// Developer Experience

Demonstrates GitHub Spark, an AI-native micro-app platform from GitHub Next that lets anyone build, use, and share personalized apps through natural language—without writing code or managing deployments. The video creates a city travel log app that captures reviews with GPS coordinates, plots destinations on a map, generates AI city suggestions based on existing ratings, and uses the variant generator to explore alternate UI directions from an ambiguous prompt. It also covers the built-in theme editor, state management, and revision history for iterating on app design.

Demonstrates the o1-preview reasoning model integrated into GitHub Copilot Chat in Visual Studio Code, available to approved users via the chat model picker alongside GPT-4o and o1 mini. The video builds a JavaScript maze generator that supports keyboard navigation, BFS and DFS solving algorithms, and visual path rendering—using o1-preview's extended internal reasoning to satisfy complex multi-requirement prompts in fewer iterations than standard models.

Introduces GitHub Models on the GitHub Marketplace, a curated playground for exploring and comparing a range of top AI models using entitlements tied to your GitHub account. The video demos GPT-4o and phi-3 mini instruct side-by-side, shows how to tune system prompts and temperature in the interactive playground, and demonstrates calling model APIs from GitHub Codespaces and the GitHub CLI—all without requiring separate API keys or service sign-ups.

Shows GitHub Copilot Workspace running on the GitHub mobile app, allowing developers to capture ideas and iterate on code from a phone or tablet. The video covers using device dictation for task input, reviewing and editing the AI-generated specification and plan, inspecting code changes via the built-in diff view, running unit tests from the integrated terminal, and creating a pull request with an auto-generated description—all from a mobile device.

Demonstrates GitHub Copilot Workspace starting from a template repository to scaffold a to-do application, showing how AI can jumpstart creativity when starting a new project. The video walks through the full specification-to-plan workflow, iterating with a live app preview, and switching between Copilot Workspace and GitHub Codespaces to make direct code edits. It also covers the share feature for collaborating on work in progress and the automated first deployment via GitHub Actions.

Rapid prototyping is more than quick coding — it is a structured discipline for learning fast and making smarter product investment decisions. In this episode, Chris is joined by Andrew Greenstein, CEO of SF AppWorks and host of "The Next Great Thing" podcast, to explore three distinct types of rapid prototyping: design sprints, iterative feature development, and platform proof-of-concepts. The conversation draws on Kent Beck's product development triathlon (explore, expand, extract), Saras Saraswathy's effectuation theory, and a West Elm innovation case study — where rapid prototyping an AI image-matching feature and a chatbot delivered measurable revenue gains.

The gap between raw Kubernetes and a developer-friendly platform is where the most interesting tooling is being built today. GitOps gives teams a declarative, version-controlled way to manage their clusters — but the YAML expertise and infrastructure knowledge required can be a steep barrier for developers. In this episode, Chris is joined by Laszlo Folgas, founder of Gimlet.io, to explore ClickOps over GitOps: a UI-driven deployment approach where developers click their way to production while the platform silently generates GitOps manifests and commits them to a Git repository. They cover Flux CD, how Gimlet's opinionated platform works end-to-end, and why developer experience has become the defining battleground in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Chris and Matt pick up inside GitHub Codespaces, getting the Player State service running locally on the first attempt thanks to Dapr's environment-variable secret store and Codespaces secrets. They then wire up the World Events Engine with Azure Storage Queue bindings and Table Storage state before hitting a stubborn .NET minimal API routing bug — becoming the cliffhanger that sets up the next session.

Being a developer is hard. From knowing the building blocks of programming, through to keeping on top of the latest languages and frameworks. That’s before we even think about running systems in production But at some point, we’ve all uttered those words ‘It works on my machine’. Or, may have looked up code snippets from our favourite search engine What if there was a better way for both? In this demo-led session, Chris will introduce GitHub Codespaces and GitHub Copilot, explaining how they can improve your developer experience and make you even more productive!!

Chris and Matt solve a recurring ToolUp Days pain point — inconsistent developer environments — by setting up GitHub Codespaces with a custom dev container. They extend a community .NET template to include Go, configure Dapr component files for local Azure Storage access, and leverage Codespaces secrets as injected environment variables to avoid storing credentials in source code. By the end of the session they have a fully reproducible, cloud-hosted development environment that spins up in seconds.