Modern, cross-platform web development on .NET for engineers who already know another backend — the hosting model and Kestrel, choosing between Minimal APIs, MVC, and Razor Pages, the middleware pipeline, dependency injection as a first-class citizen, configuration and options, Entity Framework Core, authentication, and a look at Blazor — all on .NET 10.
Backend
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ASP.NET Core Web Development Primer -
Consensus and Coordination: Raft, Paxos, and Why Agreement Is Hard Why getting a group of machines to agree on a single value is the root problem under etcd, Consul, Kafka, and every database you run — leader election, quorums and majorities, the FLP impossibility result in plain terms, Paxos vs Raft and why Raft won on understandability, log replication, split-brain and fencing, and how to reason about a cluster that has lost its leader.
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Consistency, CAP, and Replication: The Tradeoffs You Cannot Escape CAP and the more useful PACELC reformulation, the spectrum of consistency models from linearizable to causal to eventual, single-leader vs multi-leader vs leaderless replication, quorum reads and writes (R + W > N), read-your-writes and monotonic guarantees, conflict detection, and how real systems like PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, and Cassandra pick their points on the curve. What 'eventually consistent' actually costs you.
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NATS: The Cloud-Native Nervous System NATS is a single-binary messaging backbone that scales from a two-node homelab to a global supercluster without a ZooKeeper sidecar, a broker fleet, or a PhD in configuration. This post covers core pub/sub and subject hierarchies, request/reply, queue groups, JetStream persistence and its KV and object stores, leaf-node topologies for edge deployments, the NKEYS/JWT security model, and an honest comparison to Kafka and RabbitMQ — including where each one actually wins.
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RabbitMQ Deep Dive The full AMQP 0-9-1 model from producers to consumers, the four exchange types with routing examples, acknowledgement semantics and publisher confirms, quorum queues replacing classic mirrored queues via Raft consensus, streams as a Kafka-style append log, dead-letter exchanges and TTL, clustering and partition handling, and an honest accounting of when to reach for Kafka instead.
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SQL Server Quick Start and T-SQL Cheat Sheet Getting productive on Microsoft SQL Server fast when you already know PostgreSQL or MySQL — connecting with sqlcmd and the modern clients, running the engine in a container, the T-SQL dialect essentials (TOP, OFFSET/FETCH, MERGE, CTEs, window functions), indexes and execution plans, stored procedures, backup and restore, and the dialect gotchas that trip up newcomers.
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Time, Order, and CRDTs: Coordinating Without a Clock Why wall-clock time lies in distributed systems, Lamport timestamps and vector clocks, happens-before and causal ordering, the trouble with NTP and the appeal of TrueTime and hybrid logical clocks, and conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) for merge-without-coordination — with practical uses in collaborative editing, offline-first apps, and geo-distributed state.
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C# and .NET for Backend Engineers ASP.NET Core, minimal APIs, Entity Framework Core, Native AOT, and the performance story that makes .NET a serious choice for backend development in 2026.
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Go for Systems and Backend Development Language fundamentals, concurrency model, standard library, and practical patterns for writing CLI tools and services in Go. A guide for ops engineers and backend developers.
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Java in 2026: Still Relevant Modern Java (17–25), records, sealed classes, virtual threads (Project Loom), GraalVM native images, and an honest assessment of where Java stands today.