Nicholas Blumhardt
@nblumhardt.com
Founder at @datalust.co, core maintainer for #serilog, original #autofac author, long-ago-.NET PM. Deep down the #rustlang rabbit hole. Also at https://nblumhardt.com/@nblumhardt. 🇦🇺
Signed up with @opentalk.eu after investigating a few Zoom alternatives; so far, so good!
It's surprising just how much functionality is "table stakes" in that space, now; it's nice to see a segment with a bunch of viable offerings.
It's surprising just how much functionality is "table stakes" in that space, now; it's nice to see a segment with a bunch of viable offerings.
January 27, 2026 at 4:06 AM
Signed up with @opentalk.eu after investigating a few Zoom alternatives; so far, so good!
It's surprising just how much functionality is "table stakes" in that space, now; it's nice to see a segment with a bunch of viable offerings.
It's surprising just how much functionality is "table stakes" in that space, now; it's nice to see a segment with a bunch of viable offerings.
Saw this live; it's sure to strike some chords with my tool-making friends.
A bootleg recording of my favorite talk I've ever given, "Tool-making, for good and evil," is now on youtube! (link below)
Huge thanks to @larene.dev for recording, @damianm.com for convincing me to do it, and the awesome folks hosting (and in the audience) at @dddbrisbane.bsky.social, back in Dec.
Huge thanks to @larene.dev for recording, @damianm.com for convincing me to do it, and the awesome folks hosting (and in the audience) at @dddbrisbane.bsky.social, back in Dec.
Tool-making, for good and evil
YouTube video by Frank Elavsky
www.youtube.com
January 23, 2026 at 4:27 AM
Saw this live; it's sure to strike some chords with my tool-making friends.
Reposted by Nicholas Blumhardt
I am excited to announce SharpDbg - a new cross platform, managed .NET debugger, written completely in C#! (No C++ required 💪)
⭐ Star it on GitHub! github.com/MattParkerDe...
SharpDbg implements the VS Code Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP),
...
⭐ Star it on GitHub! github.com/MattParkerDe...
SharpDbg implements the VS Code Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP),
...
GitHub - MattParkerDev/sharpdbg: SharpDbg is a .NET managed code debugger supporting the VSCode DAP, implemented completely in C#/.NET
SharpDbg is a .NET managed code debugger supporting the VSCode DAP, implemented completely in C#/.NET - MattParkerDev/sharpdbg
github.com
January 1, 2026 at 1:25 AM
I am excited to announce SharpDbg - a new cross platform, managed .NET debugger, written completely in C#! (No C++ required 💪)
⭐ Star it on GitHub! github.com/MattParkerDe...
SharpDbg implements the VS Code Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP),
...
⭐ Star it on GitHub! github.com/MattParkerDe...
SharpDbg implements the VS Code Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP),
...
Reposted by Nicholas Blumhardt
The Seq team rounded out 2025 at DDD Adelaide and then DDD Brisbane a month later, both fantastic community-oriented conferences.
Here's Ashley Mannix sharing his experiences shepherding Seq's high-performance #rustlang codebase through back-to-back years of rapid growth.
Here's Ashley Mannix sharing his experiences shepherding Seq's high-performance #rustlang codebase through back-to-back years of rapid growth.
December 16, 2025 at 10:58 PM
The Seq team rounded out 2025 at DDD Adelaide and then DDD Brisbane a month later, both fantastic community-oriented conferences.
Here's Ashley Mannix sharing his experiences shepherding Seq's high-performance #rustlang codebase through back-to-back years of rapid growth.
Here's Ashley Mannix sharing his experiences shepherding Seq's high-performance #rustlang codebase through back-to-back years of rapid growth.
2025 was a year of the industry fixating on development velocity.
2026? The year of fixating on software reliability.
2026? The year of fixating on software reliability.
December 11, 2025 at 12:02 AM
2025 was a year of the industry fixating on development velocity.
2026? The year of fixating on software reliability.
2026? The year of fixating on software reliability.
Reposted by Nicholas Blumhardt
Have you ever thought about having unit tests for your unit tests? 🤔 If so, decent chance your testing isn't catching the bugs you need and is just slowing you down ⏱️ @Ashley Mannix at #DDDAdelaide 2025 shows how to test complex software, challenging what a test is 🧪
October 29, 2025 at 10:00 PM
Have you ever thought about having unit tests for your unit tests? 🤔 If so, decent chance your testing isn't catching the bugs you need and is just slowing you down ⏱️ @Ashley Mannix at #DDDAdelaide 2025 shows how to test complex software, challenging what a test is 🧪
Reposted by Nicholas Blumhardt
Liam McLennan shows us at #DDDAdelaide 2025 the power in using Metrics to gain observability at high volumes where logs simply don't work 📊. Join us to learn what metrics are, when they are useful, and how to actually collect and analyse them 📈🔍
November 6, 2025 at 9:58 PM
Liam McLennan shows us at #DDDAdelaide 2025 the power in using Metrics to gain observability at high volumes where logs simply don't work 📊. Join us to learn what metrics are, when they are useful, and how to actually collect and analyse them 📈🔍
Reposted by Nicholas Blumhardt
One thing I started noticing recently is that competent engineers give up their credibility due to AI.
