Last year I wrote a post,career chutes and ladders, where I proposed that a linear climb to the C-suite is not the only approach to a satisfying career. At the end of the post, I mentioned I was stepping off the ladder to take on an IC role.After over a year of being on a personally funded sabbatical, I started a new job atPostHogas a Senior Product Engineer. This week is my orientation where I get todrink from the firehoseonce again.What is PostHog?Apart from being a company that seems to really love cute hedgehogs, PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform. They have a set of tool ...继续阅读 (3)

I love usingRefitto call web APIs in a nice type-safe manner. Sometimes though, APIs don’t want to cooperate with your strongly-typed hopes. For example, you might run into an API written by a hipster in a beanie, aka a dynamic-type enthusiast. I don’t say that pejoratively. Some of my closest friends write Python and Ruby.For example, I came across an API that returned a value like this:{"important":true}No problem, I defined a class like this to deserialize it to:publicclassImportantResponse{publicboolImportant{get;set;}}And life was good. Until that awful day that the API returned this:{"im ...继续阅读 (7)

The career ladder is a comforting fiction we’re sold as we embark on our careers: Start as Junior, climb to Senior, then Principal, Director, and VP. One day, you finally trade the only thing you have left, your soul, for a key to the executive bathroom and bask in the C-suite glow. You’ve made it!If you’re lucky, your company supports a tall Individual Contributor (IC) ladder. But often, the next rung swaps your hoodie for a power shirt, suspenders, and management duties.My first job followed this script: developer to team lead to Senior Manager. I was hustling up that ladder.But life isn’t l ...继续阅读 (7)

Ever look for a recipe online only to scroll through a self-important rambling 10-page essay about a trip to Tuscany that inspired the author to create the recipe? Finally, after wearing out your mouse, trackpad, or Page Down key to scroll to the end, you get to the actual recipe. I hate those.So I’ll spare you the long scroll and start this post with agit bisectcheat sheet and then I’ll tell you about my trip to hell that lead me to write this post.$git bisect start$git bisect bad# Current version is bad$git bisect good v2.6.13-rc2# v2.6.13-rc2 is known to be good.# Repeat git bisect [good|ba ...继续阅读 (13)

C# 11 introduced a new feature -static virtual members in interfaces. The primary motivation for this feature is to support generic math algorithms. The mention of math might make some ignore this feature, but it turns out it can be useful in other scenarios.For example, I was able to leverage this feature to clean up how I register and consume custom config section types.Custom Config SectionAs a refresher, let’s look at custom config sections. Suppose you want to configure an API client in yourappSettings.json. You can map the config section to a type. For example, here is anappSettings.json ...继续阅读 (28)

This is a follow-up tomy previous postwhere I compared .NET Aspire to NuGet. In that post, I promised I would follow up with a comparison of using .NET Aspire to add a service dependency to a project versus using Docker. And looky here, I’m following through for once!The goal of these examples is to look at how much “ceremony” there is to add a service dependency to a .NET project using .NET Aspire versus using Docker. Even though it may not be the “best” example, I chose PostgreSql because it’s often the first service dependency I add to a new project. The example would be stronger if I chose ...继续阅读 (32)

RecentlyI tweeted,It’s not a perfect analogy, but .Net Aspire is like NuGet for cloud services. We created NuGet to make it easy to pull in libraries. Before, it took a lot of steps. Nowadays, to use a service like Postgres or Rabbit MQ, takes a lot of steps.And I’m not just saying that becauseDavid Fowler, one of the creators of .NET Aspire, was alsomost definitely one of the creators of NuGet. But it is his MO to focus on developer productivity.To understand why I said that, it helps to look at my initial blog post that introduced NuGet. Specifically the section“What does NuGet solve?”.The . ...继续阅读 (34)

When you fail, many people will tell you how failure is a great teacher. And they’re not wrong. But you know what else is a great teacher? Success! And success is a lot less expensive than failure.About a month ago, my co-founder and I decided to shut down our startup, A Serious Business, Inc., the makers of Abbot. He wrote somebeautiful words about it on LinkedIn. Now it’s my turn to write some less than beautiful words about the experience.Before I get all maudlin about failure, let me say that the experience of building a company from scratch with a close friend and amazing team was one of ...继续阅读 (80)

One of my pet peeves is when I’m using a .NET client library that uses internal constructors for its return type. For example, let’s take a look at theAzure.AI.OpenAInuget package. Now, I don’t mean to single out this package, as this is a common practice. It just happens to be the one I’m using at the moment. It’s an otherwise lovely package. I’m sure the authors are lovely people.Here’s a method that calls the Azure Open AI service to get completions. Note that this is a simplified version of the actual method for demonstration purposes:publicasyncTaskGetCompletionsAsync(){varendpoint=newUri ...继续阅读 (48)

This is the final installment of the adventures of Bill Maack the Hapless Developer (any similarity to me is purely coincidental and a result of pure random chance in an infinite universe). Follow along as Bill continues to improve the reliability of his ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core code. If you haven’t read the previous installments, you can find them here:How to Recover from a DbUpdateException With EF CoreWhy Did That Database Throw That Exception?In the first post, we looked at a backgroundHangfirejob that processed incoming Slack event and it raised some questions such as:DbCont ...继续阅读 (41)

This is the final installment of the adventures of Bill Maack the Hapless Developer (any similarity to me is purely coincidental and a result of pure random chance in an infinite universe). Follow along as Bill continues to improve the reliability of his ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core code. If you haven’t read the previous installments, you can find them here:How to Recover from a DbUpdateException With EF CoreWhy Did That Database Throw That Exception?In the first post, we looked at a backgroundHangfirejob that processed incoming Slack event and it raised some questions such as:DbCont ...继续阅读 (53)

In theprevious installmentof the adventures of the hapless developer, Bill Maack, Bill faced some code that tries to recover from a race condition when creating aUserif theUserentity doesn’t already exist.As a reminder, these events are based on real events with real production code, but with names, locations, and code changed to protect the guilty. All code samples have been simplified for brevity.At the end of the last post, Bill pondered the following question:There’s a problem with the exception handling. A unique constraint violation is not the only reason EF might throw aDbUpdateExceptio ...继续阅读 (44)