Field notes on .NET and Azure architecture, legacy modernization, and AI-assisted development that survives contact with production.
I stood up five .NET services and a compensating order saga solo, in six weeks, most of it not spent typing. The tempting read is that AI replaced the team — but having just done it, I'm here to tell you the work shifted left, not away.
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Onion layering, a transactional outbox, an event-fed projection, and CQRS aren't four separate patterns — they're one composed system, and JobBoard proves it on a single screen. Here's the code, the honest caveats, and the seed-data bug that revealed exactly how they depend on each other.
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A client asked for 'full traceability, cradle to grave.' My first instinct was distributed tracing, and it was the wrong system entirely. Here's how reframing the ask — and the security hole it uncovered along the way — became a queryable audit trail on a five-service .NET stack.
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Everyone's racing to write a CLAUDE.md and a folder of skills — but the toolkit is the easy 20%. I built a five-service event-driven job board with Claude Code, and the real deliverable isn't the .claude/ folder; it's the architectural judgment that authored it and turns a plausible alpha into something you'd actually ship.
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Most consulting relationships ask you to buy on faith: you like the person on the call, you sign, and only then find out what "senior architecture help" actually means. So I put an entire engagement in a public repo — the ADRs, the prompt library, and the system built from them.
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Every project management tool assumes a project has a team. This client had it backward — one team carrying three projects, and a senior developer with nine items in progress that no tool could see. So I built the board that could, using layered SCRUB prompts.
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The AI does something genuinely terrifying: it writes code that runs fine, ships, and is quietly wrong. So I stopped typing instructions at it and started engineering them — and built a 1,200-line Angular component from a prompt document written before a single line of TypeScript.
Read MoreThe backend came together in five minutes: ASP.NET Core 9, Aspire, Azure SQL, microservices. The UI was a different beast entirely — and buying a template instead of building one was the right architectural call.
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"Audit framework" sounds about as exciting as watching paint dry. Then comes the "oh shit" moment where someone asks who changed a record and when — and you find you cannot answer. Here is what we built instead.
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The world does not need another side project that fizzles out after a GitHub repo and a half-finished README. It needs projects that teach as they grow. This is the blueprint for AspireHire — and the series that builds it in the open.
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Save to the database, publish an event. Two writes, one of which can fail — and now your system is lying to itself. The Outbox Pattern makes the business operation and the event publish atomic, and this is how you actually implement it.
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"Our system is slow, hard to scale, and every deployment is a nail-biting experience." Six months of modernizing a retail client's monolithic e-commerce platform — and the lessons that only show up in production.
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A simple request for a list of blog posts ballooned into hundreds of queries. The CPU was fine. The database was fine. The problem was me — and the classic EF Core traps that catch almost everyone.
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Testing is the backbone of reliable software and the most time-consuming part of building it. Here are the prompts that get Copilot generating genuinely useful MSTest DataRows across an Onion Architecture — controller and business layers both.
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Microservices are the easy part. Making them talk to each other without a pile of hand-rolled HttpClient boilerplate is the part that quietly rots. Refit turns inter-service communication into a declarative interface — here is how we wire it.
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When you are running multiple microservices across environments, "it works on my machine" stops being a joke and starts being an outage. Observability cannot be bolted on later — so here is how we build it in from the start.
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Copilot demos beautifully and disappoints quietly. The difference between the two is everything you do around it — how you prompt it, where you trust it, and where you absolutely do not.
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Architecture still matters, and most systems prove it the hard way. A real-world implementation of Domain-Driven Design on Onion Architecture in .NET 9 — dependencies pointing inward, business reality in the code.
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Cutting through the marketing gloss on .NET Aspire: how it is actually used in production, by real teams, for real clients, on an architecture that scales.
Read MoreBuilding cloud-native apps can feel like juggling flaming swords while riding a unicycle. Aspire Café is a hands-on, working template — microservices, orchestration, infrastructure and patterns you can actually read.
Read MoreThat's usually where an engagement starts — a system that outgrew its assumptions, and a team that needs senior judgment without a full-time hire.
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