In this segment from Agent Academy Live, we’re officially kicking off the Agent Academy Hackathon!
Join us as we share what the hackathon is all about, how you can participate, and what you can build using Copilot Studio and AI agents. Whether you're just getting started or already building advanced agentic solutions, this hackathon is your chance to learn, experiment, and showcase your ideas.
This is your opportunity to turn ideas into real, working agents—and connect with a global community of builders along the way.
In this episode, Andy welcomes back Steve Kahle, entrepreneur, executive, and fractional CIO, author of Leadership Recall: Harness Insights. Accelerate Innovation. LEAD WITH AUTHORITY. Steve first joined the podcast in episode 184 to discuss email overload. This time, the conversation turns to a challenge every leader faces: the forgetting curve. Research suggests we forget up to 83% of what we learn within a week, and Steve argues this is not just a learning problem, it's a leadership problem.
Steve shares his CCR framework (Capture, Catalog, and Recall), along with practical tools such as the Anki flashcard app and the Email Me voice-note app, to build what he calls a learning operating system. The discussion covers how to design a recall fitness practice in as little as three minutes a day and how removing friction at every step keeps the system sustainable.
If you're looking for a practical system to stop letting great insights slip away and start leading with more authority, this episode is for you!
Sound Bites
"I think God put in my heart to be a relentless optimizer. I like to see things work and work well."
"When you really zoom out in life, those who are really successful have figured out what are the frameworks, what are the methodologies that work, and they simply apply those."
"Our subconscious mind can handle about 11 million bits of data per second, but about 40 bits conscious mind."
"I went all in. Christ totally transformed my heart, and I'm realizing that scripture memory is a superpower."
"Time swiftly washes away the obvious."
"Learning really is a privilege, and we need to be able to find time that works with our daily rhythms."
"Three minutes a day is really all you need to be able to see tremendous traction on being able to recall things that matter"
"Instead of 'I'm bad at remembering names,' you could, do a reframe like, 'Hey, I'm getting better at remembering people's names.'"
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:48 Start of Interview
02:06 Early Experiences and the Instinct to Remember
04:08 Is Memory a Natural Gift or a Trainable Skill?
05:19 Forgetting as a Feature, Not Just a Bug
07:10 The Leadership Cost of Forgetting
09:10 Shifting the Bottleneck from Input to Retention
12:02 The Five-Hour Rule and Three Learning Archetypes
14:19 The CCR Framework in Practice: Capture, Catalog, and Recall
19:50 Removing Friction from Your Learning System
23:23 Inside Anki: Cloze Deletions and Building Cards
26:10 Organizing Your Recall Decks
27:30 Real-World Results: When Readers Apply the System
Episode 184 with Steve Kahle. It's our previous conversation about keeping your head above water when drowning in email and commitments. Definitely recommend checking it out.
Episode 411 with Laura Mae Martin. She's the head of productivity at Google and shares ideas that I still use to this day.
Episode 376 with Nick Sonnenberg. It's a book about helping you and your team stop drowning in all the information and commitments at work.
Chat with PMeLa
You can chat directly with PMeLa—the podcast's AI persona—to get episode recommendations and answers to your project management and leadership questions. Visit PeopleAndProjectsPodcast.com/PMeLa to chat with her.
Pass the PMP Exam
If you or someone you know is thinking about getting PMP certified, we've put together a helpful guide called The 5 Best Resources to Help You Pass the PMP Exam on Your First Try. We've helped thousands of people earn their certification, and we'd love to help you too. It's totally free, and it's a great way to get a head start.
I know you want to be a more confident leader–that's why you listen to this podcast. LEAD52 is a global community of people like you who are committed to transforming their ability to lead and deliver. It's 52 weeks of leadership learning, delivered right to your inbox, taking less than 5 minutes a week. And it's all for free. Learn more and sign up at GetLEAD52.com. Thanks!
Thank you for joining me for this episode of The People and Projects Podcast!
If you purchased an iPhone between June 2024 and March 2025, you could receive a payment from the $250 million settlement over Apple's intelligence features on iPhones! Apple could be using Intel chips again in future Apple products. More Mac mini and Mac Studio models are no longer available on the Apple Store. And Apple is now requiring verification for education discounts.
US Supreme Court declines to pause order holding Apple in contempt in Epic Games lawsuit.
iPhone users could get up to $95 per device as Apple reaches $250M settlement over Siri delays
Apple reportedly has a deal to use Intel-made chips again.
Intel's stock jumped 13% today over Apple chip manufacturing report
Additional Mac mini and Mac Studio models cut from the Apple Store website as AI data centers strain available RAM, SSD supplies
Apple requires verification for education discounts, ENDS discounts for k-12 unless you're homeschooled.
