Create repeatable delivery paths that remove operational friction without building a mini-enterprise.
Platform Engineering for Solo Developers: Build a Paved Road, Not a Palace
Razvan Mares··8 min read
A solo developer has an unusual infrastructure problem: there is nobody else to hand work to.
You are the person writing a feature, reviewing the pull request, repairing the deployment, checking the database migration, answering support email, and wondering why a background job stopped at 02:13. Th...
PostgreSQLGitHub Actionsci-cd+4
Use Sonnet 5 for momentum and Opus 4.8 for the moments that need deeper architectural judgment.
The Two-Model Coding Agent: Designing a Sonnet 5–Opus 4.8 Relay
Razvan Mares··8 min read
A coding agent does not need one model for an entire task any more than a production system needs one process for every workload.
That distinction matters because software work changes character as i...
PostgreSQLci-cdgit+2
A boundary-first approach to tools, state, approvals, observability, and reliable AI behavior.
Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 in .NET: Design Agents at the Boundary
Razvan Mares··8 min read
An AI agent is easy to demo when it has one tool, one prompt, and no consequences. Ask it to summarize a document, call a weather API, or draft a support reply, and the interaction feels almost magica...
.NETcsharpAI/ML+2
Make end-to-end tests deterministic by treating data setup, transitions, and cleanup as one designed system.
E2E Testing as a Data Story: Building Reliable Stateful Test Journeys
Razvan Mares··8 min read
End-to-end tests are often described as browser tests: open a page, click a button, assert that text appears.
That description is technically correct and operationally incomplete.
A meaningful E2E t...
PostgreSQLci-cdTypeScript+2
A practical look at the services, boundaries, and operational habits behind my home platform.
What Runs After the Cluster Boots: My k3s Homelab Stack
Razvan Mares··8 min read
A Kubernetes cluster is easy to describe as a collection of nodes, manifests, and containers. That description is technically correct, but it misses the interesting part: the cluster only becomes a pl...
PostgreSQLGitHub Actionstraefik+4
Advanced techniques for reducing allocation, contention, and latency in production .NET services.
The .NET Hot Path Field Guide: Measure, Shape, and Ship Faster Code
Razvan Mares··8 min read
Production performance work in .NET is rarely about discovering a secret API. It is about seeing the runtime as a moving system: requests enter, objects accumulate, work queues form, database calls wa...