01 / Writing

Notes from the build.

Architecture, .NET, cloud, AI, and graph databases — written from production, not theory.

Featured · October 13, 2026 · 11 min

Why the Agile Coach Is Not a Luxury in a Software Team

Why the work of an agile coach can't simply be handed to the tech lead or the CTO, why agile is about results and not comfort, and why retrospectives and other ceremonies are the glue of a team, especially a remote one.

October 6, 2026 · 6 min

Keeping Your Knowledge Graph Current Without a Dedicated Team

A knowledge graph that nobody updates becomes a lie with good syntax. This article builds the automated maintenance loop — deriving edges from git history, deployment manifests, and OpenTelemetry service maps, reconciling on a schedule, and handling conflicts with provenance on every edge.

October 6, 2026 · 7 min

Hybrid Retrieval in C#: Combining Vector Search, Graph Traversal, and Reranking for Agent Memory

Vector search finds candidate entry points; graph traversal expands context around them; a cross-encoder reranker decides what actually reaches the model. This article implements that full pipeline in C# with real token budgets, RRF fusion, and deduplication.

October 5, 2026 · 7 min

Edge AI with .NET, Part 4: Time Series That Outlives the Hardware

Sensor readings are more valuable than the devices that produce them. This instalment shows how to model IoT meter data in TimescaleDB 2.29, map it with EF Core 10, and run a .NET anomaly-detection worker that survives meter swaps, tariff changes, and dead cameras.

October 5, 2026 · 6 min

Edge AI with .NET, Part 3: Vision OCR You Can Actually Trust

Reading utility meter digits with a vision model is a solved demo and an unsolved production problem. This article covers prompt design, image detail costs, the documented failure modes that matter, and the validation layer that makes a GPT-6-Astra reading safe to persist.

October 5, 2026 · 7 min

Edge AI with .NET, Part 2: Arduino Firmware That Sleeps Most of Its Life

Most of your firmware's job is doing nothing, efficiently. This article covers the complete Arduino firmware for the ESP32 based M5Stack Timer Camera X: dual mode operation, NVS config storage, HTTPS posting, and getting back to deep sleep in under five seconds.

October 5, 2026 · 7 min

Edge AI with .NET, Part 1: Integrating a 1975 Power Meter That Has No API

A 50-year-old Ferraris disc meter has no network port, no pulse output, and no protocol. Here's how to build a complete integration stack around a camera, a .NET 10 minimal API, and TimescaleDB when the only interface is a photograph.

October 5, 2026 · 7 min

Graph-Native Data Structures in C#, Part 7: Bipartite Graphs & Collaborative Filtering in NebulaGraph

In this series finale we build a user and product recommendation engine on NebulaGraph using bipartite graph modelling and two hop collaborative filtering, including scored ranking, cache invalidation, and where hybrid vector and graph retrieval goes next.

October 5, 2026 · 7 min

Building an Agentic System in .NET, Part 6: Redaction, Audit and the Safety Layer

If you archive every agent session, you also archive every secret anyone ever pasted into one. This last part covers the full safety layer: redaction pipelines, audit trails, prompt injection threat modelling and retention pruning, with code.

October 5, 2026 · 7 min

Building an Agentic System in .NET, Part 5: Designing an Agent Bus in ASP.NET Core

Design a production agent bus in ASP.NET Core 10 with EF Core, SignalR and PostgreSQL, covering agent registration, topic channels, at least once delivery, claim semantics with row level locking, and self contained hand off payloads.

September 30, 2026 · 10 min

WebMCP: Letting Agents Call Your Web App Instead of Clicking It

Agents interact with your site by reading the DOM and guessing which element to click. WebMCP lets the page declare named tools instead. Here is the real API, the security model, and how it fits next to an MCP server in C#.

September 29, 2026 · 7 min

Your AI Cost Model Is Already Wrong: Tokenizers, Context Cliffs and Session Hours

Claude 4.7 and later use a new tokenizer that produces about 30 percent more tokens for the same text. The price per million went down. The number of millions went up.

