Hello, I'm   Jason

During Alexa Live 2020, Amazon announced a new Alexa Skills Challenge with conversations. There’s over $101,000 USD in prizes for the competition. The deadline to submit is at 5pm EDT on September 14, 2020 (47 days away). You can submit and find the full details by visiting https://alexaconversations.devpost.com/. Here are some items to get started with. If you miss place this post, this will be sent to you in email after you sign-up for the challenge:

Microsoft is hosting a half-day event today filled with topics for frontend developers. This virtual event kicks off at 11:30am EDT (8:30am PDT) today, July 29, 2020. You can add this event to your calendar and see the schedule at https://createfrontenddevelopers.splashthat.com/.

Since mid-March, I’ve been working remote. That’s 136 calendar days and 94 working days. Right after the 4th of July, our place of business opened up for around 5-10% of our workforce. One week later, we pulled them back out to comply with the restrictions from the Pennsylvania governor. Schools have been talking about doing all in-person, all remote learn, and a hybrid solution for the better part of the summer thus far. Just yesterday, two Major League Baseball games were postponed due to concerns over COVID-19. Late summer fairs have been cancelled and Black Friday is changing. Google has asked it’s entire team to work remote until summer 2021. So, I’m curious, what is your place of employment doing to prepare for the rest of 2020? Are you working remote for the rest of the year? Are you already back in the office? How are you leveraging technology as time passes? Leave a comment below.

GitHub had announced back on June 11th that they were working on a way to rename the default branch structure from master to main.

If you are an Angular developer and you also use Visual Studio Code, you should be using the Angular Language Service extension for VS Code. This extension provides rich editing and Intellisense for both inline and external templates.

A problem that many businesses have had for years is working with other organizations to find a common time to meet. Microsoft has built a tool called FindTime that requires Microsoft 365 (formerly called Office 365) and makes it easy to find a common time to meet. In fact, I use this outside of my day to day. My personal email account is setup on a $5/mo Microsoft 365 account. I’ve enabled FindTime for my account. So, if I need to find a time to meet, for example scheduling a pizza party for one of my kid’s sports teams, I can simply send out a poll with a list of time slots and let the team vote. At the end of voting, if there is one clear “winning” time slot, the appointment will be auto-scheduled and the other temporary holds on your calendar will disappear. If there are multiple slots there are more options. You can even schedule a Microsoft Teams or Skype meeting this same way.

Every now and then a new minimalist CSS framework comes along for those looking to implement a framework for structure without carrying the weight of Bootstrap or Material. Milligram is one of these frameworks. At just 8.8KB for the minified style, Milligram offers a consistent look and feel for:

In order to keep all elements of Azure Functions patched and maintained, Microsoft is rolling out a platform upgrade on October 31, 2020 for all Azure Functions v2 applications. Azure Functions v2 applications currently run on .NET Core 2.2. Microsoft will be upgrading the foundation to support .NET Core 3.1.

Microsoft announced .NET Core 5 Preview 7, ASP.NET Core 5 Preview 7, and Entity Framework Core 5 Preview 7 in subsequent posts yesterday. Below you’ll find the highlights of each:

I’ve added additional positions that I need to fill. I’m looking for passionate developers looking to grow within a stable company called biBerk. biBerk is a commercial insurance company and part of the Berkshire Hathaway family. I’ve listed a few of the highlights for each opening below. Some of the openings have more than one position. Please apply directly using the link within each position.