Hello, world. I guess.
Why I'm starting a blog, what I'll write about, and a disclaimer that I might disappear for months.
I've been meaning to do this for a while. Not "a while" in the vague aspirational sense — I mean I've had a folder called blog-ideas on my desktop since 2022 with exactly three text files in it, none of which turned into anything.
So. Here's attempt number four.
The honest reason I'm doing this isn't to build a brand or establish myself as a thought leader or any of that. I write on dev.to sometimes, and I like it fine, but the editor is a little awkward for longer pieces and everything lives inside their platform. I wanted something that I owned. A place where I could write a 4000-word post on outbox patterns without feeling like I'm fighting the formatting.
I also just want to think out loud more. A lot of what I do at work involves figuring out problems that don't have clean answers — when do you use saga orchestration vs. simple choreography? What does "idempotent" actually mean when your message broker might deliver duplicates under load? When is the complexity of MassTransit worth it over just rolling a simple queue handler yourself? I work through this stuff, and then it disappears into Slack threads or my own notes. That seems like a waste.
So this is where that thinking will live.
What I'll actually write about:
.NET internals when I stumble into something unexpected. The runtime does interesting things. I've been burned enough times by async/await behavior that I've developed opinions about it.
Distributed systems patterns. Mostly what I'm actually using at work — outbox pattern, sagas, event sourcing (though I'm skeptical), idempotency. Not theory, just what I've implemented and what surprised me.
Tools and tradeoffs. I recently spent way too long evaluating MassTransit vs. NServiceBus vs. Wolverine. I'll write that up at some point. It's the kind of comparison that's more useful coming from someone who's actually had to make the call.
Whatever I'm figuring out. That's the catch-all. It might be Azure Functions cold start behavior. It might be why a particular SQL query started degrading after a schema migration. It might be something completely off-topic.
Fair warning: I might post five things in two weeks and then go quiet until December. That's just kind of how I work. I'm not committing to a schedule.
But the folder is empty now, and the site is live, so that's something.