The Estimation Theater Nobody Asked For Let’s be honest: planning poker is basically ritual theater that nobody actually enjoys. You know the scene. Someone calls out “planning poker!” and suddenly everyone goes silent, frantically trying to divine whether this particular login feature is a 5 or an 8 (or both, depending on the developer’s coffee intake that morning). The irony? After years of teams obsessing over story points, velocity calculations, and Fibonacci sequences, the real question remains unanswered: how long will this actually take?...

In the startup world, there’s a famous mantra: “Move fast and break things.” But somewhere between the move-fast era and enterprise maturity, we collectively decided that all technical debt was a villain waiting to destroy us. We built entire careers around debt elimination, created JIRA tickets with apocalyptic descriptions, and treated every shortcut like it was code arson. The irony? Some of the most successful companies in the world wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t taken on strategic technical debt at precisely the right moment....

You know that feeling when you refresh your analytics and suddenly your servers are screaming louder than a cat at a vet appointment? That’s the moment you realize your carefully crafted side project is about to either become legendary or spectacularly explode in everyone’s faces. I’ve lived through this scenario twice—once successfully, and once… let’s just say I learned what “503 Service Unavailable” really means at scale. If you’re reading this, you’re probably experiencing either pre-viral anxiety or the thrilling aftermath of unexpected internet fame....

The elephant in the room isn’t new—it’s just gotten bigger, smarter, and disturbingly capable of memorizing everything you feed it. Yet somehow, we’ve collectively decided that pasting proprietary business logic into Claude or ChatGPT is totally fine. Spoiler alert: it’s not. The Uncomfortable Truth Nobody Wants to Admit Let me set the stage with what should be obvious but apparently isn’t: when you feed confidential data into an AI model, that data doesn’t just disappear into some secure vault....

The Controller-Free Revolution (And Why You Might Actually Like It) Remember when building a REST API in .NET meant creating a controller file, adding attributes to every method, and somehow ending up with more ceremony than a royal wedding? Those days are fading faster than your motivation on a Monday morning. Welcome to the world of Minimal APIs—where you can craft production-ready REST services with less code, fewer files, and genuinely less headache....