Martin Stühmer — CTO, Enterprise Architect & DevOps Engineer

Who I Am

I’m Martin, CTO at Integrated Worlds GmbH in the Stuttgart region. I’ve been writing production .NET code since Framework 2.0 — back when SOAP was still considered modern and ORMs were a heated debate. A lot has changed since then. My opinions have changed too, usually because I was wrong about something.

Before Integrated Worlds, I was Director of Consulting Services at CGI, leading teams through architecture decisions and digital transformation projects across multiple industries. These days I set technology strategy and stay close enough to the code to feel the consequences of those decisions firsthand.

I’m a Microsoft Certified Trainer and IHK-certified instructor, maintain several open-source NuGet packages, and write about what I’ve actually learned rather than what sounds good in theory.

LinkedIn · GitHub · Bluesky

What I Know Well

Nearly two decades of production work leaves marks. Here’s where I’ve built up depth and, frankly, strong opinions:

.NET and C# — I’ve tracked this ecosystem from the framework era to .NET 10. Source generators, Roslyn analyzers, performance engineering, testing strategies, static analysis. I know what actually improved over the years and what just changed names.

Cloud-native architecture on Azure — AKS at scale, multi-cluster networking, zero-downtime upgrade strategies, cost governance, observability. I’ve spent enough time in Azure to know the gap between what it can do and what you should actually use.

DevOps and supply-chain security — GitHub Actions, dependency management, container security, Bicep-based infrastructure compliance. The organisational side matters as much as the tooling.

Application security and privacy — Azure Key Vault, managed identities, GDPR-relevant .NET patterns, data minimisation, AI coding tool content exclusions. Security that works in practice, not just in architecture diagrams.

Engineering culture — What AI coding assistants actually change about software quality (less than the hype, more than the skeptics admit), how to introduce static analysis without poisoning team morale, and when “best practices” are earned principles versus cargo-cult repetition.

How I Work

As CTO I stay close to the code. I write, review PRs, debug production issues, and mentor — because technology leadership that operates purely from a distance eventually loses touch with the real cost of decisions.

As a trainer I focus on fundamentals that outlast the current framework cycle. Static analysis, testing discipline, performance patterns, maintainable architecture. The things that prevent fires, not just the things that look good in a job posting.

As an open-source maintainer I publish packages that solve problems I’ve hit repeatedly. Knowing that strangers depend on your code is one of the better ways to raise your standards.

What I’ve Learned the Hard Way

I’ve over-engineered systems that should have been simple. I bet on Silverlight and WCF. I built “flexible” architectures that were really just complicated ones. I’ve shipped code I’m not proud of.

Here’s what held up after all that:

  • Quality isn’t optional — analyzers find bugs in milliseconds, tests prevent regressions, and neither is slower than a production incident
  • Fundamentals outlast frameworks — the patterns and principles stick around long after the tools are deprecated
  • Context beats dogma — “best practices” always depend on your team, domain, and actual constraints
  • Evidence beats intuition — measure, benchmark, validate; don’t just decide
  • Pragmatism wins — architecture that ships beats architecture that’s perfect on paper

What I Write About

Everything here comes from production systems and real teams, not documentation rewrites. I’m skeptical of buzzword-driven development and allergic to advice that’s never been tested under load or deadline. If something doesn’t hold up, I’ll say so.

The topics I keep returning to: .NET and C# performance and evolution, Azure and AKS architecture decisions, DevOps and supply-chain risk, application security and GDPR implementation, what AI coding tools actually change (and what they don’t), and the economics of technical debt and code quality.

I write for developers, architects, and operators who maintain production systems and care about getting it right — not just getting it shipped.

The code you create is a valuable legacy, so it’s important to build it carefully.

Published blogs

Standardize or Drift: One Defaults Package for All Your Solutions

Standardize or Drift: One Defaults Package for All Your Solutions

Directory.Build.props drift is the quiet tax every multi-repo .NET org pays. NetEvolve.Defaults ships MSBuild properties, .editorconfig, NuGet Audit, and ten Roslyn diagnostics as a private-asset NuGet package. Bump the version once, every repo gets the upgrade.
.NET 11: The STS Release With C# 15 Union Types and Runtime-Async

.NET 11: The STS Release With C# 15 Union Types and Runtime-Async

STS releases are supposed to be quiet bridges to the next LTS. .NET 11 is not. The union keyword landed in Preview 2, runtime-async is now the default for the BCL and ASP.NET Core shared framework, System.Diagnostics.Process ships a major overhaul, and EF Core gains approximate vector search against SQL Server 2025. All facts sourced from the .NET repositories.
TUnit.Mocks: No Castle, No Reflection, No Drama

TUnit.Mocks: No Castle, No Reflection, No Drama

Most .NET test projects rely on NSubstitute and Castle.DynamicProxy. That foundation is cracking: NativeAOT breaks it, trimming strips it, cold-start costs accumulate. TUnit.Mocks takes a different route: a source generator emits typed mocks at compile time, IService.Mock() (or Mock.Of<T>()) is the entry point, runtime reflection is gone.
The Codebase Doesn't Know You Quit

The Codebase Doesn't Know You Quit

The first four parts of this series treated legacy as something between me and myself: Past Self leaving code for Future Self, with an AI in the middle. That framing is incomplete. Code outlives employment, not just memory. The companies I worked for have forgotten most of what I did there. The repositories haven’t. This is the fifth part of the Code as Legacy series, about the legacy you leave when you’re not around to defend it.
The Machine Writes. The Legacy Is Still Mine.

The Machine Writes. The Legacy Is Still Mine.

Part three ended with me promising to stop adding to Past Self’s pile. I was already wrong. I’m not the only author anymore: Copilot and Claude finish methods before I’ve finished thinking, shipping code under my name with my git config as the committer. This is part four of the Code as Legacy series, about what changes when the author is partly a machine.