GitHub Copilot Preview, Azure Logic Apps, Side-loading Android Apps

GitHub Copilot Preview

I signed up for GitHub Copilot Preview and that ended today and I was charged the $10. I originally planned to use it at work but I chose not to log into my personal account there. Instead I put it on my PC so I could toy with it. I didn’t know what it could do, it was just recommended to me by a friend, so I wanted to check it out.

My take? It’s somewhat shocking. I am working on a Python script to pull API data from a weather service, a fairly common programming exercise. Out of curiosity I started a new “print” line and upon just typing “pr”, Copilot offered me an entire line of code that would also give me the air pressure. I continued doing this until I added another dozen lines that Copilot recommended to me, including visibility, wind speed and direction. This was primarily a test of their inline code functionality and it was impressive.

Next, I wanted to test it’s overall code editing function. I asked it to add a function that would print the output into a text file. Within seconds it created the code, asked me if I wanted to overwrite my code, test it, and commit it. Again, pretty impressive! I am going to screw around with this more tomorrow.

Azure Logic Apps

I spent some time researching Azure Logic Apps as part of a project. I worked halfway through a Pluralsight introductory course on it and what they can do. I spent some time understanding what a service bus is and how it works. I am interested in it as an orchestrator mostly for ETL tools. I’m working on a specific use case and it sounds like it might be a go for it. Next steps will be working on a proof-of-concept, one of my first ones that I’ve been able to do for my employer, which I am pretty excited about and hope it gains a little steam. Really, I just want to mess around with the tech!

Side-loading Android Apps

I learned how to put my Samsung tablet into Developer Mode. I do not know what took me down this path today. I was always told the beauty of Android was its customization, so I am trying to figure that out. I will probably use Copilot to create a very simple app that I can load onto the tablet and use. I also found out about F-Droid and I will probably screw around with that a little bit more in the future, just to see what I can do with the device.

I normally only use this tablet as an extension of my PC, especially when it comes to reading documents away from my computer. Other than that I use mostly Apple mobile devices, but I like the Tab-A because I could expand its memory and load a ton of media onto it for long car trips with the boys. The device itself is getting a little long in the tooth so I want to toy around with it before its end of service.