Your HTML Comments Are More Powerful Than You Think: Building Custom Validation Grammars with HtmlAgilityPack Published on October 1, 2025 in 20 minutes to read We were getting ready to redesign and simplify phobos.petabridge.com - our Akka.NET observability platform documentation site. The plan was to remove a bunch of old pages, restructure the information architecture, and redirect everything properly so we wouldn’t break any inbound links from Google, Stack Overflow, or the blog posts...
17 days ago • 1 min read
There Has Never Been a Better Time to be a Junior Developer - And It Won't Last Forever Published on August 22, 2025 in 11 minutes to read Everyone in tech is convinced that AI will eliminate junior developers first. “Why hire a junior when AI can write code?” they ask. The prevailing wisdom is that entry-level developers are most vulnerable to automation. They’re dead wrong. I wrote “The Future of AI Belongs to Experienced Operators with Good Taste” a few months back and that’s still...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
So Microsoft Deleted Some of Our Packages From NuGet.org Without Notice Published on July 11, 2025 in 7 minutes to read “Software supply chain management” is one of those terms that sounds like Venture Capital-funded vendor marketing bullshit right up until it isn’t. In 2016 the npm left-pad incident taught many of us in the software industry the importance of: The fragility of depending directly on central package management systems, such as npm or nuget.org, hence why artifact proxying...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Continuous Deployment of Docker Compose Applications Using GitHub Actions Published on April 23, 2025 in 12 minutes to read Intro Over the past year or so we’ve built out a decent-sized test lab environment for Akka.NET and I’ve also personally started a small homelab environment for creating some useful services for my family’s use. Both of these networks use the same components: Tailscale for secure networking and ssh access; docker compose for running infrastructure services such as...
6 months ago • 1 min read
Signing NuGet Packages Using Azure DevOps and Workload Identity Federation Published on April 14, 2025 in 12 minutes to read Azure released a major update to some of their VM images last week and it’s caused a number of problems for me: mono support was removed from ubuntu-latest, which caused all of our FAKE v4.0 builds to no longer work for Akka.NET and several of our other mature projects; SignService, our workhorse for Authenticode signing all Petabridge NuGet packages for the past seven...
6 months ago • 1 min read
The Future of AI Belongs to Experienced Operators with Good Taste Published on March 27, 2025 in 14 minutes to read I have a lot of respect for Geoffrey Huntley. So when I read his blog posts about AI over the past couple of months: “Dear Student: Yes, AI is here, you’re screwed unless you take action…” and “The future belongs to people who can just do things” among others, I thought to myself - “am I missing something?” This image of his, in particular, summarizes his take on AI and the...
7 months ago • 1 min read
Software Falsehoods: you can build it cheap, fast, and good - pick two Published on March 8, 2025 in 10 minutes to read “You can build it cheap, fast, and good - pick two” is how the saying goes, referring to the inherent trade-offs in software development priorities. It makes intuitive sense but utterly fails in real-world applications. Two simple reasons why this correlation does not hold: Price is not realistically correlated to quality of outcomes and Price isn’t correlated to faster...
8 months ago • 1 min read
.NET OSS Projects: Better to Re-license or Die? Published on January 18, 2025 in .NET / Open Source This week FluentAssertions, a popular open source library designed to make it easier to write assertions during unit testing, changed its license from Apache 2.0 to some commercial terms under the name of a new business entity, Xceed. The net impact of this is that FluentAssertions now costs $129.95 per seat for commercial use for version 8.0 and later. Naturally the .NET community was in...
9 months ago • 1 min read
