GitHub CoPilot recently promoted Agent mode as a full feature in VS Code. Many writers and commenters in the blogosphere think competitors are still better; perhaps they’re right. But this is the one I have, and Microsoft is innovating rapidly - seeing that first hand at Microsoft Build even as I type this. So in recent days I’ve performed three initial experiments that I want to share. Not because I’m doing anything brilliant: just trying to find tasks that might be a good fit, learn how to interact with the tool, and share a bit to help others in my proximity.

Lesson: be patient, and be in a learning mode. Not just waiting for it to finish (might take several minutes), but also in getting the right results. I remarked on a failure (below) to my colleague Jason Hoekstra; he suggested that I simply undo and try again. It was the right advice. Experiment and build an intuition.

Below I describe three experiments and outcomes.

Containerization of an application benefits operations of the application by solving the problem of “it works on my machine” (at least, for the application itself). The container holds the operating system and all needed components. Once you have Docker on a host - whether localhost, on-prem data center, or in the Cloud - you can run the application with greater confidence, knowing that the application will execute the same in all environments.

But the benefits of containerization can also shift left in the development lifecycle. For example: have you ever needed to revisit an older application, and realized that you don’t have the SDK on your machine? Instead of installing the SDK locally, you may be able to run the SDK in a Docker container.

Lamium amplexicaule aka henbit, the first flower to appear in my yard this year.

Data engineering gurus Joe Reis and Matthew Housley once again led a closing town hall at Data Day Texas. Rather than opining from the front, they turned the session over to the wisdom of the crowd. Housley seeded the conversation with a single question – “what is the elephant in the room?” – and the room was ready with an answer: AI. In particular: what is AI going to do to my job?

Given a room full of strangers, some participants were remarkably open about their fears. Perhaps knowing that the audience is composed of fellow data geeks helped to establish a sense of vulnerability. These fears were being expressed by the people who, in theory, should be the ones developing expertise in using AI tooling. But that’s how disruptive the technologies may be: even the data experts are uncertain and afraid.

Perhaps 20 years from now we’ll look back and wonder what the fuss what all about, just as I wonder what the backstory was on this balloon-based scarecrow protecting raspberries in my backyard circa 2006. By Stephen A. Fuqua.

Notes from three talks on data cataloging at the recent Data Day Texas 2025

• The Meta Grid
• Investing in Semantics and Knowledge
• We Are All Librarians

Following up on Grudgingly Accepting AI Coding Assistants, I have a small win from my first experiment with GitHub Copilot: a Python script for converting portions of an Open API specification file to a CSV. There is nothing revolutionary in this small win; countless programmers have doubtlessly done much more. But a reluctant engineer has to start somewhere.

As a software engineering director building open source products, I have prohibited my teams from using AI coding assistants due to concerns about intellectual property and questions about the risks and real world effectiveness of AI coding assistants. It is now time to allow and even encourage AI coding assistants, with guardrails.

Balcones National Wildlife Refuge, December 2024, by Stephen A. Fuqua

Manager-dom was not a sought-after status (though I admit to prior curiosity), but as with many other engineers-turned-managers, it found me anyway (Q3 2023). Being a team lead and then an architect came naturally and brought success for many years. Some of the skills translate well from those roles while other necessary capabilities tend to be underdeveloped. Nothing can truly substitute for the value of gaining experience and reflecting on it; here are a few resources that I have found useful in my journey so far, giving me new ideas to play with and questions to aid my reflection.

Sharp-shinned Hawk at Resaca de la Palma State Park, by Stephen A. Fuqua (2024).

In reaction to all of the “agile is dead” articles, I am cleaning up old posts about Agile, re-reading them, contemplating lessons learned but forgotten, and asking myself if some practices have outlived their usefulness. That is the spirit of agility: the interplay of action and reflection.

Amongst its many admirable principles, where does one find environmental concerns in the Bahá’í Faith? So I wondered, early on my journey on this religious path. Recently, in honor of Faith Climate Action Week, several friends and I reflected on this question.

Our conversation opened with a brief meditation on this passage of praise for God, who is recognized through all the natural wonders:

“… whatever I behold I readily discover that it maketh Thee known unto me, and it remindeth me of Thy signs, and of Thy tokens, and of Thy testimonies. By Thy glory! Every time I lift up mine eyes unto Thy heaven, I call to mind Thy highness and Thy loftiness, and Thine incomparable glory and greatness; and every time I turn my gaze to Thine earth, I am made to recognize the evidences of Thy power and the tokens of Thy bounty. And when I behold the sea, I find that it speaketh to me of Thy majesty, and of the potency of Thy might, and of Thy sovereignty and Thy grandeur. And at whatever time I contemplate the mountains, I am led to discover the ensigns of Thy victory and the standards of Thine omnipotence.”

Bahá’u’lláh, Prayers and Meditations by Bahá’u’lláh, CLXXVI.

Wildflowers on Naw Ruz at Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, by Stephen A. Fuqua (2024).

“For the past two years, the Ed-Fi Alliance software development team has been listening to community members through its Technical Advisory Group, Special Interest Groups, and at our annual events. We have been hearing that the pace of change in the Ed-Fi ODS/API Platform needs to accelerate, shifting to a cloud-native architecture that can better support large-scale deployments while offering greater cost and performance flexibility. To do so, we need a reboot.”

→ Full article at New Cloud-Native Functionality Coming to the Ed-Fi Alliance Technology Suite

Though barely mentioned in the article, the work to create a production ready system has been dubbed Project Tanager, the third bird-related project name in my tenure with the Ed-Fi Alliance (Roadrunner, Meadowlark).