some folder. Read more →

Let Azure API Management its identity authenticate with your backend services

Aside from Azure Traffic Manager, Azure Functions, and Azure Service Bus, Azure API Management (APIM) is one of my favourite services to use in just about any solution. A useful little nugget for APIM is it’s able to have its own Managed Identity. You can choose to use a System Managed Identity or a User Managed Identity. Both options have pros and cons. When you have configured APIM with a managed identity, this identity can be used to authenticate with the backend services. Read more →