The last two years, I’ve had the good fortune to be invited to the Netherlands for TechoramaNL, and I’ve been able to bring my wife and business partner Michelle and our twin boys along as well. It’s been fun and educational for all of us, so this year when there were opportunities to submit talks in Portugal that butted up against TechoramaNL on the calendar, we decided to go ahead and submit. Amazingly, my submissions were accepted to not one but two different Portugal events, and so the trip went from one week to three. And along the way, I also said yes to my good friends at DevIntersection who wanted me to present there (the week before we were to leave for Europe, in Florida). And when JetBrains asked if I could present at their DotNetDays event literally on the same day I was presenting in Florida for DevIntersection, I said “Why not?” and added that to the schedule as well.
It was a bit ambitious, but we pulled it off. And I say “we” because it was definitely a team effort. Michelle’s amazing at organizing trips, which is good, because there’s no way I could have gotten all of my stuff put together if I were having to deal with trip planning and logistics for the four of us in addition to working on my content.
I posted about my Fall 2025 Speaking Tour previously. Here’s a quick review of how the last month went from my perspective.
JetBrains.NET Days Online
8 October 2025 (Wednesday) - Online 0730 EST / 1330 CET Clean Architecture with ASP.NET Core
This is a talk I’ve given before, but I made a bunch of updates and for this event I was aiming for a shorter time slot of just 45 minutes. I got up super early so I could be awake and ready to go at 0730. I was also giving the talk from my conference hotel in Florida, which only had wifi not wired networking. While I was in the lobby waiting to go live on the stream, the internet dropped and I was disconnected for about 30 seconds, which wasn’t great and added a bit of stress. But there was nothing to be done about it at that point, and fortunately there weren’t any problems during my actual stream. I thought it went pretty well and we had a lot of good questions and engagement during the stream. You can check out the recording online here:
JetBrains .NET Days 2025 - Clean Architecture with ASP.NET Core
DevIntersection / CybersecurityIntersection
I had two sessions on 8-9 October, one just an hour or so after the streamed JetBrains .NET Days Online session. That one was on OWASP Top 10 Threats, which is always an important topic. When I agreed to give the talk in the spring, the OWASP web site promised an update with the 2025 list by the end of summer 2025. I foolishly figured that meant it would surely be done by my October conference in the fall. Unfortunately, that deadline shifted, and the list’s publication was moved to November during the OWASP conference. Which meant I was left to come up with my own list and make recommendations for mitigating the threats I’d chosen to focus on. Which was fine; in a one hour talk there’s not enough time to offer anything but overview coverage of the threats and a few specific low-hanging fruit practices that most applications should be applying. But it did mean I had to put more thought into developing the content than if I’d been able to just leverage the OWASP list.
My second talk was on The Dark Side of Microservices, and focused on common antipatterns and failure modes in microservice implementations. This is a talk I’ve given a few times before, and dovetails nicely with my modular monolith content, which for most applications provides a better way to evolve an application on the way to microservices.
Unfortunately, none of these talks were recorded, so I can’t share recordings with you here.
Azure Dev Summit
I flew home from Florida on Thursday night after my last session, had Friday to reset and pack for the longer trip, and then Michelle and the boys and I left on Saturday for Lisbon, Portugal. We spent Sunday seeing some Lisbon sights, including the Castelo de Sao Jorge.
Then I spent the next few days focused on my talks for Azure Dev Summit. This was a brand new event co-organized by Microsoft and the NDC and Techorama folks, and it had a ton of great content from a host of great Microsoft team members as well as community speakers. The venue was a large event space - mostly just a single room - which was divided into session rooms through the creative use of inflatable walls and igloos!
For the most part this worked pretty well, and kept everyone in the same large space where the food and drinks were served. There were couches and tables and chairs spread out so plenty of networking and socializing could happen between sessions.
My talks were on Taming Cross-Cutting Concerns in Your Code (on Monday) and Clean Architecture with ASP.NET Core (on Tuesday).
For this trip I brought along a laptop display extender with two screens that got a lot of attention from other speakers. It worked really well both while preparing my talks in the speaker room as well as when giving the talks, so I could easily see both my notes and what was being shown on the big screen, as you can see in the pic above. It’s a no-name thing I got on Amazon - here’s a referral link.
