All Articles on .NET, Azure & DevOps Engineering

Browse our latest articles exploring the tension between innovation and stability in software development

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.
You're Shipping Bugs Faster, and Your Tests Are Helping

You’re Shipping Bugs Faster, and Your Tests Are Helping

AI coding agents make you faster. They also make your bugs faster: they generate plausible-looking code, you review quickly, the tests pass, and production breaks two weeks later. I keep falling into this pattern myself, always on the happy path, telling myself the edge cases come later. They don’t. Here’s the pattern, why most test frameworks make it worse, and how TUnit fights it.
I'm Done Making Empty Promises

I’m Done Making Empty Promises

I’ve spent two articles in this series describing Past Self and the damage he left behind. What I haven’t said yet is the uncomfortable part: I am Past Self, right now, making the same promises he made. // TODO: fix this properly. We’ll clean that up after the release. I’ll write the tests when there’s time. This is the third part of the Code as Legacy series, and I’m deciding to stop.
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.