Tim Cook among CEOs confirmed for President Trump's China trip.
More refunds possible for Apple as Trump's 10% global tariffs found illegal too.
Apple releases tvOS 26.5, HomePod 26.5, and visionOS 26.5.
Apple to make design changes in macOS 27 to address Tahoe quirks.
Here's how I finally got Google's uninvited 4GB AI model off my Mac.
macOS 27 threatens to bury Time Capsule, FOSS brings a shovel.
Apple kicks off new run of A18 Pro chips as MacBook Neo demand exceeds expectations.
Not dead yet: Apple Vision still has a future.
visionOS 27 will bring these new Vision Pro upgrades.
The $1 Steve Jobs coin.
Google denies copying Apple's Liquid Glass design for Android.
You can purchase Apple's Mac Pro wheels kit for $699.
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What does a production-grade large language model look like? While at NDC Sydney, Richard talked with Vaishnavi Gudur from Microsoft about her work scaling LLMs for Teams transcriptions, summaries, and more! Vaishnavi discusses the underlying complexities of operating the Teams LLM infrastructure for a large array of customers across different countries and regulatory regimes. Data sovereignty also plays a large role: different countries have specific rules on where data must reside and how it can be accessed. As the scale increases and the tail gets longer, the rules set gets more complex! Lots of great thinking about what LLMs look like in a production environment.
It's been a minute since I've posted here - but rest assured that the SSMS team has been working hard to bring you lots of exciting features and fixes! Today we shipped SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22.6.0, and it's a really nice mix of work: continued investment in Database DevOps (preview), a security-related update to how we authenticate against Azure Storage, a handful of quality-of-life improvements in the editor and tools, and a solid roundup of bug fixes (many of which came directly from items filed on the feedback site!). Thank you, as always, for taking the time to log issues and upvote what matters to you. It really does shape what we work on.
Let's dig into what's new!
Database DevOps (preview)
SQL projects support in SSMS continues to evolve with incremental changes, including an adjustment to the Solution Explorer icon for solutions to match the '.slnx' icon found in Visual Studio.
SSMS Solution Explorer with the updated solutions icon.
This release also introduces the ability to create a SQL project directly from an existing database. Once a project is created, you can check it into source control and work with it in VS Code or vice versa, enabling a flexible experience across different tools and teams. If a database changes over time, you can use the SQL projects "Import From Database..." menu item in Solution explorer to update your project with the latest schema changes. This allows you to keep your project in sync with the database and maintain a single source of truth for your database schema.
New entry point alert! Now you can right click a database in Object Explorer and create a project from there!
Once your database definition is captured in a SQL project, CI/CD pipelines and the SqlPackage CLI can be used to automate deployments and manage the quality of database changes. Documentation is available at aka.ms/sqlprojects-docs, and our public roadmap at aka.ms/sqlprojects-roadmap shows what's coming next.
Unified Settings
We're continuing to migrate settings from the classic Tools > Options dialog into the new Unified Settings experience. In 22.6, Transact-SQL IntelliSense and Keyboard Query Shortcuts are now available in Unified Settings. If you haven't opened Unified Settings yet, give it a try. The search and filtering experience is significantly better than what we had before, and we'd love your feedback as we keep moving more settings over. I also recorded a Data Exposed episode with Anna Hoffman where I talk about a few ways you can customize your SSMS 22 installation to work for you.
The new Unified Settings experience is an embedded tab with powerful searching and filtering capabilities.
Storage Account access - now with Entra authentication
This one is worth calling out for anyone who connects to Azure Storage accounts from SSMS. The Storage Browser, DACPAC import/export, and Merge Audit File dialogs have all been updated to support Microsoft Entra-based authentication instead of shared key access. Shared keys have been a long-standing concern from a security perspective, and moving these flows to Entra brings them in line with modern authentication guidance.
Quality-of-life improvements
A few smaller changes that I think are worth highlighting:
Registered Servers: Multi-server connection attempts can now be cancelled. If you've ever kicked off a connection to a large group and immediately realized you picked the wrong one, you no longer have to wait it out. There's now a Cancel button.
Results Grid: Hovering over a column header in the results grid now shows the column's data type in the tooltip. Small, but handy, this comes straight from a feedback item.
Query Designer: In the Show Criteria pane, there's a new right-click option to Change Column Width for an individual column.
GitHub Copilot in SSMS
On the GitHub Copilot side, this release is primarily about stability and cleanup rather than new capabilities. We fixed a crash that some of you ran into when using Copilot Edit, and we removed the GPT-5* models from Ask mode. They may return down the road; for now, the remaining models should give you a more consistent experience.
If you missed Erin's blog post about 22.5.2, code completions are still disabled by default. You can opt back in under Tools > Options > Text Editor > Inline Suggestions.
