/ Notes from my R&D days. 2026-07-09T13:09:16+02:00 Neil Boyd / Jekyll © 2026 Neil Boyd /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2026-07-08T00:00:00+02:00 2026-07-08T00:00:00+02:00 /posts/2026-07-08/ Neil Boyd

When Agentic Coding Breaks Code Review A couple of very familiar phenomena. CORS: What is it protecting? Explaining that CORS is a browser security measure, in case you didn’t already know that. EF Core in Clean Architecture the Pragmatic Way Making the case for using EF Core DbContext directly instead of adding a repository extraction, because EF Core is already an abstraction. Spec-driv...

2026-05-27T00:00:00+02:00 2026-05-27T00:00:00+02:00 /posts/2026-05-27/ Neil Boyd

Functional Programming in C# 15: Union Types and the ApiResult Monad A union type is a type that holds exactly one of several named cases at a time. Think of a monad as a smart wrapper around a value that lets you chain operations without checking for errors at every step. The wrapper carries the result or the failure through the pipeline — you only inspect the outcome at the end. We ca...

2026-04-02T00:00:00+02:00 2026-04-02T00:00:00+02:00 /posts/2026-04-02/ Neil Boyd

Solving the Distributed Cache Invalidation Problem with Redis and HybridCache How to use Redis pub/sub to invalidate the cache across multiple instances of an application using HybridCache. They also mention that you could use FusionCache to do it all for you. Cleaner switch expressions with pattern matching in C# Example: return environment.ToLower() switch { "dev" => dev...

2026-02-23T00:00:00+01:00 2026-02-23T00:00:00+01:00 /posts/2026-02-23/ Neil Boyd

Web Components Are the Comeback Nobody Saw Coming When Web Components were first introduced, browser support was a bit spotty, and developers were keen to use the latest framework. Now, developers are getting tired of the complexity of frameworks, and Web Components are fully supported in all major browsers, so they are making a comeback. Why Developers Are Ditching Frameworks for Vanilla Jav...

2025-12-23T00:00:00+01:00 2025-12-23T00:00:00+01:00 /posts/2025-12-23/ Neil Boyd

No More Mocking ILogger Instead of mocking ILogger use the FakeLogger class from the Microsoft.Extensions.Diagnostics.Testing package. It doesn’t help us, sadly, because we use Serilog. GitHub MCP Registry Offers a Central Hub for Discovering and Deploying MCP Servers Lots of MCP models to plug in to wherever you use them. Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews Don’t just...