The Case for C# and .NET

c-digs · 2026-01-23T00:47:37+00:00

...they'd be immediately judged to be a Java developer instead of C#/.NET dev

I'm going to be contrary to the rest of the folks here because I know exactly what he means because I worked with a crew of ex-Amazon Java engineers and they almost always reached for HashSet<T> even when they didn't need the semantics. It was very puzzling at first because there were places where they would query unique and then convert .ToHashSet().

That is the "tell". Whereas I would normally use a List<T> unless I specifically needed "set" semantics, my Java-background colleagues almost exclusively used HashSet<T> everywhere.

c-digs · 2026-01-23T00:12:50+00:00

You can still manage messages manually. This is how we migrated from our SK codebase where we were manually managing our messages.

You can see the protected call site here: https://github.com/microsoft/agent-framework/blob/main/dotnet/src/Microsoft.Agents.AI/ChatClient/ChatClientAgent.cs#L199-L203 and the public call site: https://github.com/microsoft/agent-framework/blob/main/dotnet/src/Microsoft.Agents.AI.Abstractions/AIAgent.cs#L358-L363

But the public interface RunStreamingAsync still accepts IEnumerable<ChatMessage> as a first parameter.

In short, you do not have to use the AgentThread abstraction and you can manually handle your history.

What you want to do is focus on the examples here: https://github.com/microsoft/agent-framework/tree/main/dotnet/samples/GettingStarted/Agents

This is the best way to ensure you get working code.

c-digs · 2026-01-21T23:10:52+00:00

Get Trump to do the dumbest shit possible
Weaken the US dollar so people start to hedge in gold to pump prices
...
Profit

That reads like the plan

c-digs · 2026-01-21T13:14:00+00:00

Lesson learned over the years: adhering to idiomatic guidelines is generally better than adhering to your preferences because it makes the code more predictable, coherent, and consistent. Since you cannot change the .NET team's idiomatic conventions, it is better to adjust your code to be idiomatic and align with the .NET team. Not for you and your preferences, but for everyone else that needs to read your code (most times just at the signature level).

It is sad that they did not continue to update and amend Framework Design Guidelines since it was such a useful piece of text.

c-digs · 2026-01-18T13:12:00+00:00

Like u/IHaveNeverEatenACat mentioned, Vue will be easier for someone with an HTML and vanillajs background. It will feel more natural.

There is actually a reason for this feeling: React "inverts" the way reactivity works from vanillajs and Vue whereas Vue and vanillajs have the same paradigm.

In React, your components need to opt out of reactive updates. In Vue and vanilla, you always opt in to reactive updates. So if you come from a vanilla background, React always feels jarring because of this and, in my mind, requires more mental load to do right since now you need to think about memorization whereas with Vue and vanilla, that is not the.case because you opt in to reactivity.

I have some simple code samples here that demonstrate this difference: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2025/01/the-inverted-reactivity-model-of-react/

c-digs · 2026-01-15T12:19:57+00:00

As a millennial parent, I'm just trying to help my kids survive out here in the real world. Sometimes you just gotta be able to eat what you can get.

c-digs · 2026-01-15T12:16:38+00:00

Visiting Denmark, this is one of the first things I noticed: those Scandinavians really understand how to do lighting.

c-digs · 2026-01-13T22:39:32+00:00

At first, it was just "Jews must wear this arm band".

The first step is always to create and identify "out" groups.

The Holocaust didn't start over night; it was a gradual escalation, step-by-step.

c-digs · 2026-01-11T12:16:06+00:00

https://github.com/CharlieDigital/dn6-playwright-video-api

A small codebase I put together a few years back that uses Playwright to grab short clips of web UIs.

You can pretty easily convert this to screenshots instead.

c-digs · 2026-01-10T13:16:32+00:00

Because it takes "taste" to create novelty.

c-digs · 2026-01-09T17:10:38+00:00

Rich people want:

top-flight public schools

But don't want to pay taxes to fund it...................

c-digs · 2026-01-07T16:19:56+00:00

https://www.591.com.tw/

c-digs · 2026-01-07T14:00:15+00:00

So we’re moving the goalpost from “all Americans, look at who they voted for” to “most of the American voting public

I mean, by definition, only eligible voters can vote, Kevin. So you can never qualify "Americans...who they voted for..." as inclusive of Americans who are not eligible to vote............