Twice already highly competent engineers I respect sent a PR that turned out to have very subtle issues. These issues would not be possible if a human understood it.
Twice already highly competent engineers I respect sent a PR that turned out to have very subtle issues. These issues would not be possible if a human understood it.
November 15, 2025 at 12:40 AM
One thing I started noticing recently is that competent engineers give up their credibility due to AI.
Twice already highly competent engineers I respect sent a PR that turned out to have very subtle issues. These issues would not be possible if a human understood it.
Twice already highly competent engineers I respect sent a PR that turned out to have very subtle issues. These issues would not be possible if a human understood it.
Hope you're all doing okay out there 👋
July 29, 2025 at 10:56 PM
Hope you're all doing okay out there 👋
I can't believe it's so rare to get a terse, sensible, un-pushy issue raised ahead of a PR that feel the need to micro-blog when it happens, but here you go 😂 github.com/serilog/seri...
Add support for NO_COLOR env var · Issue #130 · serilog/serilog-expressions
Hey! There is a slight inconsistency between different serilog console logging methods when it comes to support for NO_COLOR env variable. See https://no-color.org/ for the reasoning. Also there ha...
github.com
July 29, 2025 at 10:56 PM
I can't believe it's so rare to get a terse, sensible, un-pushy issue raised ahead of a PR that feel the need to micro-blog when it happens, but here you go 😂 github.com/serilog/seri...
Building the Serilog sink for OpenTelemetry on OTLP, rather than the SDK, is turning out pretty well. It's super stable and in wide use at v4.2.0, while there's still no final SDK API for non-Microsoft loggers.
Dependencies aren't inherently bad, but **schedule dependencies** almost always are.
Dependencies aren't inherently bad, but **schedule dependencies** almost always are.
May 31, 2025 at 1:15 AM
Building the Serilog sink for OpenTelemetry on OTLP, rather than the SDK, is turning out pretty well. It's super stable and in wide use at v4.2.0, while there's still no final SDK API for non-Microsoft loggers.
Dependencies aren't inherently bad, but **schedule dependencies** almost always are.
Dependencies aren't inherently bad, but **schedule dependencies** almost always are.
Reposted by Nicholas Blumhardt
May 26, 2025 at 7:22 AM
Has anyone investigated writing an MCP server binding for System.CommandLine in #dotnet?
Just poking around to keep up with what's going on in that space, seems like it could be an interesting quick bootstrapping option for existing codebases..?
Just poking around to keep up with what's going on in that space, seems like it could be an interesting quick bootstrapping option for existing codebases..?
May 25, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Has anyone investigated writing an MCP server binding for System.CommandLine in #dotnet?
Just poking around to keep up with what's going on in that space, seems like it could be an interesting quick bootstrapping option for existing codebases..?
Just poking around to keep up with what's going on in that space, seems like it could be an interesting quick bootstrapping option for existing codebases..?
Happy Firefox user, here, but I need to spend more dev time in Chromium-based browsers. Is the Chromium project itself the go-to privacy-conscious option? Any others I should take a look at? 🙏
May 23, 2025 at 12:38 AM
Happy Firefox user, here, but I need to spend more dev time in Chromium-based browsers. Is the Chromium project itself the go-to privacy-conscious option? Any others I should take a look at? 🙏
Reposted by Nicholas Blumhardt
May 22, 2025 at 12:31 AM
After me spending years maintaining a .NET state machine library, we implemented the core node state machine in plain old C# 😅
Couldn't be happier - states as classes, trigger handlers as switch statements returning new states, it's such nice, clear, direct code I don't think I'll look back....
Couldn't be happier - states as classes, trigger handlers as switch statements returning new states, it's such nice, clear, direct code I don't think I'll look back....
A peek into the delicate machinery that adapts a running Seq node to its role in the cluster: blog.datalust.co/leader-elect...
May 21, 2025 at 5:48 AM
After me spending years maintaining a .NET state machine library, we implemented the core node state machine in plain old C# 😅
Couldn't be happier - states as classes, trigger handlers as switch statements returning new states, it's such nice, clear, direct code I don't think I'll look back....
Couldn't be happier - states as classes, trigger handlers as switch statements returning new states, it's such nice, clear, direct code I don't think I'll look back....
Since data movement has such a huge impact on performance in distributed systems, we did a bit of work cleaning up Seq's query plans in 2025.1, and now explicitly show the send/receive operations that connect computations locally and over the network.
