James Montemagno
James Montemagno

Live, Love, Bike, and Code.

Tags


James Montemagno
Author

Introducing PDF Diff: Compare PDFs Privately in Your Browser

Hey friends! I'm super excited to share a new tool I've been working on that solves a problem I bet many of you have faced: how do you quickly compare two PDF documents to see what changed? Enter PDF Diff! Why I Built This Look, we've all been there. You get two versions of a contract, a proposal, or a license agreement, and you need to figure out what changed between them. Sure, you could upload them to some random website, but do you really want to send your potentially sensit…

James Montemagno James Montemagno

5 Ways I Use Background Coding Agents Every Day

Coding agents are different from in-editor chat and agent modes for AI assisted programming. They run asynchronously—often in the cloud—tackling tasks while you focus locally. I rely heavily on the GitHub Copilot coding agent and its VS Code integration to spin up multiple parallel workflows. Below are five everyday patterns I use to offload work, speed up development, and keep my repos in top shape. 1. Assign Issues Directly to GitHub Copilot When a new issue or idea lands, I immediately han…

James Montemagno James Montemagno

Announcing Hotkey Typer — type long prompts with a hotkey

When I'm recording demos or making videos I often need to reproduce long prompts or blocks of text on-screen. Manually retyping them every time is slow and error-prone, and pasting from the clipboard can feel jerky and reveal private content. I wanted a tiny, reliable app that would let me press a global hotkey and have the application type a predefined, human-like block of text into whatever app currently has focus — perfect for demos, tutorials, and repeatable workflows. Enter Hotkey Typ…

James Montemagno James Montemagno

Developing & Working with .NET Containers on Windows ARM Devices

I am by no means a cloud-native developer, I am a client developer. I have spent some time though to get a general understanding about microservices, images, containers, docker, and all the buzz words that surround the topic. I recently got really into DevContainers and using them on GitHub Codespaces and Visual Studio Code to create an environment to run apps in. From there, I went down a rabbit hole of educating myself more by taking Microsoft Learn training courses, watching the new container…

James Montemagno James Montemagno