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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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How To Outline A Short Story – For Beginners by Writers Write
Friday May 15th, 2026 at 5:15 AM

Writers Write
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In this post, we share a template that will show you how to outline a short story, especially if you are a beginner.

If you’re looking for an outlining tool to help you write a short story, you will love this template.

  1. National Short Story Day in the UK is on 21 December, the shortest day in the Northern Hemisphere.
  2. Short Story Day Africa is celebrated on 21 June, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere.

If you want to learn how to write a short story, sign up for our online course.

Writing Short Stories

Writing short stories is a great way to learn the craft of writing and to discover your strengths and weaknesses. You need fewer words, and there is less pressure than writing a long novel.

There are many short story competitions to enter. These are great for setting deadlines and for giving you a potential platform for your work. These short-terms goals can be good motivators for us.

There are fewer rules in writing short stories. You can write about one of your character’s backstories, or follow the fate of a supporting character after they’ve left your novel.

If you want to learn how to outline a short story, use this template.

How To Outline A Short Story – For Beginners

How To Outline A Short Story
Source for poster

Looking for resources on the craft?

  1. If you want to learn how to write a short story, sign up for our online course.
  2. The Short Story Checklist
  3. How To Show And Not Tell In Short Stories


by Amanda Patterson

If you enjoyed this post, read:

  1. 6 Sub-Plots Every Writer Should Know
  2. How To Write Great Dialogue In Fiction
  3. What Is An Unreliable Narrator? 9 Types Every Writer Should Know
  4. How Writers Use The 4 Main Characters As Literary Devices
  5. Mastering Point Of View In Writing
  6. 7 Essential Elements Every Writer Must Master
  7. 12 Setting Secrets Every Storyteller Needs To Know
  8. 17 Ways To Think Like A Writer Every Day
  9. Why The Silence Of The Lambs Is A Masterclass For Thriller Writers
  10. Write A Page-Turning Book Blurb In Just 5 Steps

Top Tip: Sign up for our free daily writing links.

The post How To Outline A Short Story – For Beginners appeared first on Writers Write.

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Plugin of the Month – May 2026: Coverage Plugin
Friday May 15th, 2026 at 5:15 AM

Jenkins Blog
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Welcome back to the Plugin of the Month series, where we highlight useful and impactful plugins from the Jenkins ecosystem.

For May 2026, we’re featuring the Coverage Plugin.

Quality assurance is a pillar of modern CI/CD. Knowing how much of your code is actually tested—and how effectively those tests find bugs is crucial for maintaining a healthy codebase. This month, we are highlighting the Coverage Plugin, a comprehensive solution for collecting, aggregating, and visualizing code and mutation coverage reports in Jenkins.

What is the Coverage Plugin?

The Coverage Plugin is the modern successor to several older, format-specific coverage plugins. Instead of installing a different plugin for every language in your stack, the Coverage Plugin provides a unified object model and a sleek UI to handle a wide variety of report formats.

Whether you are measuring line coverage with JaCoCo or mutation density with PIT, this plugin brings all that data into a single, high-level overview within your Jenkins dashboard.

2026 05 15 coverage report overview

Supported Formats

One of the strongest selling points of this plugin is its versatility. Out of the box, it supports an extensive list of report formats across various ecosystems:

  • Java: JaCoCo, OpenClover, JUnit, and PIT (Mutation Coverage).

  • Node: Cobertura

  • Go: Go Coverage results.

  • C#/.NET: OpenCover, NUnit

  • Embedded/Safety Critical: VectorCAST (including MC/DC, Function, and Function Call coverage).

  • Testing Frameworks: JUnit, NUnit, and XUnit.

  • Static Analysis: PMD software metrics (via a patched version of PMD).

Key Features

1. Unified Visualization

The plugin provides beautiful, interactive charts that track coverage trends over time. You can see at a glance whether your team is improving their test suite or if technical debt is creeping in.

2. Detailed Source Code View

It doesn’t just show percentages. You can drill down into specific files to see exactly which lines of code are covered (green) and which are missed (red), allowing developers to pinpoint gaps without leaving the Jenkins UI.

