Thursday
Room 1
10:30 - 12:30
(UTC+01)
2 Hours
Copilot: The Good Parts
AI coding assistants can feel like magic, or madness, depending on how you use them. In this fast-paced, practical workshop, we’ll skip the hype and dig into Copilot’s good parts: the workflows that actually make you faster, cleaner, and more confident as a developer.
You’ll learn to use Copilot for everyday efficiency wins, writing smarter helpers, testing generated code, generating commit messages, and auditing your own work, while also exploring how to verify that what Copilot gives you isn’t garbage.
Then we’ll level up: using Copilot itself to build a small MCP (Model Context Protocol) server in JavaScript that connects to real data from Cassini’s Enceladus flybys. You’ll see how Copilot can reason about live domain data once it’s given structured context, a glimpse into the next generation of AI-assisted development.
Whether you’re curious, skeptical, or already hooked on Copilot, this session will give you the patterns, prompts, and mental models to make it an indispensable (and trustworthy) part of your toolkit.
Rob Conery
My name is Rob Conery and I help developers of all sorts learn what’s new with technology. I have been working in the technology field full time since 1998 as a DBA and then a web developer. My original focus was the Microsoft ASP.NET stack, building tools like Subsonic and the first Micro-ORM: Massive. In addition I co-founded Tekpub.com (acquired byPluralsight) with James Avery and co-host This Developer’s Life with my friend, Scott Hanselman. I currently create videos for Pluralsight and build open source things as I can.