Choose Boring Technology

Like wine, (some) technology gets better with age. The blog Choose Boring Technology advocates to make technology choices as boring as possible, unless you deliberately choose or have room for the unknown. “Boring” is not a lack of ambition—it’s the deliberate, wise pursuit of excellence. Choose your “innovation tokens” wisely, and your future self will thank you.

I would have loved to see the talk in a YouTube video, but only the slides are available – so I made a longform instead. Enjoy the read.

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Validating Dependency Injection

This is a snippet from Nick’s recent video

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.Host.UseDefaultServiceProvider((context, options) =>
{
    options.ValidateScopes = true;
    options.ValidateOnBuild = true;
});
  • UseDefaultServiceProvider: Configures the default DI (Dependency Injection) container.
  • ValidateScopes = true: Ensures that scoped services are not resolved from the root provider (to avoid accidental singleton-like behavior).
  • ValidateOnBuild = true: Forces validation of the service provider at application startup to catch misconfigurations early.

Understanding High CPU and Memory Usage: When to Act and When to Relax

Modern applications, especially cloud applications running on right-sized infrastructure, rely heavily on efficient resource management, but “efficiency” doesn’t always mean “low usage.” High CPU or memory consumption can be either a red flag or a sign of optimal performance, depending on the context. In this post, we’ll explore when to celebrate high resource usage—and when to panic—with a focus on .NET applications.

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Future-proofing Result<T> Libraries

C# is coming ‘soon’ with Type Unions (see the official proposal and Nick’s video on this), which I think is great. However it’s not there yet and if you need it now it’s important t consider which library will require the least refactoring when this feature becomes part of the official language specification.

This post explores some of the most popular libraries in .NET for implementing this pattern and helps you decide which one fits your project’s needs.

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From Layers to Rings – Hexagonal Architectures Explained (by Silas Graffy)

This article is a proper English translation of Von Schichten zu Ringen – Hexagonale Architekturen erklärt by Silas Graffy. I found it to be one of the best explanations and motivations for the architecture style, but the ‘Chrome Autotranslation’ was severely lacking.

In summary:

  1. Classical layered architectures do not work: they put the database as a foundation and they tend to evolve into ‘everything talks to everything spaghetti’.
  2. In the mid-90’s, building on the Dependency Inversion Principle, Alistair Cockburn coined the hexagonal architecture: it decouples the core application logic from external concerns (such as databases).
  3. Because six sides was rather random, the name was changed in 2005 to Ports and Adapters.
  4. If we add the internal/external notion, we arrive at the Onion Architecture (Jeffrey Palermo in 2008).
  5. This inspired Clean Architecture (Robert C. Martin in 2012), as a more generalized form of the Onion Architecture.

Enjoy the read.

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Exploring options for building REST APIs with C# and deploying to Azure

Somebody asked me, what is the difference between a C# REST API running as a Web App on an App Service as a container and a C# REST API running as a HTTP Function on an App Service or a Consumption Plan?

There are lots of aspects in this question, so let’s unpack this a bit first.

First, let’s talk about the various ways we can build REST APIs in .NET.
Then, we’ll talk about how you can deploy these, either as code or as a container.
Last, we’ll explore – if you end up with a container – which Azure service best fits your needs.

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David Deutsch on (un)sustainability & climate optimism

David Deutsch – The Beginning of Infinity

David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity brims with ideas that turn conventional wisdom on its head. One especially eye-opening chapter in this book, titled “Unsustainable,” challenges the familiar notion that human progress inevitably stumbles over finite resources. Deutsch suggests that what truly brings about societal collapse isn’t the depletion of a particular resource, but rather a failure to keep creating new knowledge. It’s a perspective that, paradoxically, leads to optimism—even about environmental issues such as climate change—because creativity and innovation can render the “limits of nature” far less limiting than we might think.

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