How do you improve your CSS skills? Carl and Richard talk to Martine Dowden about her new book, Tiny CSS Projects. The book is built around twelve progressively more complex CSS tasks - you can follow along to learn in general or pick a particular chapter for a specific skill you want to exercise. The conversation digs into thinking about the architecture of styling beyond the particular page and how those styles can be updated version-to-version without frustration. You can improve your CSS game!

What's the latest with gRPC? Carl and Richard chat with Irina Scurtu about her latest work with gRPC. Irina talks about the improved tooling with gRPC, including tools like Postman to help you see what's happening in a gRPC interaction, even decoding the binary data! The conversation also digs into the complexity of metadata with headers and trailers and the challenges of supporting multiple platforms and multiple type systems - but it works if you take the time to learn the details. And the results are fast and flexible communications!

How do you handle background tasks? Carl and Richard talk to Sergey Odinokov about Hangfire, his open source project for background job processing in .NET. Sergey talks about his experiences building applications that needed background processing and hoping to find a library similar to other platforms - and eventually creating Hangfire. The conversation dives into the array of different processing options, state management, and the challenging problem of building and maintaining an open-source project over a decade!

What can Uno do for you? Carl and Richard talk to Nick Randolph about the latest from the Uno platform. Nick talks about how Uno has continued to evolve into a broad and effective cross-platform client tool while also adding integrations for design and continuous integration. The conversation digs into the challenge of getting from design to development and how the Figma Plugin makes it easier to take designer Figma docs and make them into actual code in Uno. There are also wizards for helping you add Uno UX testing into your CI/CD pipeline and much more. It's an open-source project, so you can take Uno out for a spin today!

Coming out of .NET Conf, one of the big announcements was .NET Aspire. Carl and Richard talk to David Fowler about his work creating the tools to make building cloud-native .NET applications easier. David discusses the challenge of not re-creating the past - tools like Azure Service Fabric. However, the complexity of containerized applications is real. Aspire can make it simpler to take advantage of being in a container, on the cloud, with all the telemetry, observability, scalability, and flexibility that being cloud-native can bring you!

How do you migrate to .NET 8? Carl and Richard talk to Jimmy Bogard about his experiences helping teams migrate from .NET Framework 4.8 to more modern versions of .NET. Jimmy talks about the team wanting to be able to use ASP.NET Core in their applications as the incentive to make the migration in the first place. The conversation digs into landing on .NET 6 to make migration easier but then wanting to move quickly to later versions to take advantage of the latest features. And no dead-drop migrations - using a reverse proxy to operate the two applications side-by-side so that over months, everything moves across while remaining functional - a great story of migration!

Let's start 2024 with a conversation about energy! Richard chats with Carl about ongoing developments in power generation around the world. Wind technology is maturing but also hitting size limits. Solar is the fastest-growing power generation source on the planet now - and there are recycling options! There are exciting new developments in power storage, some applied hydrogen power projects, and new concepts in geothermal and small modular nuclear. Richard wraps up with thoughts on COP 28 and our progress towards safer, stable power for everyone. Happy New Year!

Time for the annual Space Geek Out! Richard summarizes many of the important space stories of the past year, including SpaceX's record number of Falcon 9 flights and the first two flights of Starship. The conversation also explores the state of the International Space Station, Dream Chaser, Artemis, and other moon missions, including India's successful landing! Richard then digs into the Crisis in Cosmology - how the James Webb Space Telescope has changed our understanding of the universe, and how it is disrupting the current models of the universe. But new science is good - the more you know!

How do you improve the performance of your .NET applications? Carl and Richard talk to Daniel Marbach about his work building high-performance .NET applications and the process he goes through to get them to perform at the level his customers need. Daniel talks about profiling and benchmarking - understanding where your time passes in your code and how to measure it to know if you're making it better. The good news is that great tools are out there to help you; check the show notes for links to them!

It's almost 2024, do we still need to talk about securing our apps? Carl and Richard talk to Laura Bell Main about her ongoing efforts to get everyone involved in creating and operating software to be part of making that software secure. Laura talks about committing one hour of each sprint to security and how, over time, those small efforts can build up to excellent secure guardrails that make our software more resistant to exploitation. Don't push security issues off to someone else - we can all help!