I've been experimenting with Pivotal Cloud Foundry recently and put this quick tutorial together for deploying an ASP.NET Core application using PCF. I was amazed at how easy this was and I'm sure you will be too. This is a quick getting started with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and ASP.NET Core.

Managing secrets on your development machine can be a challenge. This is evident in the high number of secrets that are regularly found publicly available in GitHub. I recently found that Spring Cloud Config Server running in Docker on my workstation has made managing those secrets without including them in my source control alongside the code a little easier.

The role of Software Architect is typically not well defined in most organizations and I've found Gregor Hohpe's description of The Architect Elevator to be the most enlightening.

Change is hard as a individual. Implementing lasting change in a team or organization is probably one of the most difficult things one can attempt. I say lasting change, because it is easy to impose short term change, but hard to make that change stick.

Meditating on a software development task and picking a random number is a guess. There are other methods that provide equally effective methods of planning that do not include guesses.

Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, author of The Goal and father of the Theory of Constrain identified Four questions necessary to realize the full benefits of adopting a new technology. These Four questions can be used to help your organization realize order of magnitude advantages when adopting new technologies like the Cloud.

I recently had to add a private NuGet package feed to my Azure DevOps build pipeline that creates a Docker container. It looks like a lot of folks are struggling to do the same thing so I put some notes together on how I was able to get it to work without adding secrets to my source control.

The notion that developers are light bulbs and any developer or team of developers will output the same code or have the same perspective on every pattern seems to be pervasive at pretty much every company I have worked for over the last 20 years. I believe there is a better way to organize your teams so that they have well defined boundaries and ownership of outcomes.

As a software engineers we all know the requirements will change over time. At some point you will need to become comfortable with versioning your NServiceBus messages to adapt to those changing requirements. When you start thinking about the nuances of deploying endpoints that need to handle messages of different versions in flight or in an error queue waiting for retries it can be overwhelming at first. Luckily, there is a straight forward and relatively painless way to make changes to your contracts that will enable your endpoints to process old and new versions in parallel.

Over the years I have read countless management and technical books and of those books there are a select few that had a profound impact on how I view the world and my capabilities as a leader. I have put together this list of books to share so that others can benefit from their knowledge and so I can remind myself of some books I should periodically read.