Notes on cloud & data architecture, .NET engineering and the practice of shipping software, written from the field, with the code to back it up.
The broad areas everything here files under.
Multi-part deep dives, meant to be read in order. Recently active first.
The 22-part Convey series read the packages; it never once walked the sample system that ships with them. Opening the missing chapters with the trip an order takes through Orders, Pricing and Deliveries — and what the samples quietly teach that no package README does.
Seventeen parts of reading FastEndpoints and the series never once mentioned mappers - the entity-translation layer half the endpoint base classes exist to serve. The Missing Chapters opens with the biggest gap: where mappers live, how they are found, and why they are secretly singletons. Part 1 of FastEndpoints — The Missing Chapters.
Every team's fifth microservice ships with the same four hundred lines of bootstrap code as the first four. Opening a deep-dive series on Convey, the open-source .NET toolkit that turned that boilerplate into thirty composable packages.
Teams ask for a rewrite as though greenfield were a reward for enduring the old codebase - it is a diagnosis with a test attached, and misdiagnosis is how rewrites fail. Part 1 of 2 on choosing the field you build on.
The first exercise I give anyone learning to direct coding agents has no prompt in it at all - it is a status bar. Why sixty lines of PowerShell teach context and harness thinking better than any lecture about either.
Controllers grow sideways and Minimal APIs grow into soup. FastEndpoints bets on a third shape - one class per endpoint - and this series reads its source to see how the bet is implemented. Part 1 of FastEndpoints in Depth.
What .NET Aspire actually does for a real multi-service system - the AppHost model, service defaults, the dashboard, and the road from F5 to deployment.
Already on the schedule — the next articles off the publish ladder, nearest date first.
Wire four services into a .NET Aspire AppHost and run it once - traces, logs, health and environment variables for the whole system, before you have written a single line of observability code. Part 1 of a series on Aspire in production.