Still not perfect, but getting closer! 😁
Still not perfect, but getting closer! 😁
May 20, 2025 at 2:55 AM
Since data movement has such a huge impact on performance in distributed systems, we did a bit of work cleaning up Seq's query plans in 2025.1, and now explicitly show the send/receive operations that connect computations locally and over the network.
Still not perfect, but getting closer! 😁
Still not perfect, but getting closer! 😁
Reposted by Nicholas Blumhardt
Today's the day! Seq 2025.1 is ready at datalust.co/download, and on Docker Hub/ECR 😎
Find out what's new in the release announcement 👉 blog.datalust.co/announcing-s...
Find out what's new in the release announcement 👉 blog.datalust.co/announcing-s...
Seq — centralized structured logs
Seq is the self-hosted search, analysis, and alerting server built for structured log data.
datalust.co
May 19, 2025 at 11:31 PM
Today's the day! Seq 2025.1 is ready at datalust.co/download, and on Docker Hub/ECR 😎
Find out what's new in the release announcement 👉 blog.datalust.co/announcing-s...
Find out what's new in the release announcement 👉 blog.datalust.co/announcing-s...
Reposted by Nicholas Blumhardt
What I've been up to for the past year: blog.datalust.co/seq-clusteri..., and one of the toughest things to ship that I've ever worked on 😅
It's time to prepare for Seq Clustering!
Now in preview, Seq 2025.1 introduces high availability (HA), scale-out clustering in the Datacenter subscription tier.
* Seq 2025.1 clusters continue ingesting data and serving queries even when on...
blog.datalust.co
April 24, 2025 at 10:08 PM
What I've been up to for the past year: blog.datalust.co/seq-clusteri..., and one of the toughest things to ship that I've ever worked on 😅
Today's "quick-and-dirty" hack turned out quite nicely; a Seq relay (replication/forwarder) plug-in that properly handles traces, OTLP envelope properties, etc.: github.com/nblumhardt/s...
GitHub - nblumhardt/seq-app-relay: A simple HTTP/JSON forwarder that preserves all event metadata.
A simple HTTP/JSON forwarder that preserves all event metadata. - nblumhardt/seq-app-relay
github.com
April 23, 2025 at 6:35 AM
Today's "quick-and-dirty" hack turned out quite nicely; a Seq relay (replication/forwarder) plug-in that properly handles traces, OTLP envelope properties, etc.: github.com/nblumhardt/s...
Whoah, just spiked replacing Seq's internal cluster HTTP proxy with #aspnetcore's YARP, and once I remembered to register its service dependencies, it Just Works™️ first try, WebSockets and all.
That's the mark of a nice piece of software, going to have to dig into this thing 😎
That's the mark of a nice piece of software, going to have to dig into this thing 😎
April 16, 2025 at 11:50 PM
Whoah, just spiked replacing Seq's internal cluster HTTP proxy with #aspnetcore's YARP, and once I remembered to register its service dependencies, it Just Works™️ first try, WebSockets and all.
That's the mark of a nice piece of software, going to have to dig into this thing 😎
That's the mark of a nice piece of software, going to have to dig into this thing 😎
Reposted by Nicholas Blumhardt
The option to build a complementary product or service isn't viable for everyone, but for high-use libraries, it's within reach a lot of the time.
When you build one of these things, you end up a bit of a domain expert, and have a high chance of seeing the gaps and opportunities others won't...
When you build one of these things, you end up a bit of a domain expert, and have a high chance of seeing the gaps and opportunities others won't...
April 16, 2025 at 9:38 PM
The option to build a complementary product or service isn't viable for everyone, but for high-use libraries, it's within reach a lot of the time.
When you build one of these things, you end up a bit of a domain expert, and have a high chance of seeing the gaps and opportunities others won't...
When you build one of these things, you end up a bit of a domain expert, and have a high chance of seeing the gaps and opportunities others won't...
Surprised to see a few posts like this lately. I've been strongly anti-license-switch for as long as this stuff has been going on, but perhaps not loud enough.
There is no future in which this will happen. The #serilog project doesn't even accept donations! It's by the community, for the community.
There is no future in which this will happen. The #serilog project doesn't even accept donations! It's by the community, for the community.
What would break the dotnet csharp world right now, would be if #serilog followed suit and did the same thing.
May companies would be forced to engineer away to alternatives or pay for license. As logging is not a straight forward thing to replace.
May companies would be forced to engineer away to alternatives or pay for license. As logging is not a straight forward thing to replace.
April 16, 2025 at 8:29 AM
Surprised to see a few posts like this lately. I've been strongly anti-license-switch for as long as this stuff has been going on, but perhaps not loud enough.
There is no future in which this will happen. The #serilog project doesn't even accept donations! It's by the community, for the community.
There is no future in which this will happen. The #serilog project doesn't even accept donations! It's by the community, for the community.