3. Quality Gates

You can define "Quality Gates" in your Pipeline. For example, you can configure the build to fail or become unstable if the overall coverage drops below a certain percentage, or if a specific pull request decreases the coverage by more than 1%.

4. Mutation Coverage Support

Beyond standard code coverage, the plugin supports PIT (Pitest). Mutation coverage tests the effectiveness of your tests by injecting faults into your code and seeing if your tests catch them. This provides a much deeper look into the reliability of your test suite.

Getting Started in a Pipeline

Integrating the Coverage Plugin into your Jenkinsfile is straightforward. Here is a simple snippet for a Java project with Maven using JaCoCo:

pipeline {
  agent any
  stages {
    stage('Test') {
      steps {
        // Run your tests (e.g. Maven with JaCoCo)
        sh './mvnw clean verify'
      }
    }
    post {
      always {
        // Record coverage results
        recordCoverage(tools: [[parser: 'JACOCO', pattern: '/target/site/jacoco/jacoco.xml']])
      }
    }
  }
}

Contribute to the Ecosystem

The Jenkins community thrives on contribution. If your favorite coverage tool is not yet supported, the Coverage Plugin is built on a highly extensible Coverage Model. The maintainers welcome pull requests to add new parsers and features.

Explore the plugin today on the Jenkins Plugin Site and start improving your project’s transparency and quality!

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Daily Reading List – May 14, 2026 (#784) by Richard Seroter
Friday May 15th, 2026 at 5:15 AM

Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings
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Today’s list feels a bit more cynical (pragmatic?) about AI than usual. That’s ok as it’s important to see the full range of perspectives.

[blog] The Road More Traveled. A look back at what the point of microservices was, and the impact of AI on architecture.

[blog] Build Long-running AI agents that pause, resume, and never lose context with ADK. Can your agent run for a week without getting messed up? Here’s a reference system that you can browse and learn from.

[article] Tokenmaxxing is super dumb. Again, I get the reason people do it. I’ve asked my own team to think AI-first, but it doesn’t mean I care how many tokens they consume each day.

[blog] An Engineer’s Guide to Better AI Skills: Implementing a Testing Process to Optimize Agent Performance in Any Repository or Skill.The Pinterest engineering team shares their thoughts on evals and such.

[article] Google Cloud is hiring an army of AI deployment engineers. It’s true. Customers need to own their AI journey, but we’re going to be invested in their success.

[blog] Google Cloud Next 2026 Data Content. Skim through this list and find a talk or two that you’d like to watch.

[article] AI is creating a generation of developers who can’t debug their own code. Can you explain your code? Fix an issue? If you’re hiring juniors who say no to both, you’ll need to change something.

[article] Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets #56: Signal in the Noise. Brian pulled out some relatively durable points about AI from a recent in-person event.

[article] Burnout and Cognitive Debt. This doesn’t tread any new ground, but still offers a useful, sobering reminder to consider the human impact of our AI-fueled work.

[blog] Learning Software Architecture. Like most things, software design is best learned through hands-on experience. But this post also points out that an application’s architecture is usually shaped by an org’s incentives and social dynamics.

[blog] Code Review Responses: Add Context When It Counts. The gist of this advice is “say more.”

[blog] MCP vs. CLI: Which Is Better for Agentic AI? Both work well, it just depends on your use case and the environment your agent is running in.

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below:



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python-1.4.0 by giles17
Friday May 15th, 2026 at 5:14 AM

Release notes from agent-framework
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[1.4.0] - 2026-05-14

Added

  • agent-framework-core: Forward MCP tool call metadata (#5815)
  • agent-framework-core: Support list[str] arguments for file-based skill scripts (#5850)
  • agent-framework-core: Strip server-issued response item IDs under storage (#5690)
  • agent-framework-ag-ui: Add tool result display channel (#5762)
  • agent-framework-ag-ui: Promote to release candidate stage (#5844)
  • agent-framework-devui: Improvements for DevUI (#5840)

