I’m Martin, CTO at Integrated Worlds GmbH in the Stuttgart region. I’ve been building .NET systems for nearly 20 years—since Framework 2.0 when SOAP was cutting-edge and ORMs were controversial.
Today I lead technology strategy for cloud-native solutions on Azure. Before this, I was Director Consulting Services at CGI, working with enterprise teams on architecture and transformation. I’m a Microsoft Certified Trainer and IHK-certified instructor, and I maintain several open-source NuGet packages.
As CTO, I don’t just make decisions from a distance. I write code, review PRs, debug production issues, and mentor teams. Technology leadership means staying hands-on and feeling the consequences of your choices.
As a trainer and mentor, I focus on fundamentals that outlast framework hype. Static analyzers, testing strategies, performance patterns, maintainable architecture—the stuff that actually prevents production fires.
As an open-source maintainer, I publish packages that solve problems I’ve hit repeatedly in real systems. When strangers depend on your code, you write better tests and clearer docs.
Almost two decades means I’ve made every mistake: over-engineered systems, bet on Silverlight and WCF (oops), built “flexible” architectures that were just complicated, shipped code I’m not proud of.
Here’s what stuck:
Quality isn’t optional – Analyzers catch bugs in milliseconds, tests prevent regressions, and both are faster than firefighting
Fundamentals outlast frameworks – Patterns and principles survive; specific tools don’t always
Context beats dogma – “Best practices” depend on your team, domain, and constraints
Evidence beats opinion – Measure, benchmark, validate before deciding
Pragmatism wins – Good-enough architecture that ships beats perfect architecture that doesn’t
I share perspectives from production systems and real teams. I’m skeptical of buzzword-driven development and allergic to cargo-cult practices. If a trend lacks substance or a pattern doesn’t hold up under pressure, I’ll say so.
This blog is for developers, solution architects and operators who maintain production systems and care about quality, not just shipping fast.
When we activated static code analysis for the first time in one of my last projects, the overwhelming number of warnings exceeded expectations and highlighted gaps in the code. Without making any changes, the project already had a significant number of warnings. After activating additional analyzers and updating some configurations, this number temporarily increased dramatically.
The high number of warnings was initially daunting, but we saw it as an opportunity to significantly improve our code quality. At first glance, it seemed easier to suppress or ignore these warnings. But as I often remind my team, “The code you create is a valuable legacy, so it’s important to build it carefully.” Ignoring warnings today creates obstacles for future developers—and that could very well include you six months down the line.
This experience reinforced the importance of managing warnings and errors systematically. Let me share some of the lessons we learned, the strategies we used to tame those 60,000 warnings, and how you can apply these techniques to your own projects.
In software development, there’s a silent debt that accrues interest over time, often hidden beneath layers of code and decisions made in haste or ignorance. This debt is aptly termed technical debt. Much like the german proverb, “Wer den Pfennig nicht ehrt, ist den Taler nicht wert”, (or the english equivalent, “A penny saved is a penny earned”) technical debt reminds us that small oversights or compromises in the present can snowball into significant challenges down the road. This article critically examines the parallels between financial principles and technical debt, emphasizing the importance of addressing both direct and indirect debt while understanding its distinction from external risks such as hacking or abuse.
In software development, dependencies are inevitable - any project worth its salt relies on various libraries, frameworks, or packages. However, as I found in my own work, managing these dependencies can be an onerous task. Constant updates, new vulnerabilities, and endless manual approvals were draining my time and focus. What if, I thought, these processes could be automated? This thought led to the creation of dependamerge, a GitHub Action designed to free developers from the drudgery of manual dependency maintenance and let us get back to what we do best: building great software.
As developers, we’re often tasked with maintaining and modernizing legacy codebases that were written long before some of the best practices of today—such as nullability annotations—were available. While modern C# now supports nullable reference types, enabling us to avoid the dreaded NullReferenceException, introducing this feature to existing, large codebases can be a challenge.
In this article, I’ll share my step-by-step approach for introducing nullability into a legacy .NET and C# project. You’ll learn how to apply nullability in a controlled, incremental manner using project-level settings, scoped annotations, and file/method-level directives, all while maintaining the integrity of your legacy codebase. After all, modernizing your code doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing endeavor—gradual change is key to a successful transition. Let’s get started!
In the ever-evolving world of .NET development, managing project configurations effectively is crucial for maintaining a clean and efficient build process. One of the less frequently discussed but highly useful properties is BuildingInsideVisualStudio. This property, when correctly utilized, can streamline your build process and ensure that your project is configured properly depending on the build environment. In this article, we’ll explore the BuildingInsideVisualStudio property with concrete examples and discuss best practices for using it effectively.
