Waldek Mastykarz – Insights on Microsoft 365 Development and Community Practices Waldek Mastykarz is a Developer Advocate at Microsoft who helps developers get the most out of the Microsoft 365 platform. On his blog, he shares hands-on guidance, tips, and real-world examples for building apps, automations, and extensions for Microsoft 365. As a core contributor to Microsoft 365 Patterns & Practices, he collaborates with the global developer community to create open-source tools, reusable templates, and best-practice documentation that make extending Microsoft 365 easier and more consistent. Before joining Microsoft, Waldek spent years working with partners across the Microsoft ecosystem and earned the title of Microsoft MVP twelve times for his community work. His writing reflects both deep technical knowledge and a passion for sharing practical insights that help other developers succeed.
44 articles from this blog
When building evals for AI coding agents, string contains is incredibly tempting. It’s fast and deterministic. And it costs practically nothing, so yo
Why business dependency, not technology or scale, defines an enterprise app and its governance obligations.
Explains why a model's knowledge cutoff is a ceiling, not a snapshot, and how this affects AI agent design.
Why AI can't 'just' replace enterprise apps: the hidden non-functional requirements that make them dependable.
Is AI getting cheaper or more expensive? I’m not sure that’s the right question. Models get cheaper and new ones replace old ones, but we aren’t buyin
Turning a collection of books, papers, or documentation into an agent skill is increasingly easy. But once you have built the skill, how do you know i
Whenever I have an idea, I talk to an LLM. But I don’t ask it to tell me whether the idea is good. Instead, I give it the half-baked thought and ask i
Coding agents make it incredibly easy to skip the learning. Tell an agent that you need to deploy your app to the cloud. Give it access to your code a
If you built it, so can I. Everyone can build software now. Need a small utility? Ask an agent. Need a component or a framework tailored to the peculi
A paragraph is a thought and its development. That’s what I learned at school some thirty years ago. You introduce an idea, stay with it for a while,
Your product didn’t get worse. It still does the job, works the way your customers expect and gives them no compelling reason to switch. Then those cu
We have continuous integration and continuous deployment. AI coding agent extensions need continuous evaluation. If you build a skill, MCP server, or
An opinion piece arguing that AI-assisted writing is valid if it represents your thoughts, comparing it to AI-assisted coding.
Explores the limitations of AI chat interfaces for precise editing, proposing a return to direct annotation like a red pen.
Explores how AI agents are changing app usage, making traditional UIs less essential as users prefer direct outcomes over navigating interfaces.
AI can build impressive demos quickly, but a demo is not a product. This article explores the difference and what it takes to turn software into a real product.
AI reduces software creation cost, but ownership remains expensive due to maintenance, compatibility, and edge cases.
Every agent skill should come with a nutritional label. We already have descriptions that tell us what skills do. The label should show whether a skil
Models know a lot about software, but we don’t really know how current that knowledge is. A model might have a knowledge cutoff of February 2026. That
A recent study of coding-agent trajectories found that 60.5% of observed documentation interaction targeted artifacts created for agents, such as inst
