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If you find that your ASP.NET authentication cookies expire every time your IIS application pool restarts or recycles, the culprit is likely the DataProtection API not finding the previously stored keys. This post describes one gotcha I ran into with the default storage location on IIS in the user profile due to a default Application Pool setting.
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Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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Pennsylvania, USA
A practical look at the path from developer to architect, what the role really involves, and the tools that help teams stay aligned.
Pennsylvania, USA
As companies adopt AI tools, a lot of time is spent on thinking about AI policies from a security, compliance, or even cost-focused angle. But many leaders are neglecting to address how their teams should work with AI in the context of the team as a whole. This creates a lot of unresolved tension, and it’s time for leaders to step up and set some guidelines not just for how to use AI in an “approved” sense, but how to use it respectfully.
When I say respectfully, I am not talking about the baseline appropriate workplace behavior (bullying, abuse, harassment, etc). Instead, I’m concerned that many of us haven’t considered that the ways AI can make an individual more productive (literally enabling them to produce more outputs) can have an overall negative impact on the team’s productivity. Leaders can’t just sit around and expect that their teams will know that they can’t just produce slop and send it to others; if you haven’t set up a thorough policy yet, here are some suggestions on what to cover.
Elements of Respectful AI Use
Don’t ask someone to read/review what you haven’t read or reviewed yourself.
This is one of the most common frustrations I hear amongst people working on AI-heavy teams. Whether it’s code that the owner didn’t really bother to understand before submitting for review, or documents that they generated and didn’t bother to read, too often people try to steal productivity from their colleagues by streamlining their production of work while asking their colleagues to do all of the quality control themselves. It’s great to have a loop of AI code generation -> AI code review -> AI fixes -> final human review, but if the person prompting the AI doesn’t bother to review that code first, they’re putting a huge validation tax onto their teammate, who has to trust both that you prompted well AND that the AI understood the context and problem well enough to get a sustainable solution.
Documents are an even bigger temptation than code, because AI is so verbose and most of us hate writing and editing. It’s easy to get into a loop where you ask the AI some questions, skim the answers, output a document and send it to others. I’m guilty of this myself! But what makes sense when you’re skimming one answer at a time may not make for a good overall document, and there is a big difference between answering individual questions and writing for a human reader. In particular, the context that you have in your own head as you are talking to the AI may not come out at all in the document; if you don’t bother to read it thoroughly before sending it out, you won’t catch the gap in framing.
Even worse, sometimes people don’t even understand what the document they prompted is trying to say. Can you describe this document, and have a conversation about the concepts it presents with others and why it makes sense? If not, you have no business sending it along without at minimum the huge caveat this is AI-generated and I still don’t really understand this space, please help me.
Many people have reached the point where they won’t read something a person didn’t bother to write themselves, and who can blame them when so many don’t even bother to read their output before sending it on?
Shorter is better.
Part of the annoyance of reviewing AI-generated work is that the AI can be painfully long-winded. AI code often looks like tutorial code, with much more verbosity than human developers would bother with. Add in the temptation to one-shot big changes rather than thinking about how to break the code down into pieces, and you can end up with stacks of thousand line pull requests. The documents AI produces are so thorough that something that should be 3 pages turns into 10 or 20. And for those who have fully embraced AI for all of their text-based interactions, you start to see the LLM-generated wall of text chat messages or emails.
This is, frankly, just rude. It goes hand in hand with not bothering to review your own work, but even if for some reason you convince yourself that you really did read and edit that giant PR/document/message, you’re still asking so much more of the audience than you probably put into the exercise in the first place. When it comes to code, I encourage you to honestly ask yourself: if this broke at 3am and none of the AI tools were working, would you be able to look at the PR context and the change and debug it? If not, it is probably too much. When it comes to a big document, at a minimum, have you at least summarized the important points up-front? If someone is just going to ask an AI to summarize the document themselves, you should probably do more work to provide that value before handing it off.
Finally, if you’re writing long-winded emails or chat messages with AI-assistance in order to painstakingly try to explain something, perhaps you actually need to have a meeting or call instead. Increasingly long text exchanges have always been a sign that people need to stop and talk face-to-face, and AI logorrhea hasn’t changed that.
AI is not an excuse to turn off your brain, or your heart.