After spending Wednesday attending sessions and preparing for my next conference, I was able to go see some more of Portugal with my family. On Thursday we went to Tomar, which is rich with Knights Templar history and has several amazing castles and churches. The weather was sunny and warm. We learend about Manueline architecture, which features intricate Gothic-like features and many nautical references.
On Thursday and Friday we visited nearby Sintra, which has a bunch of tourist destinations. We spent time exploring Pena Palace and the Moorish Castle, both of which are about 1000 years old.
We saw the Quinta Da Regaleira, which has amazing gardens and grounds as well as a “reverse tower” that descends deep into the ground.
We also went to the westernmost point in Europe, where the next land to the west is North America. Our favorite place we visited in Sintra was the gardens in Montserrat. Something we didn’t appreciate before this point was the extent to which the Portuguese had brought back plants from all over the world, and how much they flourished in Portugal’s climate. In these gardens, there were so many massive plants, from forests of ferns to giant fig trees that had taken over and merged with ancient stone temples. There were massive centuries-old trees from New Zealand and North America next to plants from Brazil, Mexico, and other places. Some trails had nets over them to protect passers-by from giant seed pods that weighed up to 22 pounds. Pictures don’t do it justice, but we would definiitely visit again and spend more time there. The palace had some amazing and intricate decoration as well, but the grounds are what most impressed us.
There was also a beautiful palace in the gardens but there’s only so much room for pics in one blog post!
NDC Porto
We took a train from Lisbon to Porto on Sunday. I was able to work on my sessions for most of the trip, which actually had decent wifi (despite what I’d heard about train wifi from other speakers…). The weather in Porto was very different from Lisbon - wet and rainy pretty much all week. And the terrain was also quite different, with our hotel located by the river, and much of the city up steep hills from the riverside. But we had fun exploring the city, and the venue for the conference was a short walk away at a riverside former customs house.
I had two 2-hour workshops, one on Clean Architecture and the other on Pipeline Architecture, which was a modification of my Taming Cross Cutting Concerns talk, focused on applying design patterns to produce a reusable pipeline that all of your app’s use cases could share. It’s a great approach in my opinion since it dramatically reduces duplication and total lines of code while at the same time producing consistent policies for how the app handles things like logging, security, caching, validation, and more. Both talks went well and overall I had a great time at the conference.
The Smiths were able to do a tour of Porto’s bridges as well as a day trip to the Duoro Valley to see the terrain and visit some wineries.
We flew from Porto to Amsterdam on Saturday 25 October, took the train to Utrecht. We visited The Hague on Sunday and saw the Delft museum and the M. C. Escher museum. The public transportation in The Netherlands is so great. It’s really easy to get around there and see things. It helps that our hotel in Utrecht is right next to the train station. Techorama was Monday-Wednesday 27-29 October. I had an all day workshop on Monday on building a Modular Monolith .NET App in a Day. It went well and I had about a dozen students. My Tuesday talk was on SOLID principles, something I’ve been teaching for a very long time. I took the opportunity to update it to focus more on common problems I see .NET teams experiencing with their use of patterns like MVC, minimal APIs, and repositories. I thought it went well.
I got pulled into an architecture panel mostly because Ian Cooper wasn’t around (watch on YouTube).
And then my last talk on Wednesday was a brand new one, which I called Minimal Clean Modular Monoliths. It demonstrated and compared the same solution built using Vertical Slice Architecture, Clean Architecture, Modular Monoliths, and finally adding Microservices.
As a bonus, I also demonstrated how to combine VSA and Clean Architecture into a single project, which I’ve since decided to make into its own dotnet project/solution template.
Techorama publishes all of their professional photos from the event on their Flickr account, which I appreciate.
After that last talk, my October speaking tour was complete, but The Smiths continued on to London via Eurostar train through the English Channel Tunnel. Which is really cool when you think about it and also a complete non-event while you’re doing it (and certainly nothing you can capture in a photograph). We spent a few days touring London, seeing Westminster Abbey, The Tower of London, the Tower Bridge, The Eye, and even a Hamilton show (which was amazing). It was a great trip and Michelle did an amazing job of planning it all out for us.
Since getting home, I had just one more talk for dotNetConf on Clean Architecture with .NET 10. Other than that, I have a bunch of NuGet packages in need of updates for .NET 10, and a backlog of clients in need of architectural assistance. Which, I guess I should mention, is a thing I do. If any of the above (the tech topics not the family touring) sounds like stuff your team or organization could use, reach out to me and let’s talk!
(and yes this is being published rather late - sorry!)