How We Run Blue-Green Deployments
The first time I ran a blue-green deployment in anger, it was 6:40 on a Friday evening and the payment authorization service had been down for eleven minutes....
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Tagged #.net — Page 2
The Case for Boring Technology in Fintech
A few years ago I sat in a postmortem for an outage that cost us most of a business day of failed settlements. The root cause was not a bug in anything we had...
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Building a Rules Engine You Can Actually Maintain
The worst rules engine I ever inherited had 1,847 rules in a single database table, evaluated top to bottom, and the order they ran in was determined by the...
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Designing Safe Database Schema Changes
Of all the operational risks I worry about as a CTO in regulated payments, the one that keeps recurring in postmortems is not a fancy distributed-systems...
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Handling Timezones and Dates Correctly
Of all the categories of bugs I have seen ship to production over a twenty-year career, the ones rooted in date and time handling are the most insidious. They...
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Background Jobs in .NET: A Practical Guide
Every payments platform I have worked on eventually grows a second nervous system. Alongside the request-response code that answers an API call in...
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Structured Logging in .NET
Every incident review I have ever sat through eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable question: what was the system actually doing at the moment it...
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Managing Secrets in .NET Applications
Every breach post-mortem I have read in the last decade has a secrets problem buried somewhere in it. A connection string in a config file checked into source...
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Handling Money in Code: Never Use Floats
Every engineer who has spent time near a payments ledger eventually learns the same lesson, usually at the worst possible moment: a reconciliation report is...
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Database Migrations Without Downtime in .NET
Every team I have led eventually hits the same wall: the schema needs to change, the business cannot tolerate a maintenance window, and the database underneath...
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The Pragmatic Guide to Adopting .NET 9 in Production
A new major .NET release arrives, and the team chat immediately splits into two camps: the people who want to upgrade this week because it is new, and the...
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Observability for Payment Systems: Logs, Metrics, and Traces That Matter
When a payment fails at 2am, the question is never "is something wrong." Your customers have already told you that, loudly, across every channel you have. The...
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