07 May 2015 1 minute to read

Talking about Akka.NET and the Actor Model on Hanselminutes and .NET Rocks

I’ve done a bit of a “press tour” for Akka.NET since we released Akka.NET v1.0 at the beginning of April and I wanted to share a couple of the interviews I’ve done in the .NET community since.

Hanselminutes: Inside the Akka.NET open source...

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24 Apr 2015 15 minutes to read

How to Start Contributing to Open Source Software

The Petabridge team (all two of us) just wrapped up a big two weeks. We launched Akka.NET V1.0 and then traveled to Portland to talk about .NET open source software at .NET Fringe.

24 Mar 2015 13 minutes to read

On a Mission to Mars

This weekend I went through the Landmark Forum and had to confront a big secret that I’ve been keeping hidden for virtually my entire life: the true aim of my ambitions.

Ever since I was a middle schooler, I’ve wanted to help build the first human colony on Mars....

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17 Mar 2015 8 minutes to read

Creating a Custom ETW EventSource for Debugging High-Performance Code in C#

One of the things I’ve been working on for both Helios and Akka.NET is a custom ThreadPool implementation that allows us to isolate mission-critical code from the noise of the CLR ThreadPool.

My second pass at implementing...

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13 Mar 2015 2 minutes to read

Want me to work on your distributed .NET applications?

Petabridge - We help .NET companies make distributed, realtime applications.

Time for a brief commercial interruption…

Recently Petabridge announced its professional services offerings around Akka.NET.

I’ve been...

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04 Feb 2015 12 minutes to read

The Right Way to do Equality in C#

One of the pitfalls of doing development in C#, Java, C++, or really any predominantly Object Oriented language (OOP) is how “equality” is defined.

In C#, for instance, you have the following methods that are built into every object:

  • object.Equals
  • the == operator
  • ReferenceEquals, for explicitly checking reference equality

My personal opinion: in any managed language, checking for referential equality is a pretty bad default - and if you’re working with immutable objects then equality by reference doesn’t really work.

In C/C++, where pointer arithmetic and knowing the precise location of something in memory matters it’s a different story. Equality by reference is the correct default in that case.

What’s the right thing to do?

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20 Jan 2015 15 minutes to read

Akka.NET - One Year Later

Akka.NET - Distributed Actor Model for .NET

I originally posted this at Beyond HTTP, Petabridge’s official blog. Read More

12 Jan 2015 11 minutes to read

In Response to a Letter from a Beginning Programmer

I received a heartfelt response from a new software developer in response to my “What Do You Need to Become an Elite Developer?” blog post. With his permission, I decided to post his letter and my response – with his name omitted.

Hi Aaron,

First, I want to...

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27 Dec 2014 5 minutes to read

The Next Fork in the Road

I had several friends and advisors review this post prior to publishing it; most encouraged me to go forward with publishing it but others cautioned that future investors / business partners may choose to pass on a deal with me due to the content below. I took time to consider...

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