Reinier van Maanen shares the launch of tech.hub.ms, a Microsoft tech news aggregator with AI-driven categorization, built in collaboration with Rob Bos and Xebia colleagues.

Announcing tech.hub.ms — Curated Microsoft Tech Content Platform

Author: Reinier van Maanen

Overview

tech.hub.ms is a new platform dedicated to aggregating and curating high-quality technical content in the Microsoft ecosystem. The project, spearheaded by Reinier van Maanen alongside Rob Bos and other Xebia colleagues, aims to provide an organized, filterable hub for topics such as Azure, AI, ML, GitHub Copilot, .NET, Security, and DevOps.

Features

Curated Content: The site collects news, blogs, videos, and community articles focused on Microsoft developer and engineering topics.
AI-Powered Categorization: Custom AI routines categorize, tag, and summarize incoming articles, helping users find relevant information efficiently.
Weekly Roundups: Regular highlights summarize the week’s most significant developments across all focus areas, enhancing knowledge discovery.
Contributor-Friendly: Contributions through Pull Requests are encouraged via the GitHub repo.

Topics Covered

Azure
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
GitHub Copilot
.NET ecosystem
Security (with a Microsoft focus)
DevOps

How It Works

tech.hub.ms operates as an advanced RSS scraper with integrated AI for content annotation. It aggregates feeds from approximately 70 sources, extracting as much detail as possible. The content is categorized, tagged, and summarized, with outbound links always referencing the original publishers to maintain author visibility and support.

Shortcut URLs like ai.hub.ms for AI or ghc.hub.ms for GitHub Copilot help users jump directly to specific topic areas.

Community and Contributors

The site is primarily developed and maintained by Reinier, with Rob Bos and other Xebia colleagues contributing substantial content (notably around GitHub Copilot). A list of direct contributors includes Rob Bos, Fokko Veegens, Liuba Gonta, and Randy Pagels.

Roadmap and Future Plans

Move to a dynamic site architecture for improved flexibility
More complete NLWeb support
Personalized roundups driven by user prompts
Podcast support for personalized roundups
Expanded AI and MCP agent coverage
Better search and tagging functionality
LinkedIn and event integration
Reintroduction of Reddit content via more robust scraping

Technical Stack

Jekyll for site-building
Dev containers for development
GitHub Pages for hosting (with plans to migrate to Azure Static Web Apps and Azure App Services due to scaling)
Playwright used for scraping and headless browser automation
Content analysis via GitHub Models and Azure OpenAI for robust summarization and rate-limiting mitigation

Planned Blog Topics

Building the platform architecture with Jekyll, dev containers, and GitHub Pages
Experiences leveraging GitHub Copilot and Azure OpenAI for development
Solving CI/CD and scaling challenges with Azure infrastructure
Data handling and automation for weekly roundups
Evolving from static hosting to full cloud deployment

Find out more at tech.hub.ms, or contribute to the project on GitHub.

This post appeared first on “Reinier van Maanen’s blog”. Read the entire article here