mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06I 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
Microservices consume 20% more CPU and 44% more energy than a monolith doing the same work.
IT is projected to consume 21% of all global energy by 2030. The internet already produces more carbon than commercial aviation.
The $44.5B in cloud waste is not just wasted money. It is wasted electricity.
The architecture tax is environmental, not just financial.
Simplification is climate action.
Baseball History Project -- Opening Day 2026 Update!!
Just shipped significant performance improvements and UX refinements to the Baseball History Project. Data now runs from 1871 all the way through the 2025 season.
154 years of professional baseball to explore.
Box scores, franchise history, player careers. It's all there, and faster than ever.
https://baseballhistoryproject.com
#Baseball #OpeningDay #MLB #Sabermetrics #WebDev #opensource
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
ReSharper for VS Code shipped its 1.0 in March, and I finally got around to writing up a week of using it.
I'm not switching from Rider. That's the whole point. But VS Code is where I end up on borrowed laptops, in dev containers, on SSH sessions, peeking at PRs. And C# Dev Kit has always been the polite-but-shallow option for that work.
ReSharper closes the gap. Setup, screenshots, and the honest caveat about the debugger:
https://www.woodruff.dev/resharper-made-vs-code-a-real-option-for-my-net-work/
#dotnet #csharp
htmxRazor v2.0.1 ships today. This is the Platform and DX release.
Six features: VS Code extension (97 snippets), JetBrains Rider plugin (81 live templates), CSS Anchor Positioning for tooltip and dropdown, an interactive component playground, a Theme Builder with CSS download, a SignalR connector, and a Kanban board with full keyboard navigation.
Targets .NET 10. No breaking changes. 1,838 tests.
dotnet add package htmxRazor --version 2.0.1
43% of engineering time is spent on coordination. That number compounds with service count. At 140 services, three engineers spent their entire time maintaining service contracts. Not shipping features. The Stripe survey puts it at $77K per developer per year. Run the math for your team: salary x 0.43 x headcount. That is the coordination tax.
https://simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/the-architecture-tax
Nobody designed the system. It accreted, one reasonable decision at a time.
A cache for performance. A config service for flexibility. A second API gateway because migration kept getting pushed.
112 boxes later: 40% of the engineering budget on maintenance. Features are taking weeks instead of days.
The Complexity Trap is structural. Five recognizable patterns. A way out.
Part 1 of new series:
https://simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/the-system-nobody-designed
Shipped a major update to Baseball History, my open-source MLB stats project!
- 30+ REST API endpoints (no auth, OpenAPI spec, Scalar docs)
- Player Comparison Tool
- Awards & Voting explorer
- Postseason browser (1871–present)
- Salary Explorer (1985+)
Built with ASP.NET Core 10, htmx, and EF Core. Lahman DB, SQLite, fully open source.
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
82% of engineers believe trending tech adoption improves career prospects. That belief is rational. The market trained them correctly.
Thorstein Veblen called this conspicuous consumption: goods whose value comes from their cost, not their utility. Complex architectures are Veblen goods. The expense signals sophistication. A simpler solution that performs the same function misses the point because the function is the display.
https://simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/the-status-architecture-why-complexity
Your developer community now has members who cannot read your content.
AI coding agents integrate with your platform before a human writes a line. When they get it wrong, developers leave. No ticket. No post. Silently.
That gap has a name.
Agentic Relations.
Conway's Law runs in both directions. Everyone cites the forward direction: org structure determines system structure. Nobody talks about the reverse.
Restructure the system without restructuring the teams, and the teams will rebuild the system they are organized to produce. Communication patterns outlast code. The Slack channel outlasts the consolidation initiative.
Service boundaries are headcount requirements written in a different language.
https://simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/conways-revenge
The inaugural River City AI & Dev meetup is on April 15!
We're kicking things off with a live demo of Squad, a multi-agent AI orchestration framework that deploys a full team of specialists directly in your repo. Agents fan out in parallel, build, test, review, and ship pull requests. It's wild, and you need to see it.
📍 Bamboo Grand Rapids
🕐 6:00 – 8:30 PM
https://rivercity-ai.dev/
#RiverCityAI #GrandRapids #AI #OpenSource #Developer #Michigan
Your ARB has never rejected a proposal for being too complex. Only for the wrong kind of complex.
The board faces an asymmetric cost structure: bad rejections are immediate and attributed. Bad approvals are delayed and diffuse. Loss aversion does the rest.
The Governance Trap is how ARBs manufacture the complexity they were built to prevent:
https://simplicityfirstphilosophy.substack.com/p/the-governance-trap-how-architecture
River City AI & Dev (Grand Rapids, MI) is looking for speakers and sponsors!
Speak: AI tools, agents, dev workflows, or any tech topic you're excited about. All formats welcome.
Sponsor: support the community and get in front of West Michigan developers.
Meets every 3rd Wednesday • http://rivercity-ai.dev
Two Complexity Audit slots open for Q2.
Over the past month: the Architecture Tax, TCA calculation, and three case studies. Amazon, 37signals, Segment. Some of you ran your own numbers.
If that number was large enough to act on, this is the next step.
A Complexity Audit is 2 to 4 weeks. Fixed scope. Fixed price. I map your architecture against the TCA model and produce a document your CFO can read.
simplicity-first.dev/ArchAssessment
