30-second learning · 83 short videos

One engineering idea, played out step by step

Some things are faster to watch than to read. Each short takes one idea — why a rack losing power does not take your shop down, why b = a is not a copy, where Netflix actually streams from — and plays it out a step at a time, most of them in under a minute. Every step is written out under the player too, so you can go back over it at your own pace instead of the player's.

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Showing all 83 shorts

MSDEVBUILD Azure Money debited. Order failed. 10 steps · 56s

Money debited. Order failed.

The payment worked. The webhook did not.

  • Why a slow payment webhook loses orders after the money is taken
  • Why a webhook should save the event and answer 200 before doing any work
  • How a reconciliation timer finds payments whose webhook never arrived

Azure 10 steps

MSDEVBUILD Azure Security Your public API has no login — and no identity 8 steps · 26s

Your public API has no login — and no identity

Browsing without signing in is the requirement. Trusting the header was the bug.

  • An Origin or X-Client-App header is a string the caller chooses, so it authenticates a channel, not a caller.
  • A short-lived guest token gives an anonymous request a countable, expiring, revocable identity without any account behind it.
  • Rate-limit on the token subject rather than the IP: addresses rotate hourly on a proxy pool and a whole office shares one behind NAT.

Azure 8 steps

MSDEVBUILD Azure Six jobs. Six specialized models. 8 steps · 25s

Six jobs. Six specialized models.

Azure AI Foundry pairs each business problem — search, images, video, claims, calls — with the model actually built for it.

  • Which Azure AI Foundry model fits which business problem — embeddings, image and video generation, vision, and speech.
  • Why semantic search beats keyword search for real customer questions.
  • How a multimodal model and speech models turn a photo or a phone call directly into structured, actionable data.

Azure 8 steps

MSDEVBUILD copilot The 7 files Copilot reads 9 steps · 23s

The 7 files Copilot reads

Most devs have never opened half of them. Here's what each one actually does — and why it matters.

  • copilot-instructions.md is auto-attached to every chat request — repo-wide, no reference needed
  • instructions/*.instructions.md scopes rules per path, skills/SKILL.md loads itself when your ask matches, and agents/*.agent.md (formerly chat modes) packages personas per task
  • mcp.json and copilot-setup-steps.yml extend Copilot into real tools and give the autonomous coding agent its own preinstalled sandbox

GitHub Copilot 9 steps

MSDEVBUILD Azure A 118-character URL. 15 characters back. 13 steps · 65s

A 118-character URL. 15 characters back.

Designing a link shortener on Azure — and the one digit that decides whether you ever see your click stats.

  • Why a link shortener is really two systems: one write, a thousand reads
  • How the short code is made, and what Cosmos DB does when two people roll the same one
  • Why the redirect must be 302 and not 301, and why Front Door answers most clicks

Azure · Architecture 13 steps

MSDEVBUILD Azure A million taps a second. One tiny message. 14 steps · 70s

A million taps a second. One tiny message.

25 million people tapping 🔥 at the same moment — and not one of those taps is ever delivered to anyone.

  • The live-reactions use case in four steps — what the app actually owes every viewer
  • Why sending every reaction to every viewer is impossible, in one line of maths
  • The five Azure services that count instead — Front Door, Container Apps, Event Hubs, Stream Analytics, Web PubSub

Azure · Architecture 14 steps

MSDEVBUILD Azure One line of code. Seven stops. 13 steps · 64s

One line of code. Seven stops.

What really happens between await http.GetAsync(...) and the JSON landing back in your app.

  • The seven stops every HTTP call to an Azure API makes, and what each one costs
  • Why the first call is slow: 100 of the 160 ms is DNS and the TLS handshake, before your code runs
  • Why new HttpClient() in a loop pays that cost forever, and IHttpClientFactory pays it once

Azure · Architecture 13 steps

MSDEVBUILD Azure The queue was in order. Your workers were not. 12 steps · 50s

The queue was in order. Your workers were not.

A customer paid $120 for an item they removed, and Service Bus did nothing wrong.

  • That FIFO delivery and FIFO processing are different things, and concurrency is what separates them
  • Why SessionId is a partition-key choice, not a yes/no on ordering
  • The one setting that silently gives back the race after you enable sessions

Azure · Messaging 12 steps

MSDEVBUILD Azure You tapped View Product. 12 steps · 50s

You tapped View Product.

Five Azure services answer before the page paints. Here is the order they run in.

  • Why the edge answers first and your API never hears about a cache hit
  • What cache-aside actually does on a Redis miss, including the write-back
  • Why product images take a different path and never reach your API

Azure · Architecture 12 steps

MSDEVBUILD Azure The outage lasted 18 minutes. Your retries lasted 4 seconds. 12 steps · 50s

The outage lasted 18 minutes. Your retries lasted 4 seconds.

720 good orders in the dead-letter queue, and not one of them was poison.

  • Why ten redeliveries take about four seconds, not four minutes
  • That MaxDeliveryCount caps attempts and says nothing at all about time
  • How to build the backoff Service Bus does not give you, with ScheduledEnqueueTimeUtc

Azure · Messaging 12 steps

MSDEVBUILD Azure What is MCP? 8 steps · 27s

What is MCP?

Model Context Protocol — how an AI assistant reaches GitHub, your database, your files and Slack.

  • Why a model on its own cannot reach GitHub, SQL or Slack
  • How an MCP client and server carry one request down and back
  • Why M + N connectors beats M × N bespoke integrations

Azure · AI 8 steps

MSDEVBUILD copilot LLMs have no memory 9 steps · 28s

LLMs have no memory

So how does Copilot know your code? It never remembers. It re-reads, re-ranks and re-sends your context on every single request.

  • Why the model holds nothing between two requests
  • How your editor rebuilds the whole prompt every time
  • What competes for the same fixed token budget

GitHub Copilot 9 steps

Free app · no app store

These are built for a phone

Every short is drawn at full portrait height, the shape a phone already is. Installed, it opens full-bleed with no address bar across the top — and the whole library reads offline.

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