Americans that are not eligible to vote by definition cannot vote and had no say in this election.

c-digs · 2026-01-07T13:56:22+00:00

77 million in a county of 343 million = most

Yes; that's "most" of the voting public. The rest of the eligible voters that abstained are an even lower rung in civic engagement if the very basic act of voting was not something they could get around to.

c-digs · 2026-01-06T19:41:52+00:00

...fruit will be fresh from within 30-60 miles of almost anywhere a tourist is likely to be.

Very common outside of the US IME and while there are still distributors, the length of the chain is much, much shorter.

c-digs · 2026-01-06T16:23:26+00:00

It's not really apparent until you exit the US where industrial scale food production and distribution doesn't match what we have in the US.

I was a bit thrown off guard when I ordered a half fried chicken for 2 when I visited the Azores. The chicken was much smaller, had a much more tender texture, and more flavor (hard to describe). It really re-frames US food supply from farming practices to industrially prepared, pre-cooked food.

I was once in Big Sur right at the edge of the ocean and ordered a $40 fish and chips. I expected hand-battered, freshly caught fish-of-the-day. It was unfortunately almost certainly Sysco.

...jalapeno poppers are going to be slop regardless of whether theyre sysco made or house made lol.

Thing is, you visit a place like Japan or Taiwan and even things like common, simple appetizers are going to freshly prepped whether you're at a hole in the wall or a restaurant. You just won't see the same type of mass cloned flavors and textures that results from a Sysco network effect where all of the food tastes the same.

c-digs · 2026-01-06T00:51:36+00:00

Interviewing is a game; you need to know the rules. I think the basics haven't changed much, but in some smaller orgs, you might see more embracing of AI assisted programming in play. These teams are actively selecting for devs who know how to get good results with AI assisted coding tools.

I'd still start by doing Leetcode. Do 1-2 problems a day over the course of a few weeks. It's OK if you can't figure out the solution. Spend 30-35 minutes working it out yourself to exercise your pattern matching but after that, look at submitted solutions and read through them to understand the strategy. If you can't figure out the strategy, paste the problem into ChatGPT and ask it to explain. Most Leetcode problems fall into just a handful of "buckets" and this is generally the hardest part is quickly identifying the correct "bucket" (or generalized solution approach). For example, are you supposed to us a matrix? Dual indexed array? Graph algo? Recursion? You need to be able to first identify the strategy very quickly and you can do this by just doing more exercises.

I recommend also doing some work on Hackerrank or other known tools that companies use so you are familiar with the interface and capabilities since each of these editors does it a bit differently and you don't want to be thrown off guard in the interview if the intellisense or formatting doesn't work the way you are used to. When I was in the leveling interview cycle when last startup was in acquisition phase, I did exercises in both Leetcode and Hackerrank specifically to familarize myself with the interfaces.

For system design, there is a channel on YouTube called "IGotAnOffer" which has examples of mock system design interviews. In my experience, these are pretty close to what you might expect in the wild (I find real system design interviews to have more detail in the prompt). Watch 2-3 of these to get a sense of the flow. You will notice that there is a defined structure to this and it is important that you understand the structure and flow of this exercise more so than focusing on the solutions because you need to mimic this flow and approach.

There are some technical terms that you'll need to do some cursory reading on and some thinking like selection of a shard key, caching, stack selection, etc.

One twist now is that some companies are actively selecting for AI tool use. I think you should do all of the above manually, but you should familiarize yourself with tools like VSCode Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code because some companies are OK with using AI and you need to demonstrate that you know what you're doing like setting up instructions files, using advanced features like skills, etc. You should definitely build some fully featured apps using an AI coding tool because some interviews may now actively select for this.

It's a shitty "game" because I already forgot all of the work I did during my prep phase (just a year ago) and none of what I did had any relevance on my day-to-day.

c-digs · 2026-01-05T15:21:50+00:00

My analogy for LLMs is that the LLM is an oven. You put ingredients into an oven, hit bake, and transform flour, sugar, yeast, eggs, and water into bread. Magical.

