AI Workshops

I worked with the VS Code team, together with GitHub, to create workshops and presentations for our Developer Advocates and also our internal engineers. They needed specialized content that showed the benefits and adoption patterns for GitHub Copilot, and I was the one asked to create these.

Presentation: Quick Wins with Copilot

I gave this presentation at NDC London in 2025, and it was the "test run" of the content I was preparing for Microsoft's AI Tour. A few things have changed, but you can watch the presentation here:

The talk focused on the big efficiency gains that AI can offer every developer, including:

• Using custom instructions to decrease your prompt needs and increase the relevancy of your responses.
• Letting Copilot create your Git commit messages for you, once again using custom instructions to comply with policy.
• Using templates and SQL files as context to generate the boilerplate code (aka the "boring stuff").
• Generating service logic with only comments, allowing you to do the fun stuff.

The talk was very well received and also highly-rated.

Workshops

I developed targeted workshops while at Microsoft, specific to the groups asking for them. I have leveraged this experience to create workshops of my own, sharing them at conferences and helping private companies.

These workshops can be tailored as to whatever programming need your company faces. I have been programming for over 27 years in many languages and platforms, including:

• .NET/dotnet core. This was my main platform and language (C#) for most of my career, until 2010 when I started working full time with...
• Ruby and Ruby on Rails. A very fun language and platform that I learned deeply. I still use to this day, with one of my sites (bigmachine.io) running on Rails 7. In 2014 I transitioned mainly to...
• JavaScript (both Node and frontend frameworks). I got to know Backbone.js very well, then Angular, then Vue, then Nuxt and now React/Next and Astro (dabbling, but still use it). I have published numerous sites with all of these frameworks, and find them extremely useful.
• Elixir. I fell in love with this language back in 2015 and put together an open source data access tool called Moebius (now retired) and even created an online course for it (retired too).
• Python. I used this language for an internal project at Microsoft using the Django framework. I enjoyed using it and got to know it well.
• Go. Same thing here: I used Go to help develop an internal CLI tool that is now external (AZD).

The point is: I can tailor Copilot workshops to your needs following a basic script and flow which I'll describe below.

The Mind Blower

This workshop is the most fun because people will audibly gasp when I show them the fun ways you can use Copilot to increase your efficiency.

Here's a .NET version of the talk:

We have inherited an application that doesn't follow our standards. Specifically: it uses CQRS with the Dapper ORM, sometimes with inline-SQL, which is a no-no. We need to swap this out with Entity Framework...

How long would you think such a project would take? I would budget a few days for this, or even weeks if the project was big enough.

With Copilot (specifically Agent mode) and Claude Sonnet 3.5, we do this in less than an hour*.

Here's the flow. If done as a workshop, we:

• Set up custom instructions to ensure there's context for Copilot.
• Create coding style instructions using Copilot as well.
• Install EF and make sure it works without errors.
• Roll the models over to EF using Copilot's Agent mode, and update the Data Context.
• Go through a Code Review.
• Ask Copilot to document what it just did (and the conversation we had) in a copilot_conversation.md file we can review with the team.
• Go through 2 refactoring steps after the team reviews the new code.
• Ensure all tests pass, by asking Copilot to build and test and fix any errors.

Speed is not the point here, and the talk can be slowed down and stretched into a multi-day workshop easily, accounting for Q&A and 1-off scenarios (of which there are many). There are also numerous "asides" where we discuss how best to use Git for this process, and share our progress with our team (once again using Copilot).

This workshop is the most fun, and people really enjoy it.

The "I'll Believe it When I See It"

Many people don't want to use AI with their code unless it can prove itself useful. For "big lift" projects, like replacing one framework with another, Copilot can, indeed, prove extremely useful.

That's what this workshop is all about. I created it after I rolled my Ruby on Rails site (bigmachine.io) over to Astro, and then Nuxt. I did this while on vacation because I wanted to see how hard it was to do something "non-trivial".

It turns out: not hard at all.

One workshop I gave showed how you can roll an older Angular app to React. I made a YouTube video about this (very condensed), which follows the basic process. You can see that here:

The main idea is to work from the outside in, and version forward. In essence we:

• Create a new directory for the new app, right next to the old one.
• Once again: custom instructions are our friends.
• Recreate the layout, making sure to reference the relevant files in the old application.
• Add the relevant components, making sure we have fake data and images so we can always see a working site.
• Add the logic and service classes, including API calls.
• Do a styling run, adding animations and other fun things React is good at.

There's a lot more to do in this scenario, and like the one above, it can be changed to fit your company's needs.

Perhaps you want to move from Ruby on Rails to Next.js - this workshop would work for that (I've done it myself, but to Nuxt instead of Next). Maybe you want to upgrade from .NET 4 to dotnet core 9? Same process.

This is a great hands-on presentation that can be leveraged in so many ways. I can do a 1-hour talk with it, a 3-day "let me show you the process", or a longer-term "I'll fly out and we'll get this done together" process. I'm open to any of them.