September 28, 2026 · 7 min

Graph-Native Data Structures in C#, Part 6: DAGs and Dependency Graphs

Model a build system dependency graph in NebulaGraph, keep it acyclic from C# at insert time, get the execution order with Kahn's algorithm, and answer what is blocked right now. With real nGQL and C# code.

September 28, 2026 · 7 min

Building an Agentic System in .NET, Part 4: Keeping Memory True

Stale agent memory is not just wasteful, it causes real failures that are hard to trace. This part builds the whole defence: timestamps, decay scoring, deduplication, contradiction detection, verification on read, and scheduled pruning as .NET hosted services.

September 23, 2026 · 7 min

Building an Agentic System in .NET, Part 3: Durable Memory with Postgres and pgvector

Give your .NET agent a long term memory it can actually recall. Model MemoryItem in EF Core, generate embeddings with Microsoft.Extensions.AI, store them in Postgres with pgvector, and build an HNSW cosine index with a ranked recall query that blends similarity, recency and importance.

September 19, 2026 · 6 min

Building an Agentic System in .NET, Part 2: Writing an MCP Server in C#

How to expose your own tools to any AI agent by building a Model Context Protocol server in C# with the official ModelContextProtocol SDK v2.2.0. Tool design, input validation, context window budgeting, and the naming mistakes that make models misuse your tools silently.

September 18, 2026 · 7 min

Building an Agentic System in .NET, Part 1: Anatomy of an Agent Harness

A chat wrapper is not an agent harness. This article walks through every structural component a real .NET 10 agent host needs, the turn loop, tool dispatch, persistence and the safety layer, and shows the minimal C# skeleton that survives a crash.

July 29, 2026 · 7 min

Claude Opus 5: Knowledge Cutoff, Pricing and Context Window for .NET Developers

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on 24 July 2026. It is not just another model bump, it changes what a near frontier workhorse can do for coding agents and .NET AI applications. Here is a grounded look at what actually changes.

July 27, 2026 · 6 min

Weighted Graphs and Shortest Paths in NebulaGraph with C#, Part 5

NebulaGraph's FIND SHORTEST PATH minimises hops, not edge weights, so finding the cheapest or fastest route means enumerating bounded paths and reducing on weight in C#. This article shows exactly how, with a flight network schema.

July 22, 2026 · 5 min

My recap of WeAreDevelopers 2026

Two roles at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2026 in Berlin: moderating a full afternoon on Stage 3, and running my own workshop on bridging LLMs and real systems with MCP and function calling. Plus the people who made the trip.

July 16, 2026 · 6 min

Graph-Native Data Structures in C#, Part 4: Graphs and Adjacency with a Social Follow Network

Part 4 of the series models a directed social follow network in NebulaGraph, then surfaces neighbour queries, mutual connections, friend-of-friend suggestions, and super-node protection as typed C# async methods.

July 13, 2026 · 7 min

Graph-Native Data Structures in C#, Part 3: Linked Lists and Sequences as Edges

Model append-only event streams and version chains as linked-list graphs in NebulaGraph, then walk, mutate, and guard them safely from C# using idempotent VIDs and native nGQL GO traversals.

June 26, 2026 · 7 min

Graph-Native Data Structures in C#, Part 2: Trees and Hierarchies with NebulaGraph

Relational adjacency lists and nested sets buckle under real hierarchy workloads. This article shows how to model, query and change category trees in NebulaGraph with nGQL and the nebula-net C# client, including the cycle guards you have to write yourself.

June 26, 2026 · 6 min

Two Bugs Hiding in Our OpenTelemetry Pipeline: CORS Preflights and the NUL Byte That Killed a Whole Batch

Two silent production bugs in an OTLP observability pipeline. One blocked every browser telemetry client, the other dropped whole log batches. Here is the root cause, the fix and the repro for each.