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.
Why Your Software Sucks: Inheritance Published on January 26, 2026 in 7 minutes to read “I have a great idea: let’s create a five-layer deep inheritance hierarchy with a universal base class that every domain object inherits from! That way, when requirements inevitably change, we’ll only need to touch… everything.” This is episode two of my Why Your Software Sucks video series, and today we’re talking about inheritance - specifically, how deep inheritance hierarchies turn your codebase into...
Why Am I Paying $40,000 for the Birth of My Child? Published on November 30, 2025 My third child arrives in a week. The cost? $40,000. Out of pocket. Cash. Not because something went wrong medically. That's just the price of admission for a self-employed entrepreneur who wants to grow a family while running a small business in America. $25,680 in annual premiums + $14,300 deductible = the privilege of bringing a new taxpayer into this world. I wrote about this because Michael Green's viral...
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...