Multi-part deep dives, grouped by topic. 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.
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.
A guided tour of FeedR, DevMentors' open-source .NET microservices sample for real-time data feeds - six services, Redis pub/sub, Apache Pulsar and a gRPC stream, and the two-tier eventing model that makes it worth reading. Part 1 of a source-level deep dive.
Split one database into five services and the transaction you deleted does not disappear - it goes feral. On sagas, compensation, process managers, and Chronicle, the small open-source .NET library this series reads line by line.
Unit tests mock what you assume, end-to-end tests tell you too late - consumer-driven contract testing closes the gap, and a small open-source .NET library called Pactify is the clearest way I know to learn how it works. Part 1 of a series.
Rename a property, change a type, ship the release - and every payload you stored last year stops deserialising. Introducing VersionKit, a .NET library that declares schema history as attributes and migrates old data on read.
Database-per-tenant, schema-per-tenant, or packed into a shared database? Kicking off a series on building a multi-tenant platform where one EF Core codebase supports all three isolation strategies behind a single control plane.
Dozens of Azure Functions and Logic Apps need each other's URLs and keys, and there is no Kubernetes, no sidecar, no mesh to hand them out. How a small .NET library turned one Key Vault and a naming convention into a working discovery layer - the consumer side of a registry made of secrets. Part 1 of a new series.
Hard deletes destroy the audit trail; soft deletes clutter live tables forever. Introducing ArchiveKit, a .NET library that intercepts deletions and stores immutable archive snapshots with TTL policies and cascade archiving.
Convey sells a microservice in thirty lines, and Pacco builds ten of them - this series reads the whole estate to price what the framework compresses and what every consumer pays for by hand. Part 1 of The Convey Consumer Tax.
DShop.Common is the shared library nine microservices were built on - and the rough draft of a framework its authors later shipped as Convey.
A 6.23 MB JavaScript bundle loaded on every page, a manifest that minifies CSS but concatenates JS, and two copies of jQuery - the first of four frontend chapters the attendance series skipped.
Five executables, zero queues - how an attendance platform coordinated a web app, three Azure Functions and a console job through one SQL database, and what that choice bought and cost. Part 1 of the series.
Badge gates, WFH timers and shift allowances - the shape of a seven-project intranet attendance platform, the onion it almost is, and the roadmap for fourteen more parts.
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.
Agents now work unattended for stretches long enough that the conversation can no longer save you - why unstructured runs fail, the five-phase PREVC workflow I adapted from an open-source skeleton, and where this ten-part series goes.
Between late 2025 and early 2026 coding agents stopped pausing to ask questions - this series opener maps the five-discipline stack I now use to direct them, from table-stakes prompting to specification engineering.
Opening the Terraform Module Catalog with the library's flagship: how an App Service module bundles VNet integration, dual managed identities and Key Vault TLS into a surface app teams can fill in but not opt out of.
The conventions that let one Terraform sample library serve hundreds of Azure deployments - a five-file layout, workspace-indexed environments, pinned golden modules and pipeline-first delivery. Part 1 of a series on Terraform for the Azure estate.
The per-row triggers that ran KC Star for six versions stop scaling at high volume. V7 turns them off and moves fact generation into an explicit batch pipeline. Kicking off the ultra-scale series - batch processing, feature flags, automated monitoring.
After nine versions of accumulating ambition, KC Star V9 Simplified does the rarest thing - it takes features away. No permission groups, no group cache, just direct permission lists. The README recommends starting here. Kicking off the series on the version I would actually deploy.
Every version through V7 rebuilt all the measures when a dimension changed. KC Star V8 recalculates only the ones that actually depend on what moved - dependency analysis, selective recalculation, and claimed 60 to 80 percent less work. Kicking off the intelligent recalculation series.
KC Star V6 layers role-based access control onto the org hierarchy - eight permission types, five hierarchy levels, and grants that expire. Kicking off the series where the warehouse learns that not everyone should see every number.
KC Star V5 gives the sales star a sibling: a full organizational hierarchy — organisation, regions, offices, personnel — with its own dimension rows, its own fact rows, and its own SCD2. Kicking off the series on the version where one star became three.
Through V3, KC Star assumed every number it was fed was true. V4 stops assuming - adding data quality scores, lineage, and performance monitoring so the warehouse can say how much it trusts its own data. Kicking off the data governance series.
KC Star V9 fuses V8's intelligent recalculation with V6's permission-aware calculations - and folds the employee and their permissions into the very hash that decides what to recompute. Kicking off the series where two engines meet in one version, and complexity meets its reckoning.
What if dimensions and measures were rows instead of columns? Introducing KC Star, a PostgreSQL data warehouse I evolved through nine versions, starting with the inverted foundation - SCD2 history, SHA-256 fingerprints and time travel included.
KC Star V2 leaked aggregate rows because base facts and rollups shared one table. V3 gives aggregates a dedicated SalesAggregationFact table with its own SCD2 - and the fix is as much about what SalesFact loses as what the new table gains.
KC Star V1 declared eight measures and computed four. V2 computes all eight - base measures and aggregates together in a single SalesFact table. Kicking off the series on the version that made the warehouse analytical, and started the trouble that V3 had to fix.
Dashboards go green while codebases rot - the opener of a fourteen-part series on measuring code quality and software delivery without staging the theatre that ruins both.
Most competency models fail the same way - everything matters equally, so nothing does. The case for a two-level weighting system, and a first look at the two mirrored frameworks this series unpacks.
Thirteen repositories, one umbrella that runs twelve of them, two interchangeable API gateways and a service that watches everything - the Pacco estate read as a system of systems, and the fifteen-part series it earns.
Nobody in Pacco approves an order - a vehicle reservation does. A tour of DevMentors' parcel-delivery estate, the domain it models, and the fifteen-part series it earns.
DevMentors built the same e-commerce shop twice - once as a monolith, once as nine services - with two gateways and two frontends. This series reads the whole estate as one artefact.
DShop is one e-commerce shop stamped out as nine microservices over RabbitMQ - this series reads the real source to see how the topology holds together and where it drifts. Part 1 of Nine Services and a Message Bus.
Series in the works — parts written, not yet published.
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.
