On résumé-driven development, FOMO and dismissing it

I’ve had some of thoughts not exactly résumé-driven development, but more importantly, how engineers, can remain up to date and relevant in the job market, and a recent discussion on LinkedIn reminded me about it.

November 7, 2022 · 3 min · 544 words · João Antunes

Beware of records, with expressions and calculated properties

I’ve been using C# records a lot since the feature was introduced. However, when using them, we really need to understand how they work, otherwise we might face unexpected surprises.

September 1, 2022 · 7 min · 1304 words · João Antunes

[Video] Outbox meets change data capture - hooking into the Write-Ahead Log (feat. .NET, PostgreSQL & Kafka)

Another video on using change data capture (often referred to as CDC), to hook up into the database transaction log, forwarding incoming entries to the outbox table.

July 27, 2022 · 1 min · 136 words · João Antunes

[Video] What's the point of async/await in an ASP.NET Core application?

I’ve been noticing in recent chats that folks have difficulty explaining why do we use async/await, tasks and related, when building ASP.NET Core applications.

May 30, 2022 · 1 min · 93 words · João Antunes

[Video] Quick shout-out to DevToys

Wanted to very briefly share a tool I’ve come across a couple of months ago: DevToys.

May 3, 2022 · 1 min · 106 words · João Antunes

[Video] Polymorphic JSON Serialization (feat. .NET & System.Text.Json)

Time for one more video on messing with System.Text.Json, this time to get polymorphic (de)serialization going.

April 13, 2022 · 1 min · 68 words · João Antunes

OpenAPI extensions and Swashbuckle

Let’s take a quick look at OpenAPI extensions (which I discovered were a thing last week 😛) and how to add them to our API description using ASP.NET Core and Swashbuckle.

February 21, 2022 · 5 min · 861 words · João Antunes

Array or object JSON deserialization (feat. .NET & System.Text.Json)

Ah, the joys of integrating with third-party APIs… We always end up having to hammer something to get things working 🤣. This is a post about one of such situations, resorting to some JSON deserialization trickery (via JsonConverter) to be able to get things working.

January 31, 2022 · 4 min · 689 words · João Antunes

[Video] Outbox meets change data capture (feat. .NET, PostgreSQL, Kafka and Debezium)

Quick video with an interesting approach to implement the publisher part of the outbox pattern. Using change data capture (often referred to as CDC), we hook up something to the database transaction log, forwarding incoming entries to the outbox table. In this example, we’ll make use of Debezium, hooked up into a PostgreSQL database, forwarding messages to Kafka.

January 17, 2022 · 1 min · 89 words · João Antunes

Getting a complex type as a simple type from the query string in a ASP.NET Core API controller

This is a tale of a good amount of hours of wasted time, so I’m going to document it so I remember it in the future. The idea is simple: when building an API, how can we treat a complex type as a simple type, to avoid things like primitive obsession, implement strongly typed ids and other related patterns? Let’s find out! 🙂

January 3, 2022 · 8 min · 1589 words · João Antunes