Signs we’ve switched off our brains and our hearts include: not reviewing the AI-generated work, not taking the time to do human editing, not breaking the changes down into chunks, and avoiding real conversations through AI-mediated text exchange. This guidance is about respectful use of AI because if you have empathy for your colleagues and respect for their time and skills, you will show them the courtesy of giving them work that you are proud of, that you stand behind, that you have thought through and can explain. The AI may have produced a lot of the output, but you thought about all of the pieces that needed to be done, and used the extra productivity to make something better: more reliable, simpler, well tested, whatever. If you find yourself not thinking at all and just mindlessly prompting, accepting output, and moving forward, it’s a warning sign that something is wrong. Perhaps take some advice from Vicki Boykis on adding friction to your development process (or whatever the equivalent is of your day to day work).
Framing these guidelines
If you decide to do this, one final tip from me: assuming your company has some sort of company values, it’s always a good idea to call back to these values when you create policies and guidelines like this. It’s one thing to abstractly say that shorter is better, but if you can tie that to a value for your company, it will resonate more strongly. As an example, if I were at Amazon I might consider tying “shorter is better” to the leadership principle Invent and Simplify. And since shorter is better and this is already too long, I leave you here.
This post is 100% human-generated except that I needed a spell-checker to spell logorrhea. Maybe I should’ve used an AI editor, feel free to tell me if you think so!
Enjoy this post? You might like my books: The Manager’s Path, and Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders, available on Amazon and Safari Online.
Pennsylvania, USA
Episode 905
Sailaja Mantripragada on AI Governance
AI tools can enable users to access data to which they do not or should not have permission, revealing security problems in an organization.
Sailaja Mantripragada describes the Just in Time AI Governance framework she created to address these issues.
Pennsylvania, USA
Writers Write shares creative writing prompts and resources for writers. Use these 30 writing prompts for June 2026 to beat writer’s block and inspire your daily writing practice.
June – Getting Unstuck
Month 6: Permission
Hello Writer
This year, I want to focus on the most common challenges we face as writers.
Every month, along with a prompt for every day, I’d like to share an exercise that helps us deal with challenges like writer’s block, perfectionism, procrastination, and imposter syndrome.
Getting started
Perfectionism loves to cage you in rules you don’t even remember agreeing to. This month, we’re writing ourselves a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Exercise:
Step 1: Write yourself a note. Give yourself permission to write badly, slowly, or joyfully. Step 2: Keep it on your desk or near your keyboard for daily reminder.
Why does this work?
It is really that simple and that hard, but giving yourself permission transforms writing from performance into play. Just like the bell at school set you free, so will this note to yourself.
Next month we will talk about burnout.
Good luck, writer.
30 Writing Prompts For June 2026
Download your prompts here: Writing Prompts June 2026
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Happiness
Mia
by Mia Botha
Looking for more prompts?
- 31 Writing Prompts For May 2026
- 30 Writing Prompts For April 2026
- 31 Writing Prompts For March 2026
- 28 Writing Prompts For February 2026
- 31 Writing Prompts For January 2026
- 31 Writing Prompts For December 2025
- 30 Writing Prompts For November 2025
- 31 Writing Prompts For October 2025
- 30 Writing Prompts For September 2025
- 31 Writing Prompts For August 2025
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The post 30 Writing Prompts For June 2026 appeared first on Writers Write.
Pennsylvania, USA
Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!
May is coming to a close today, did you have a good month? I hope so!
For me, the past few days I've been working on something completely new and very exciting as a personal challenge, I've been preparing to give my very first talk! I've been recording videos for several years now, but I've never attempted to present something to a live audience. This will be my first time and it's already been an interesting challenge since I had to learn how to structure a talk, how to make some slides, how to make good presenter notes, and have enough content to talk for 1 hour.
The topic of the talk is on how to write high quality clean code. I'm very happy with how the slides came out and I hope the actual presentation goes well! I'm planning to do a video version as well so stay tuned for that next week.
Have you achieved any personal challenges recently?
Game Dev: Why games cost so much ; Unreal Engine 6
Gaming: The Witcher 3 Expansion
Game Dev
Why games cost so much to make?
We've all heard how AAA game budgets are ballooning, how games nowadays are considered a failure if they don't sell 5M+ copies. Here is a really interesting breakdown on why games are so expensive to make.
It's a very interesting blog post with a ton of data. And it has a very very interesting takeaway. Games are not necessarily more expensive because making the same game costs way more than before (in fact tanks to the awesome tools that exist nowadays game developers are massively more efficient than in the 90s) The bigger issue is that we keep making bigger and bigger games. More features, more platforms, more content, more complexity, more everything. In other words: scope!
Thankfully on the indie side this is not exactly the case, recently the games that have found most success on Steam actually have pretty small scope. Incremental games, Co-op games, Horror games, many of those are finding success with just 3-6 hours of gameplay. But on AAA they are still chasing absolutely massive 100 hour games with giant worlds.
