I like creating complex solutions for simple problems just as much as every other engineer. That’s why I have dozens of side-projects going on where I’m trying out stuff. During my day job, I try to provide as much value to the customer/business with the most simple, most performant and cheapest solution I can think of.
That’s where Copilot Studio comes into play.
You’ve probably read a ton of posts and articles about bring-your-own-data, RAG, finetuning LLMs, etc.
Read more →I’ve been having issues with Disqus for a while now. Comments weren’t always placed under the correct post and I’ve done some extensive troubleshooting on it, invoking the Disqus API to resolve, added custom (meta) header fields on the pages. So far, I haven’t been able to fix it on all posts so have been looking for another system to facilitate adding comments to the posts.
This blog is a static website, created via Hugo, so no databases, only Markdown.
Read more →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →There are a ton of useful Azure resources, and one that I don’t read or hear a lot about is Azure Traffic Manager.
According to the docs:
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer. This service allows you to distribute traffic to your public facing applications across the global Azure regions. Traffic Manager also provides your public endpoints with high availability and quick responsiveness.
Meaning it’s a very good service to make sure the requests to your backend are routed to the backend that’s able to respond the fastest.
Read more →If you’ve read my previous post on how to create a Power Query custom connector with authentication, you might be wondering if the same can be achieved by using your own identity instead of a service principal being used.
The answer is: YES!
There are a couple of resources that I found helpful, but didn’t provide me with a complete answer, but did help me get to a solution. These are the ones I used as a reference:
Read more →For a while we have been creating Power BI reports retrieving data from our API. This works quite nice, but our API has OAuth2 authentication & authorization in place. So far, we added a manually created access token to the data source and updated it on a regular basis. While this works, it’s not a very solid approach.
I figured we can (and should) do better so decided to investigate a bit on the topic.
Read more →