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 -
Graph Databases with Neo4j The property-graph model explained from first principles: nodes, relationships, and properties; Cypher queries for real traversal problems; why index-free adjacency beats recursive SQL CTEs for deep graph walks; fraud detection, recommendations, and knowledge graphs as concrete production use cases; Neo4j clustering and causal consistency; and an honest accounting of when adding a graph database is the wrong call.
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MongoDB Done Right The document database past the hype: the embed-versus-reference decision that makes or breaks a schema, denormalization that does not rot, when MongoDB genuinely beats Postgres JSONB and when it does not, the aggregation pipeline, indexing and the working-set rule, replica sets and sharding, the read/write-concern consistency knobs, and the operational footguns — unbounded arrays and the 16 MB BSON limit — that sink naive designs.
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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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Serverless in Production: Lambda Patterns That Hold Up A practical guide to running AWS Lambda in production: the cold start problem and its real solutions, concurrency and throttling mechanics, event-driven fan-out with SQS and SNS, Step Functions for durable orchestration, API Gateway cost traps, container images vs layers, idempotency, and the patterns that break under load.
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Temporal and Workflow Orchestration: Durable Execution for Engineers Who've Been Burned What makes Temporal different from a job queue, how event history replay achieves durable execution, activities vs workflows with real code, retries that actually work, self-hosting on Kubernetes, and an honest comparison with Celery, Airflow, and Step Functions.
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Writing a Kubernetes Operator: The Complete Pattern Custom Resource Definitions, controllers, reconciliation loops, finalizers, status conditions, and building a real operator with controller-runtime that manages a stateful workload — with every pattern you need to do it right.
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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.
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Kotlin for JVM and Beyond Coroutines, null safety, data classes, Kotlin Multiplatform, and how Kotlin improves on Java for modern backend and cross-platform development.
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PHP: The Comeback Kid PHP 8.x features including fibers, enums, property hooks, and named arguments. Laravel 11, Livewire, Reverb, and why modern PHP deserves a second look from developers who wrote it off.
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Scala: Functional Programming on the JVM A deep technical guide to Scala 3 — case classes, pattern matching, the type system, Cats, ZIO, build tooling, and an honest assessment of when Scala is the right choice and when it isn't.
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TypeScript Deep Dive Type system, generics, decorators, tsconfig deep dive, and why TypeScript has replaced plain JavaScript for serious projects. Patterns for experienced developers.
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API Rate Limiting Patterns: Algorithms, Redis Implementations, and Client Communication A deep dive into rate limiting algorithms — token bucket, sliding window log, sliding window counter, fixed window, and leaky bucket — with production Redis implementations, distributed rate limiting, and how to communicate limits to clients.
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PostgreSQL Performance Tuning: From Slow Queries to a Database That Purrs A practical deep dive into PostgreSQL performance: reading pg_stat_statements, analyzing slow queries with EXPLAIN ANALYZE, choosing the right index type, tuning autovacuum, and scaling connections with PgBouncer.
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Redis Beyond Caching: Streams, Pub/Sub, Search, and When Redis Is Your Primary Database A deep dive into Redis beyond the cache: pub/sub messaging, Streams for event logs, RedisJSON for document storage, RediSearch for full-text search, persistence modes, and HA with Cluster vs Sentinel.
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Apache Kafka Deep Dive A comprehensive guide to Apache Kafka — how it works internally, producers and consumers, partitions and consumer groups, exactly-once semantics, schema management, and running Kafka reliably in Kubernetes with Strimzi.
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Database Migrations Without Downtime: Expand/Contract, Shadow Tables, and Safe Deploys A practical guide to running database schema changes against a live production database without downtime — the expand/contract pattern, rename and backfill strategies, shadow tables for rewrites, lock-aware migrations, and tooling that makes it safe.
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PostgreSQL for Developers: Indexes, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, JSONB, and Tuning for Real Workloads A practical deep-dive into PostgreSQL for developers — understanding indexes and when to use them, reading EXPLAIN ANALYZE output, using JSONB for flexible schemas, and tuning the key configuration knobs that matter for real workloads.
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SQLite in Production: When It's the Right Choice, WAL Mode, Backups, and Litestream Replication SQLite is more capable in production than most developers realize. This guide covers when to choose it over Postgres, WAL mode for concurrent reads and writes, proper backup strategies, and continuous replication with Litestream.