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Tag: Blazor

Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship

I haven’t published since April because I’ve been afraid. I also avoided social media, news aggregators, and discussion forums for months. I’m done letting fear stop me. What was I afraid of? In this post I detail every single thing I’ve avoided admitting on this blog.

What Books Should I Read to Learn ASP.NET Core and Blazor?

I’ve been paid to write web applications for over a decade, but my only exposure to ASP.NET has been as an API consumer on the front-end, and I’ve never touched Blazor. That’s changing—I’m learning how to be a full-stack developer. There are almost too many books about the .NET platform, so I had to choose a few to focus on. I started by reading the front matter: the title, cover, foreword, preface or introduction, and table of contents of 24 different books. This was enough to compare and choose the books that I’ll read as soon as possible.

But there are two top contenders for the first book, and I need your help deciding!

I also made a list of 3 books that I’ll read once I’m familiar with T-SQL and the Clean Architecture. 3 more books made my “someday” list—I have no specific plans, but I’d like to read them eventually. At the end of this article I’ll reveal exactly which books made the cut, and ask you to help me choose between two books to learn ASP.NET Core. But first, here are my thoughts on each book.

30,656 Pages of Books About the .NET Ecosystem: C#, Blazor, ASP.NET, & T-SQL

When I learned lean software development, I abandoned year-long planning at work and at home. This year, I broke my rule. I made a New Year’s resolution. I decided to broaden my skills so I could ship a full-stack enterprise web app completely on my own. No back-end developers, no product managers, no UI designers, and no vibe coding. Since I wrote Ruby years ago and Rails is having a Renaissance right now, I wrote down the following and taped it to my bedroom door:

In 2025, Kerrick is a Full-Stack Programmer

Develop & deploy Ruby on Rails apps, covered by automated tests, to real users.