01 / Writing

Notes from the build.

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

Featured · July 29, 2026 · 7 min

Claude Opus 5: A Working Developer's Assessment of Anthropic's New Flagship

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24, 2026 — not just another model bump, but a meaningful shift in what a near-frontier workhorse can do for coding agents and .NET AI applications. Here is a grounded assessment of what actually changes.

July 27, 2026 · 6 min

Weighted Graphs & Shortest Paths in NebulaGraph with C# — Part 5

NebulaGraph's FIND SHORTEST PATH minimizes hops, not edge weights — so finding the cheapest or fastest route requires enumerating bounded paths and reducing on weight in C#. This article shows exactly how to do that 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 & 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 & 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 & Hierarchies with NebulaGraph

Relational adjacency lists and nested sets buckle under real hierarchy workloads. This article shows how to model, query, and mutate category trees in NebulaGraph using nGQL and the nebula-net C# client — with cycle guards built into your application layer.

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-based observability pipeline — one blocking all browser telemetry clients, one dropping entire log batches — exposed how quickly boundary gaps become blind spots. Here's the root cause, the fix, and the repro for each.

June 21, 2026 · 3 min

Introducing OpenPulse: Self-Hosted Observability with AI Root-Cause Analysis

Observability forces a bad trade-off: an expensive SaaS bill with your data offsite, or a DIY stack you babysit with no AI insight. OpenPulse is the third option — self-hosted logs, traces and metrics with AI root-cause analysis and auto-remediation built in.

June 21, 2026 · 7 min

Graph-Native Data Structures in C#, Part 1 — Vertices, Edges, and Properties from the Ground Up

Stop thinking in rows and tables. This first article in the series establishes the NebulaGraph data model, the C# client patterns, and the mapping layer you will reuse across every subsequent part.

June 17, 2026 · 7 min

From ArangoDB to NebulaGraph: Why Cost Forced the Move — and Performance Made It Permanent

When ArangoDB's October 2025 licensing change put our production cluster out of compliance overnight, we had 90 days to migrate a live graph workload to NebulaGraph. Here is exactly what we changed, what broke, and what we would do differently.

June 15, 2026 · 7 min

How to Interview Junior Developers in the Age of AI

We're still interviewing juniors for 2015 — quizzing syntax AI now writes and banning the tools they'll use on day one. Here's what to test instead: problem-solving, business sense, tool fluency, and teamwork, with a scorecard you can steal.

June 11, 2026 · 6 min

Vertical Slice Architecture in ASP.NET Core: Features as First-Class Citizens

Vertical Slice Architecture flips the organizational instinct of layered systems — instead of grouping code by technical concern, you group it by use case. Here's how to structure, share, test, and migrate to slices in a real ASP.NET Core codebase.

February 6, 2026 · 9 min

From Graph Traversal to Semantic Discovery: Adding Vector Search and LLM Reasoning to Your ArangoDB .NET 10 API

In the previous article, I built a .NET 10 API […]

January 30, 2026 · 4 min

Mastering Graph Traversal in ArangoDB: Building High-Performance Path Finding APIs with .NET 10

Learn how to build high-performance graph traversal APIs using ArangoDB and .NET 10. This guide covers BFS path finding with PRUNE optimization, network expansion patterns, and AQL query techniques for knowledge graphs.

October 20, 2025 · 16 min

Building a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) System in .NET

Introduction Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become one of the most […]

June 11, 2025 · 16 min

Custom Claims in Entra ID: Integrating Application Access Control with SSO

Introduction Configuring Entra ID custom claims SSO is essential when […]

April 22, 2025 · 5 min

How to Build Serverless Functions with Rust on AWS Lambda

From Conference Stage to Code Breakdown This article is part […]

October 4, 2020 · 5 min

Connect to an electrical relay from .Net Core Windows Universal App

Introduction For many years, writing an application that connects to […]

September 7, 2020 · 4 min

Communication with IBM MQ in .Net Core 3.0

Introduction Using message queues is one of the most effective […]