This year I am back writing blogs! I’ll attempt to provide a quarterly personal update, but otherwise I’m going to be providing a lot on Microsoft’s Agent Framework, Microsoft Foundry and I will finally be getting to that Agentic RAG Chronicles series I announced Q4 last year.
Personal Update
I will keep this short … last year was not a good year for me personally. Every time I “pre-announced” a blog post series (Dec 2024 and Oct 2025), something bad happened in my personal and family life shortly after. Every quarter had its own nightmare scenario happen. Emotionally it sucked.
Ok, enough personal stuff. This year I’m in a much better place emotionally and really looking forward to this year.
Work Update
Last year was full of Gen AI projects. Copilot agents, document generation agents, RAG applications, etc. Almost all my professional code (and a lot of personal code) last year was done in python … not .Net/C#. I’m growing to enjoy python but do have some .Net code planned soon.
The Azure product I worked most with last year was Azure AI Search. I spent a lot of time building search indexes, pipelines and optimizing chunked data for retrieval. I also spent a fair amount of time on chunking (loading the indexes) and analyzing the quality of those text chucks (again for retrieval). The quality analysis, naturally lead to a pretty deep dive into OCR technologies (Document Intelligence, Mistral OCR, Docling, etc.) and a comparison of their capabilities.
The open source project I referred to the most for inspiration on the RAG application was azure-search-openai-demo. At this point I know most of that codebase pretty well.
Late last year I started building custom models for Document Intelligence … and I still have a lot of documents I need to get labeled on that project.
Coming Soon
This month I’m working with Bill Wilder and Udai Ramachandran to create some day long Agent Framework workshops (RSVPs are on the Boston Azure AI meetup for these - Burlington MA and Milton MA). We hope to take the workshops to other states soon (and virtual).
I have two blog series I am going to be working on - the Agentic RAG Chronicles series I’ve already announced … I am not going to pre-announce the other :) I’ll post it when I have one or two blogs already written. That should happen by the end of this month.
This year is all about getting back out into the community and helping others understand what they can do with [generative] AI and help provide them some resources to get started.
Looking forward to this year - let’s make it a great one!
Happy New Year!
– Jason
If you have a comment please message me @haleyjason on twitter/X.