A breakdown of the benefits of using Event Storming for solution design and a simple guide to facilitating your Event Storming workshops — I have been using Event Storming across my teams for a while now, and so far, it has proved to be the most powerful tool for solution design and discovery. If you are using domain-driven design or are trying to model a particularly complex problem, then Event Storming is especially…

An opinionated ASP.NET Core solution setup for creating web applications using Clean Architecture and Domain-Driven Design principles. These days we’re cranking out more code than ever! Microservices, miniservices, microsites, (modular) monoliths… it doesn’t really matter what. We’re getting more and more standards, patterns and practices thrown at us on a…

A walkthrough of hacking a website hosted as a container by exploiting a vulnerability. We will break down the steps and see how to protect against the attack. — Many great articles and videos show how a Kubernetes cluster or container orchestrator can be taken over once a pod/container is compromised. Unfortunately, very few of them focus on the most important part… how on earth do we hack into a running application hosted behind a secure firewall in the…

A guide to using the Entity Framework Change Tracker to audit data changes in .NET. Popularity for EF has skyrocketed since the release of Entity Framework Core and it has become one of the most widely used tools in the .NET ecosystem. This has largely been driven by a movement…

Being a Software Engineer these days is extremely challenging — technology is moving faster than ever and sometimes it can be a struggle to keep up! New technology options spring up daily and there is an ever growing number of learning platforms to choose from. I personally find that newer…

How and why we used Kubernetes for our infrastructure platform and some lessons learned along the way — Having dabbled with Kubernetes for a while, our team decided to build an infrastructure platform on top of it four years ago. Kubernetes is one of the most widely adopted and fastest growing Open Source projects in history. No-brainer, right? Well… it’s not quite that simple. Here I’d like to…

A guided tour through the process of building an aggregate and some hints and tips to keep you on the straight and narrow — Before I grab my metaphorical tour operator hat and begin our treacherous expedition through the long and windy roads of DDD Land, a few words of warning: It will be challenging You will make mistakes — and lots of them! You will never look at an even seemingly simple software…

A history of authentication and how to solve authentication in a reusable way using sidecar containers in Kubernetes — As software engineers, we spend way too much time setting up authentication and debugging issues related to authentication. We have all been down one of those rabbit holes where our authentication method is not quite doing what we expect, and we lose days (and hair) scratching our heads!

A guide to handling Domain Events and Integration Events when using DDD and .NET. — Domain Events are a fundamental building block in DDD, but they can certainly be a bit of a minefield to navigate. A Domain Event captures the memory of something interesting which affects the domain — Martin Fowler Domain Events are used to allow aggregates to react to a change in…