When the gateway fell over
What I learned by building five rate-limiting algorithms and putting them under the same load.
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Writing.
How software works. How we work together. Two sides of what I write about, with room for code, questions and people.
Technical
Implementations, architecture and experiments. Decisions you can examine in code.
Actors vs queues: the starting point
The same number-porting workflow built with queues and virtual actors. What each approach makes easier, and what it asks you to own.
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Building the workflow with grains
A grain from end to end: state, third-party callbacks, correlation and timeouts.
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From direct calls to Orleans Streams
Replacing a direct call with streams, and examining what fan-out changes.
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Clustering and storage on Postgres
Moving state, reminders and cluster membership from memory to Postgres.
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Atomic operations across grains
Atomic operations across grains, and the trade-off between transactions and compensation.
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Seeing the cluster with .NET Aspire
Following a request across the cluster with .NET Aspire and OpenTelemetry.
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The architecture reckoning at scale
A critical look at actors and microservices: infrastructure, complexity and the shape of the problem.
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The receipts: a decade at Halo scale
The other angle of the closing: what the experience at Halo scale tells us about Orleans.
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Reflections
Technology, teams and people. Questions about how we think, relate and build together.
The model is not deterministic. The program it wrote is.
Using AI to build verifiable tools instead of trusting its conclusions. A reflection on evidence, engineering judgment and checks that outlive a conversation.
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I took two personality assessments back to back. Here’s what I didn’t expect.
Self-awareness, the distance between how we appear and how we think, and the assumptions we bring to our teams.
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