Daily DevOps & .NET - Where Code Meets Culture

Opinionated .NET, Azure and DevOps engineering. Hard-won lessons from production, no tutorials.

Platform Engineering Without Backstage: Pragmatic IDPs on Azure

Platform Engineering Without Backstage: Pragmatic IDPs on Azure

Every platform engineering conference talk in the last two years has had a Backstage slide. Glossy catalogue screenshot, a scaffolder demo that creates a repo in four clicks, a knowing nod about “developer experience”. What the slide never shows is the six months the team spent building plugins, the Postgres instance somebody now babysits, the TechDocs theme nobody asked for, and the 0.4 of an engineer permanently assigned to chasing Backstage’s two-week release cadence.

There is no shame in any of this. Backstage is a serious project and serious teams run it well. The shame is treating it as the default (the thing you reach for on day one) when most teams could ship 80% of the value with a tenth of the effort and a fraction of the running cost. Backstage is a platform for building platforms. Most teams need a platform, not a platform-platform.

This post is the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) I keep building when nobody is forcing me to use Backstage. It is small, opinionated, runs on Azure plumbing you already pay for, and ships value in the first quarter instead of the third year.

My Biggest Enemy Writes My Code

My Biggest Enemy Writes My Code

Past Self wrote the code I maintain today. He had context I’ve lost, constraints I’ve forgotten, and reasons he never documented. He’s gone now, but the code isn’t. This is the second part of the Code as Legacy series, about the engineer who left me this mess, and what I’m handing Future Self in return.
Six Ways ILogger Silently Fails in Production

Six Ways ILogger Silently Fails in Production

I lost half a day because BeginScope silently did nothing in production: no error, no warning, just a flat stream of undifferentiated log entries. ILogger is a façade over a pipeline full of opt-in behaviour that looks enabled by default. Scopes, structured properties, minimum levels, exception chains, timestamps: all have failure modes that compile cleanly and fail quietly.
The Code You Write Today Is Someone's Problem Tomorrow

The Code You Write Today Is Someone’s Problem Tomorrow

The code you create is a valuable legacy — my author bio. Not marketing copy. It’s the most expensive lesson from nearly two decades in production systems. This article explains what it actually means when you’ve lived with the consequences.
Stop Pretending TimeProvider Doesn't Exist

Stop Pretending TimeProvider Doesn’t Exist

DateTime.UtcNow looks harmless. It is not. It is a hidden dependency you cannot control in tests, cannot reproduce in staging, and cannot freeze to catch the bugs that only surface at midnight or on the last day of the month. .NET 8 shipped TimeProvider to fix this. Two years on, most codebases still ignore it. Some planned to adopt it later. Later has not arrived.