2025

How to Handle Duplicate GitHub Issues Without Annoying Your Users

Adam Cogan AI, General, GitHub AI, Backlog, CX, Duplicates, github, GitHub Issues, GitHub Projects, Software Development 0 Comments

I love feedback. When you run a popular app or open source project like TinaCMS, duplicate issues are a good problem to have – it means people care enough to tell you about bugs or when they have good ideas. Teams I see at other companies see duplicates as noise, something to be swept away

My Top 3 AI Image Generators (and why designers should use them)

Adam Cogan General 2 Comments

Every month, a new AI image generation model drops, and the internet declares, “design is over.” It isn’t. At SSW, our designers continue to ship plenty of brand assets (not limited to just SSW, TinaCMS and YakShaver), faster than usual, because they’re treating AI like a junior assistant. An Assist

OpenAI – 2 Updates That Might Change How You Build Software

Adam Cogan AI, ChatGPT, General Agent Builder, AI, AI Agents, AI Automation, Automation, autonomous agents, Low-code, OpenAI 0 Comments

OpenAI just hosted their “DevDay 2025” and as usual, it’s a big update. They dropped heaps of things that are going to change the way we build software, but I’d like to focus on 2, which really blew my mind: AgentKit and Apps in ChatGPT. #1 AgentKit Agent SDK The new Agents SDK, currently in

MCP as Your Integration Layer

Adam Cogan AI, General AI, MCP, Model Context Protocol 1 Comment

While working with teams, I’ve learnt that the best way to unlock innovation is to bring everyone together and work on a problem. We do this a few times a year by running Rules to Better Brainstorming Days. I love seeing developers step away from client work to share real pains and ideas, because th

.NET Aspire 9.4 – CLI Magic and Developer-Friendly Dashboards

Adam Cogan .NET, General, Microsoft Aspire .NET, AI features, Aspire 9.4, Aspire CLI, GitHub Integrations, Microsoft Aspire, Resource Graph Dashboard 0 Comments

2 years ago, back in December of 2023, I blogged about the first release of .NET Aspire and how it promised to simplify distributed application development. Since then, the Microsoft team has been busy, releasing new features every few months, and now it’s matured a lot. I’m certain devs are going t

How to Choose the Right Software Architecture

Adam Cogan .NET, General, SSW Onion Architecture Clean Architecture, Decision tree, Microservices, Modular Monolith, Software Architecture, Vertical Slice architecture, VSA 1 Comment

As software devs, one of the most important things we do on a greenfield project is to choose the right software architecture. It is called architecture when it’s hard to change. ✅ Get it right, and your project becomes maintainable, scalable, and a pleasure to develop. ❌ Get it wrong, and you notic

YakShaver.ai – using AI to create the perfect task, PBI or work item in 30 seconds

Adam Cogan AI, General AI, AI Tools, Bug Reporting, Efficiency, PBI Creation, Work Tasks, YakShaver 0 Comments

Back when Scott Hanselman was a Microsoft RD, we got into a long conversation about ‘Shaving the Yak’. Yak shaving is when you get sidetracked by a series of small tasks that you spot along the way while trying to accomplish your main goal. I think most developers find it easy to fall down rabbit