Richard Astbury’s Blog

Aug 6, 2026

Building a Conversational Alexa Skill with Microsoft Foundry Agents

A practical walkthrough for connecting an Alexa custom skill to a Microsoft Foundry agent using Azure Functions, managed identity, conversational context, and a latency-safe fallback.

Jun 3, 2026

The Universe's Source Code Might Be Written in Octonions

An experiment in AI-assisted theoretical physics. What happens if you point a generative AI at one of the hardest unsolved problems in fundamental physics? The result is a framework with zero free parameters and 23 quantitative predictions — all matching experiment to 0.1–7%.

Jan 5, 2026

Finding New Worlds - Using Python and Open Data to Discover an Exoplanet Candidate

How we used Python, NASA's Kepler data, and systematic validation to detect KIC 8554498 b—a potential new exoplanet with an extraordinarily strong signal that may have been overlooked. A story of open science, technical challenges, and the power of accessible astronomy tools.

Oct 27, 2025

Microsoft Copilot Researcher Solves Today's Wordle Using "Computing Using Agent"

I watched Microsoft Copilot Researcher tackle today's Wordle puzzle using its "Computing Using Agent" feature. Here's how AI approaches word puzzles with systematic reasoning and computational strategy.

Jul 21, 2025

AI Self-Portraits

I asked various AI language models to create self-portraits of themselves. Here are the interesting and creative results from Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Grok.

Feb 9, 2024

Microsoft Tooling for Application Modernisation

Microsoft provide various tooling options for application modernisation. Whether you are working with ASP.NET or Java, Microsoft provides a range of tools to help you discover, containerise, and migrate your applications to Azure

Dec 31, 2023

2023 Reading List

A compilation of the books I have listened to or read in 2023. I started listening to audiobooks while doing household tasks and during commutes. The standout book for the author was 'Shoe Dog' by Phil Knight, the story of the founding of Nike, which received a five-star rating.

Dec 21, 2023

Connecting Azure Logic Apps to Azure OpenAI

GenAI can also be used in a variety of ways to support 'back end' processes. Azure Logic Apps provides a great way to implement business process, with it's rich set of connectors and visual workflow designer. This guide talks through a simple example of a Logic App that calls the Azure OpenAI API.

Sep 5, 2023

Build your own Copilot

There are many use cases for generative AI, but one that many people have been excited about is the ability to build a chatbot that can answer questions about any topic. In this post I cover the different levels of sophistication you can build into your chatbot, and how you can use the Azure OpenAI API to build your own Copilot.

Jun 14, 2023

ChatGPT Tips and Tricks

The ChatGPT interface is much more flexible than the chat, text generation and summarisation examples often cited. As a developer there are a few interesting use cases I have played with briefly. Here are a few examples.

Jun 1, 2023

GitHub Copilot Tips and Tricks

Some tips and tricks for using GitHub Copilot in VSCode

May 22, 2023

App Modernisation

Modernisation is a journey. It's the continuous acknowledgement that technical debt should be paid down, and that we should be constantly looking for ways to improve our software, and opportunities to make the team more efficient. This could include refactoring, rearchitecting, or rewriting, but it could also include improving the way we work, or the tools we use.

May 9, 2022

SFTP in Azure

Azure Blob Storage now provides the ability to connect to a Container using SFTP.

Mar 22, 2022

Hello Orleans 4.0

With the advent of .NET 6, C# 10 and Orleans 4.0 (preview) it seems like a great time to take a fresh look at Microsoft Orleans.

Aug 9, 2021

Azure Blob Storage Index Tags

Index tags allow you to provide up to 10 key-value pairs for a blob. The tags are indexed, and you can use them to query blobs in your storage account.

Jun 18, 2021

Cryptocurrency Mining in Azure

I thought I would try my hand at mining crypto in the cloud. After all, who wouldn't want to be a bitcoin billionaire?

Jan 28, 2021

Offline maps with vector tiles

On a recent project we wanted to have high quality mapping, but completely offline.

Nov 14, 2020

Adventures in Installing your own Security Camera

I bought a £50 security camera off Amazon to improve security at our home.

Nov 13, 2020

Command Driven Map

I have found an approach that works well when building web based map applications in React.js. I've found in the past that map components can get very complicated very quickly making the map control hard to maintain and hard to add new features to.

Oct 19, 2020

Keeping it Simple

I recently worked on an internal project with a team of grads and inexperienced developers. Five of us in total. It was a short project - a line-of-business application to convert spreadsheets into software. It was a lot of fun.