Fixes worth highlighting
The full list is in the release notes, but a few that I expect folks will be happy to see:
Connection Dialog: Passwords are no longer displayed in plain text when viewing a connection string. This came in as a feedback item for SQL Lakehouse connections specifically, but the fix applies broadly.
Object Explorer: Fixed the "object reference not set to an instance of an object" error that some of you saw when deleting multiple items at once and addressed an issue where newly created objects sometimes didn't appear in Object Explorer until you disconnected and reconnected.
Migration Landing Page: the Migration page we introduced in 22.5 now supports dark theme!
We say this from time to time, but it's worth repeating: if a release ever creates trouble for you, you can roll back to a previous version of SSMS 22 from the Visual Studio Installer. From the SSMS 22 entry, select More > Rollback to previous version. And if you're ever in a spot where you need a specific older build, the Release History page lists them.
Summary
You can find the complete release notes here. As always, thank you for using SSMS, for the feedback items, the upvotes, the comments, and the patience as we keep iterating. Please keep them coming, the feedback site is the best way to influence what shows up in the next release.
Your Postman Tests Are Only Valuable If They Run Automatically
You probably already have the tests. Requests with assertions, test scripts that check status codes and response shapes, maybe a full create-read-update-delete flow chained together with environment variables. You ran them before the last release. They passed. You shipped.
And then something broke in production anyway.
Not because the tests were wrong. Because nobody ran them before the deploy.
The problem isn’t your tests. It’s when they run.
A collection that lives in Postman and gets run manually before a release isn’t a test suite, it’s a checklist. Checklists depend on people remembering to use them, having time to use them, and not being under pressure to skip them. Those conditions don’t reliably hold.
The shift worth making is this: tests only count if they run on every change, automatically, without anyone deciding to run them. The moment a test requires a human to initiate it, you’ve introduced a failure mode that has nothing to do with your API.
This isn’t a new idea in software development, but it’s one that API testing has been slow to catch up on. Unit tests run in CI. Integration tests run in CI. Your Postman collection, which probably covers more realistic end-to-end behaviour than both of those combined, runs when someone opens the collection runner.
That’s the gap worth closing.
What Native Git makes possible
For a long time, getting a Postman collection into a pipeline meant one of two awkward options: export a JSON file and commit it to the repo (an opaque blob no one wants to review in a pull request), or reference a collection by its workspace ID (which means the tests and the code live in completely separate places with no clear relationship between them).
If you haven’t connected your Postman workspace to a Git repository yet, this guide to Native Git and team workspaces covers the setup. Everything in this article assumes that connection is already in place.
Postman’s Native Git integration removes that friction. When you connect your workspace to a Git repository, your collections and environments are stored as YAML files directly in the repo. They sit alongside the code they’re testing. They get reviewed in the same pull request. They’re versioned together.
This matters because it changes the conceptual model. Your tests aren’t a separate artefact you maintain in parallel with your code, they’re part of the same project. When the API changes, the tests change in the same commit. When you open a PR, reviewers can see both.
And practically, the path you give the CLI in your pipeline is just a path in your repo.
postman collection run "postman/collections/My_API" \
--environment "postman/environments/My_API_Environment.environment.yaml"
No export step. No workspace ID to manage. The collections are just files, and they’re already there.
Closing the loop in your pipeline
Once your collections are in version control, wiring them into GitHub Actions is a small step. Check out the code, install the CLI and run:
- name: Checkout repository
uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Install Postman CLI
run: curl -o- "https://dl-cli.pstmn.io/install/unix.sh" | sh
- name: Run collection
run: |
postman collection run "postman/collections/My_API" \
--environment "postman/environments/My_API_Environment.environment.yaml"
Every push, every pull request, the collection runs. Failures surface before anything merges.
The other half of this is blocking on failure. If your pipeline runs the tests but still deploys when they fail, you’ve added noise without adding protection. Split the test run and the deploy into separate jobs and make the deploy conditional on the tests passing:
GitHub Action Workflow FileDeploy Skipped When Tests Fail
Now the pipeline has an opinion. It won’t let a broken API reach production because a developer was in a hurry, or because the manual test step got skipped in the pressure before a release.
The tests you already wrote deserve to run
The manual test step is the weakest link in most API release processes not because developers are careless, but because it depends on memory and time, and both run short under pressure. Automated tests don’t forget. They don’t get skipped because a deploy is urgent. They run on every change, surface failures before they reach users, and give you evidence that the API behaves correctly rather than an assumption.
If your collections are already in version control through Native Git, you’re one workflow file away from that guarantee. The tests you wrote are already good enough. The only question is whether they’ll actually run.
For full details on installing the Postman CLI, authentication, and the complete range of CLI commands, see Working with the Postman CLI on the Postman blog.
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