Changed

  • agent-framework-core: [BREAKING] — experimental skills API] Align file skill folder discovery with agentskills.io spec (#5807)
  • agent-framework-core: [BREAKING] — experimental skills API] Extract skill spec metadata into SkillFrontmatter (#5775)
  • agent-framework-devui: [BREAKING] Tighten default access controls and CORS posture (#5740)
  • agent-framework-a2a: [BREAKING] Migrate to a2a-sdk v1.0 (#5752)

Fixed

  • agent-framework-a2a: Fix A2A v1.0 non-streaming response and sample runtime issues (#5849)
  • agent-framework-foundry-hosting: Reject path-traversal context IDs in checkpoint storage (#5851)
  • agent-framework-core: Prevent MCP message_handler deadlock on notification reload (#4866)
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Azure.AI.Projects_2.1.0-beta.2 by azure-sdk
Friday May 15th, 2026 at 5:14 AM

Release notes from azure-sdk-for-net
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2.1.0-beta.2 (2026-05-14)

Features Added

  • Added DataGenerationJobs client for synthetic data generation, accessible via AIProjectClient.
  • Added data generation job types: DataGenerationJob, DataGenerationJobInputs, DataGenerationJobResult, DataGenerationModelOptions, DataGenerationTokenUsage.
  • Added data generation job options: SimpleQnADataGenerationJobOptions, TaskDataGenerationJobOptions, ToolUseFineTuningDataGenerationJobOptions, TracesDataGenerationJobOptions.
  • Added data generation source types: AgentDataGenerationJobSource, DatasetDataGenerationJobSource, FileDataGenerationJobSource, PromptDataGenerationJobSource, TracesDataGenerationJobSource.
  • Added data generation output types: DatasetDataGenerationJobOutput, FileDataGenerationJobOutput.

Bugs Fixed

  • Fixed missing header required by ProjectInsights.

Sample Updates

  • Added evaluation cluster insight sample and documentation.
  • Added evaluation comparison insight sample and documentation.
  • Added AI-assisted evaluators sample demonstrating Similarity, ROUGE, METEOR, GLEU, F1, and BLEU score evaluations.
  • Added built-in evaluators with inline data sample demonstrating violence, F1 score, and coherence evaluations.
  • Added built-in evaluators with inline data using OpenAI client sample and documentation.
  • Added sample for grading images.
  • Added sample for Toolbox search.
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Azure.AI.Extensions.OpenAI_2.1.0-beta.2 by azure-sdk
Friday May 15th, 2026 at 5:14 AM

Release notes from azure-sdk-for-net
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2.1.0-beta.2 (2026-05-14)

Features Added

  • Added ResponsesToolboxSearchPreviewTool for discovering deferred tools via search_tools queries at runtime.
  • Added Name and Description properties to Responses tool classes.
  • Added new method GetProjectResponsesClientForAgentEndpoint on the ProjectOpenAIClient.

Breaking Changes

  • ComputerScreenshotImage property ImageUrl was renamed to ImageUri.
  • ResponsesAutoCodeInterpreterToolParam property Type was renamed to Kind.
  • ResponsesAzureAISearchTool property AzureAiSearch was renamed to AzureAISearch.
  • ResponsesAzureFunctionBinding property Type was renamed to Kind.
  • ResponsesBingGroundingSearchConfiguration property SetLang was renamed to Language.
  • ResponsesCustomToolParam property DeferLoading was renamed to ShouldDeferLoading.
  • ResponsesFunctionToolParam property DeferLoading was renamed to ShouldDeferLoading.
  • ResponsesFunctionToolParam property Strict was renamed to IsStrict.
  • ResponsesFunctionCallOutputStatusEnum was renamed to ResponsesFunctionCallOutputStatus.
  • ResponsesMCPToolFilter property ReadOnly was renamed to IsReadOnly.
  • ResponsesMemorySearchPreviewTool property UpdateDelay was renamed to UpdateDelayInSeconds.
  • ResponsesOpenApiFunctionDefinition property Spec was renamed to Specification.
  • ResponsesOpenApiTool property Openapi was renamed to OpenApi.
  • ResponsesStructuredOutputDefinition property Strict was renamed to IsStrict.
  • ResponsesWebSearchApproximateLocation property Type was renamed to Kind.
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