Chris Woody Woodruff

@cwoodruff
665 Followers
649 Following
1.4K Posts

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/Bloghttps://woodruff.dev
GitHubhttps://github.com/cwoodruff
LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswoodruff/

htmxRazor v1.4.0 is out.

Seven features: SSE streaming with IAsyncEnumerable server helpers, a multi-step wizard with TempData state, a timeline component, response-aware forms with per-status-code error handling, optimistic UI on button/switch/rating, load more pagination, and dialog size variants.

147 new tests. 1,802 total. No breaking changes.

dotnet add package htmxRazor

https://htmxRazor.com

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

User Group Kick Off and an AI Talk, Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 6:00 PM | Meetup

Our first meetup is here — and we're kicking it off right. Come meet fellow developers from across the Grand Rapids area, hear about what this community is building toward

Meetup

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

The Tragedy of the Cloud Commons

Why Shared Infrastructure Gets Over-Consumed

The Simplicity-First Philosophy
@Migueldeicaza I agree with you. More of the police state.
@Migueldeicaza actually there have been 7 bills to independently fund TSA that the GOP blocked.
You Knew Before I Did

I built a brand for twenty years. Then I searched for it.

Phil McKinney — Innovation Decision Expert

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

The Architecture Tax

Why Your Technical Decisions Are Your Biggest Budget Line Item

The Simplicity-First Philosophy

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.

https://simplicity-first.dev

#softwarearchitecture #softwaredev #ai

Simplicity-First | Software Architecture Made Simple

Kill the Bloat. A movement for developers, architects, and tech leaders who believe software should be clear, maintainable, and built for humans.

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

Technical Debt Has an Interest Rate

And You’re Not Calculating It

The Simplicity-First Philosophy

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?