I write about .NET, open source software, the Microsoft ecosystem, my adventures with startups, and outer space.
Latest from Aaronontheweb: Software Falsehoods: you can build it cheap, fast, and good - pick two
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Software Falsehoods: you can build it cheap, fast, and good - pick twoPublished 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 its own independent quality determined entirely by the buyer’s and seller’s perception of value. As the Dan Luu article I linked to mentions - it’s fairly difficult even for experts within a given domain to accurately assess the market value of their own services (or someone else’s), hence why price discovery has to be tested continuously1. But let’s take a closer look under the covers at the price vs. quality and price vs. speed relationships. |
Aaronontheweb
I write about .NET, open source software, the Microsoft ecosystem, my adventures with startups, and outer space.
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Stop Failing The `git clone && run` Test Published on October 17, 2025 in 10 minutes to read I’ve done a ton of consulting as part of my work at Petabridge over the past 10 years and I run into developer onboarding problems constantly with new clients. It takes much longer than it should to clone a customer’s application from source control and successfully run it. Continuous deployment and continuous integration (CI/CD) get a ton of attention in the DevOps space, but improving the “first...
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...