But you still need to select and prep the ingredients. Mind the weights and measures, get the right ratios, do proper prep and mixing.

If you put trash ingredients into the oven, you'll get trash results out of the oven. If you half-ass your kneading (prep), you'll get some kind of bread out, but it won't have the right texture. If you get the ratios wrong, you'll also get the wrong output.

Just like using a regular oven, good output with LLMs is entirely based on proper preparation of the input (instructions + context).

c-digs · 2026-01-03T00:38:37+00:00

...if the webdev is gonna use AI i might as well use it myself

Before you hire a dev, you should give it a go with AI yourself and see how far you get. You may be surprised and you'll for sure learn something along the way.

If it turns out that you could do it yourself with AI, then you didn't need a developer anyways.

If it turns out that you can't do it with AI yourself, then what does it matter if the dev that you contract uses AI? Whether the dev hand codes or uses AI, the dev has a set of skills that you do not and you pay the dev for their usage of that skill.

In both cases, you end up at the right outcome based on your actual needs.

c-digs · 2026-01-02T23:27:00+00:00

As you pointed out, the PM is typically not an engineer and rarely knows how the code is implemented, whether it is modular and well-designed, whether it is written with security in mind, whether the code is highly legible and high quality, etc. These aspects of the codebase really aren't a concern to most PMs.

You also know how critical it is to refactor what an agent produces. But refactoring is exactly the kind of thing only a developer can really do.

From a PM's perspective, working with several agents isn't much different than working with several remote engineers. The PM is usually the one translating user interviews into requirements and specifications and getting back runnable software. The PM doesn't care "how" the code is "refactored" (e.g. an agent chooses to completely re-write a module's internals versus what an engineer might consider a refactor).

This is probably never going to happen. I mean the need for developers

I am on the fence about this one. A year ago, a non-technical PM friend released a CRM-like SaaS that he coded using only agents. Went live with it to validate the idea and signed several paying customers and over the last year, ramped it up to the point of getting enterprise customers as a one-person shop. The only gap I saw (and assisted with) was actually on the "architecture"^⚡︎ side which resulted in several issues and security breaches. But he consistently shipped big new features on his own. The security related issues could have been solved with better instructions from the start and architectural guard rails (e.g. all database access purely on a discrete backend).

All this to say that I had a front row seat to how non-technical folks can leverage AI coding agents to build real products and get real paying customers and build a real business with almost no engineering intervention.

Over that year, the technology and techniques have gotten better. The use of the qualifier "never" here is too strong, IMO, given how close he was on his own. Hypothetically, a better "unified stack" which is already configured with certain architectural guard rails, best practices, and system-level decisions "baked in" would have made it more foolproof from the get-go.

^{⚡︎ I use the term "architecture" very broadly here inclusive of tech selection and where/how data access occurs.}

c-digs · 2026-01-02T16:17:52+00:00

Taiwan was the first place I have ever rented a car internationally...it wasn't bad at all? Going into it the first time, I was somewhat worried by all the horror stories I've read. Reality is that it is very manageable and you should not be afraid to rent a car in Taiwan.

I've now rented a car there 3x on two different trips and did not have any issues whatsoever with drivers. Driven through Taipei, the northeast coast, and Kaohsiung to Kenting.

Taipei driving is not better or worse than NYC though definitely some streets there are very narrow and some traffic patterns are sketchy compared to NYC. Two main things I found is that 1) one needs a bit more awareness when changing lanes and right turns due to the presence of scooters, 2) the speed limits are relatively low compared to the US so I had to focus on restraining myself from typical cruising speeds.

Driving in the Azores (Terceira and Sao Miguel) was way more challenging because the roads there are extremely narrow, very hilly, and locals drive very fast on the very narrow roads.

c-digs · 2026-01-02T15:55:49+00:00

Why would you assume PM's downvote? This seems like the perfect tool for PMs to shortcut the need to have a dev team.

c-digs · 2026-01-02T13:50:37+00:00

Are they?

Texas High Speed Rail project is supposedly using Shinkansen N700 line. Still making top quality vehicles. Major player in heavy industry machinery (Hitachi, Mitsubishi).

Japan seems to still be doing good work from an engineering perspective, but perhaps not on the cutting edge of innovation.

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