The post also breaks down what actually costs all that money. According to their analysis, 2D games tend to be much cheaper than comparable 3D games, multiplayer adds a serious cost, longer playtime also adds cost, and voiced audio is a huge multiplier.
Team size is still the strongest predictor of budget, but the bigger hidden cost is actually coordination. One of the most interesting graphs is on how amount of job types required to make a game nowadays. 10 years ago AAA studios mostly only had 11-30 job titles, nowadays 35% of studios have over 50! And of course with all those different people doing different jobs you need to coordinate somehow, which means lots more managers.
One piece of good news is apparently crunch has been going down, or at least part of the reason for the increased cost is people are no longer crunching for free. So crunch isn't solved but at least now it's being paid appropriately.
The lesson for indie devs is don't fall into the trap of massively expanding scope and team size. Remember how your cost directly impacts your ability to make successful games. The more you spend on your game the harder it is to turn a profit.
Also remember how the cost of a feature is not just "how long does it take to make this one thing?" It is also how that feature interacts with every other system, how much testing it needs, how much UI it needs, how many edge cases it creates, and how much complexity it adds to the whole project.
So the takeaway is very simple: if you want to actually finish your game, control your scope! Every extra feature sounds small in isolation, but complexity stacks up fast. That is true for AAA, but it is just as true for indie devs.
 | I have always been advising people to make small games and this is just yet another study emphasizing that same point. Smaller games are cheaper which makes them easier to find success. AAA now has the problem where even 5 million copies sold isn't enough to be considered a success, I don't want you, an indie dev, to fall into that same trap. |
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Game Dev
Unreal Engine 6 revealed!
Epic has just teased Unreal Engine 6! And surprisingly the first game shown running on it is Rocket League.
The teaser was very very short, basically a "new era, new engine" reveal with a first look at Rocket League upgraded to UE6. It does look absolutely gorgeous. The lighting and reflections look insane, the cars are super shiny and extremely high poly, very impressive stuff!
There are not many technical details yet, and there is no public release date for the engine, so this is more of a teaser than a full announcement. But still, seeing the Unreal Engine 6 logo officially appear is a pretty big moment.
GameFromScratch gathered some more info on it from various sources, in terms of release date maybe 1-2 years out, and based on a Tim Sweeney tweet it is meant to be sort of a merger between UE5 and UEFN (Fortnite version) with Verse (their programming language for UEFN).
The comments on the video announcement are full of jokes/concern related to how UE5 seems unoptimized and unfinished. Compared to UE4, which basically took over the entire industry, it does seem that UE5 has been lacking somewhat. Hopefully they are learning some big lessons so UE6 will be easier for developers to work with.
Either way, this is clearly the start of the next Unreal cycle. We don't know when developers will get access to it, but Epic has officially started saying the words "Unreal Engine 6", so now everyone is going to be watching very closely.
| I am always on the side of how competition improves things for developers of all kinds, so even though I'm a Unity developer I'm always interested in seeing what Unreal does, and how Unity will compete with it. |
Gaming
The Witcher 3 expansion after 11 years!
Here's some completely unexpected news, The Witcher 3 is getting a brand new expansion!
CD Projekt Red officially announced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Songs of the Past, a third major expansion coming in 2027. It is being co-developed with Fool's Theory, the studio also working on The Witcher 1 remake and made up of several developers who worked on The Witcher series before.
And honestly, that is crazy! The Witcher 3 launched in 2015, Hearts of Stone in 2015, Blood and Wine released in 2016, and now over a decade later we are somehow getting another full expansion. And it's a full expansion with Geralt! They have already said how Geralt's story is over and Witcher 4 will have another protagonist so it's awesome to play as him one last time. CDPR is calling it a new adventure, not just some tiny update, they specifically say it's an Expansion and not DLC, although we still do not know much about the story or scale yet.
They have also recently unveiled how The Witcher 3 has surpassed 65 MILLION copies sold! That's insane!
Now the big question is whether it can live up to Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, because those are some very big shoes to fill!
Summer Game Fest is happening next week, I wonder if we will see more then. The Witcher has some of the best trailers, the very first one Killing Monsters is still one of my favorite game trailers of all time.
| I was definitely not expecting this! I love The Witcher 3, it's undoubtedly one of the best games of all time, getting a new expansion 11 years after release is certainly a fun surprise! |
I Scraped Steam To Find You The Perfect Price For Your Game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUZONh7QOdI
Pricing is super important so this is an interesting bit of research
How I Simulated 100,000 Ants for my indie game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrZbcZGnxXg
Very fun simulation and excellent research on how to pathfind with an insane amount of units
Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!
(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)
Thanks for reading!
Code Monkey
Pennsylvania, USA
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