When to Train an AI Model and When to Write Code
There's a rush to use AI for almost every problem at the moment. That enthusiasm can make it easy to reach for a model before asking whether a straightforward rule would solve the problem more reliabl
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Your Distributed Lock Expired. Your Code Didn't.
A distributed lock can expire while the code that acquired it is still running. Another instance takes ownership, finishes its work and saves the result. Then the original instance resumes and overwri
How to Investigate a Growing Container Without Guessing
A .NET container uses 600 MB after startup, 850 MB by lunchtime and 1.2 GB by the end of the day. Someone calls it a memory leak and asks for a heap dump. The graph has established that memory use is
Why Decimal Arithmetic Can Still Surprise You in .NET
Switching from double to decimal solves an important problem when working with money. It lets you represent values such as 0.1m exactly in base ten. The thing is though, It doesnt tell your applicatio
Who Owns a Lookup Value in a Modular Monolith?
A lookup table looks harmless until three modules start depending on it for different reasons. Suppose an underwriting system has a list of countries. Submission intake uses it to normalise addresses.
Designing an Anti-Corruption Layer Around an LLM in .NET
Usually with An LLM integration the application might create a provider client, assemble a prompt, send a request and deserialise the response. The first feature works, the code is easy to follow and
Building an AI Circuit Breaker in .NET
Circuit breakers in .NET are good at recognising technical failure. They can stop calls when a service begins returning HTTP 500 responses, timing out or refusing connections. This works because conve