I like creating software solutions to solve problems. I am also a speaker, podcaster, and author on technology. I love htmx, server-side web dev, data, Web APIs, baseball and bourbon. .NET/Web Dev MVP
All of my posts are created using recycled electrons
| Website/Blog | https://woodruff.dev |
| GitHub | https://github.com/cwoodruff |
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswoodruff/ |
River City AI & Dev User Group — first meetup!
April 15 • Grand Rapids, MI • 6 PM
A community for developers interested in AI, web, mobile, .NET, Rust, and open-source. All experience levels welcome.
RSVP → https://www.meetup.com/river-city-ai-dev-group/events/313909270/?eventOrigin=group_upcoming_events
#RiverCityAI #GrandRapids #AI #Programming #OpenSource #Fediverse
A CFO reviews the quarterly cloud bill. 34% over budget. Again. She asks who is responsible. Nobody is lying. Nobody is responsible.
$44.5B in projected cloud waste for 2026. Only 30% can attribute costs to teams. 49% of IT leaders believe >25% is wasted.
New essay applies Hardin’s tragedy of the commons to cloud infrastructure. Why FinOps addresses symptoms. Why does a chargeback fail? What Ostrom’s Nobel Prize research says actually works.
https://simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/the-tragedy-of-the-cloud-commons
You Knew Before I Did
https://www.philmckinney.com/you-knew-before-i-did/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Phil McKinney @phil-mckinney-philmckinney
Shopify: modular monolith, $100B market cap.
Stack Overflow: vertical scaling, 100M+ developers.
Basecamp: 8 servers, left the cloud entirely.
The next time someone says monoliths do not scale, share this list.
Every one of these companies measured before they decided. They did not follow convention. They followed arithmetic.
What other companies belong on this list?
#softwarearchitecture #softwaredevelopment #economics
https://simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/the-architecture-tax
Asked AI to design a payment system.
It returned 14 files, 3 abstraction layers, a service registry, and an event bus.
The requirement needed 1 file and 47 lines.
AI has learned from every architecture post that celebrates complexity. It gives you all of it, every time.
The 2 AM Test does not care who wrote the code. It asks whether a tired engineer can debug it.
AI gives you speed. The Three Filters give you direction.
Ward Cunningham coined "technical debt" in 1992. The industry adopted the metaphor and refused to do the math.
We say "we have some tech debt" the way someone says "I have some credit card debt" without ever opening the statement.
The new essay opens with the statement. Compound interest formulas. $495K/yr carrying cost for a 10-person team. A debt ceiling projection you can run Monday morning.
https://simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/technical-debt-has-an-interest-rate
47 microservices became 3. Same functionality. 90% cost reduction.
Before: three engineers spent their days keeping infrastructure alive. Not building features. Maintaining the machine. Architecture tax in salary alone: $450K-$600K/year.
After: those same engineers shipped more product improvements in one year than the entire team managed the year before.
Same people. Same skills. Fewer services.
How many of your services could merge without losing functionality you actually use?
htmxRazor v1.3.0 is out.
Six features:
- Server-driven data table (sort, filter, pagination)
- Command Palette via Cmd+K
- Focus management after htmx swaps (WCAG 2.4.3)
- CSS container queries, skip nav and landmark Tag Helpers
- Full ARIA Authoring Practices keyboard audit.
The data table fills a real gap. No MIT-licensed #ASPNETCore Tag Helper solution existed for this pattern until now.
No Bootstrap. No client-side JS library. Pure server-rendered #htmx.
Most over-engineered system you've ever worked on?
I'll start. A team built 14 microservices for a charter school admin platform. Enrollment, attendance, grading, scheduling, cafeteria and report cards. Each with its own database and deployment pipeline. An attendance query took 4 service hops and 3 seconds.
The replacement: one service, one database, well-structured modules. Built in an afternoon. Query time dropped to under 200ms.
14 services for a system that served 10 schools.
Yours?
ReSharper for VS Code, Cursor & compatible editors is officially out!
After a year in Public Preview, JetBrains' 20+ years of C# tooling expertise lands in lightweight editors:
- Real-time code analysis & quick-fixes
- Smart code completion & refactoring
- Solution Explorer
- NUnit/xUnit/MSTest test runner
- Navigation to decompiled sources
Free for non-commercial use.
ReSharper has been a trusted productivity tool for C# developers in Visual Studio for over 20 years. Today, we’re taking the next step and officially releasing the ReSharper extension for Visual Studi
Phil McKinney
