This week I’m highlighting a few podcasts, like the awesome conversation between Scott Hanselman and Eden Wilson (Lemonerdy’s CEO) and one about Azure NAT Gateway. Also, the newly released features for Azure Synapse Analytics, an article on how to build a Data Lakehouse architecture with Apache Spark, and another on Azure attack paths. Lots of cool stuff to read!

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Podcasts

Hanselminutes

Episode 857: Creating Tech Courseware with Lemonerdy’s teen CEO Eden Wilson
Eden Wilson is a sixteen year old content creator that started coding when she was nine. She has a blog, she creates coding tutorials for her YouTube channel and she does gymnastics. A really interesting and inspiring conversation.

Episode 858: Learning to code 6502 assembly in Pikuma’s Gustavo Pezzi
Gustavo Pezzi wants to teach YOU (and everyone) how to code…in 6502 assembly on 40 year old machines! There’s something amazing about coding on the absolute metal and owning the entire machine/stack. https://pikuma.com teaches the learn the fundamentals of computer science and mathematics in creative and dynamic ways using older game consoles and teaches things like graphics and physics without large frameworks.

The Azure Podcast

Episode 438: Azure NAT Gateway
The team catches up with Aimee Littleton, PM on the Azure Networking team, to learn more about NAT Gateway and when customers should be using it. Short answer = whenever you have outbound network connectivity as part of your workload!

.NET Rocks

Episode 1811: Just Enough Design with Kathryn Grayson Nanz
How much do you need to know about design? While at CodePaLOUsa in Louisville, Carl and Richard talked to Kathryn Grayson Nanz about understanding application designers. Kathryn talks about knowing just enough about design to understand that, like software development, it is an iterative process, that takes user feedback and incorporates it into future designs. Oh, and we know why your custom icon sucks!

Towards Data Science

Episode 125: Can the U.S. and China collaborate on AI safety?
It’s no secret that the US and China are geopolitical rivals. And it’s also no secret that that rivalry extends into AI — an area both countries consider to be strategically critical. But in a context where potentially transformative AI capabilities are being unlocked every few weeks, many of which lend themselves to military applications with hugely destabilizing potential, you might hope that the US and China would have robust agreements in place to deal with things like runaway conflict escalation triggered by an AI powered weapon that misfires. Even at the height of the cold war, the US and Russia had robust lines of communication to de-escalate potential nuclear conflicts, so surely the US and China have something at least as good in place now… right?

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Architecture

Azure hybrid options
Azure offers several hybrid solutions that can host applications and workloads, extend Azure services, and provide security and operational tooling for hybrid environments. Azure hybrid services range from virtualized hardware that hosts traditional IT apps and databases to integrated platform as a service (PaaS) solutions for on-premises, edge, and multicloud scenarios. This guide helps you choose a hybrid solution that meets your business requirements.

Azure Enterprise Policy as Code – A New Approach
We work closely with customers using Azure Policy and have seen many different methods of deploying and maintaining it, from manual to over-complicated automated methods, everyone has a unique way of doing it. This code was developed to make policy deployment and management simpler while providing full flexibility for complex environments. The driver was looking at the over-engineered methods and incomplete solutions being used and trying to produce something that could easily be implemented and managed by people with little knowledge of infrastructure as code, while still being scalable and maintainable.

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Data Platform

Azure Synapse Analytics August Update 2022
Welcome to the August 2022 update for Azure Synapse Analytics! This month, you will find information about Distribution Advisor for dedicated SQL pools, Spark Delta Lake tables in serverless SQL and the new Cast transformation that was added to mapping data flows. Additional general updates and new features in Dedicated and Serverless SQL, Spark, Synapse Data Explorer, Data Integration, Machine Learning and Security are also mentioned in this edition.

Modern Data Engineering: Building a Data Lakehouse with Apache Spark — Vol 1.
In this first part, we will be introducing a new approach to Data Engineering involving the evolution of traditional Enterprise Data Warehouse and Data Lake techniques to a new Data Lakehouse paradigm that combines prior architectures with great finesse. Next, we will break down the Data Lakehouse architecture, so you’re familiar with the services in the ecosystem and how they would be used in the overall context of the project.

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Security

Azure Attack Paths
Creating and maintaining a secure environment is hard. And with every technology or product added to your environment it gets more complicated. Microsoft Azure as a cloud environment is no exception to this rule and with the many services and features that get added every year it just gets more complicated even if you did not change a thing. Because keeping your IT assets secure is important as you move to the cloud, it is important to know which bad practices to avoid and which attack scenarios are out there.

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Azure News

.NET 7 comes to Azure Functions & Visual Studio 2022
We’re thrilled to announce that Azure Functions v4 now supports .NET 7 as runtime. Azure Functions joins Azure Web Apps who also announced .NET 7 support. For those developers who are looking into building serverless functions in Azure with the latest innovation from .NET runtime, this makes it possible for all developers on the planet to focus on coding with .NET 7 new features, ready-to-code while on a large scale without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

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Cool Stuff

GitHub Pages
Learn how to create a website directly from a repository on GitHub.com. Explore website building tools like Jekyll and troubleshoot issues with your GitHub Pages site.

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Have a great week!

Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash