Brad Westness
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Organizing Your Code to Minimize the 'Blast Radius'

Software .NET Architecture Testing

I was recently listening to an episode of the .NET Rocks podcast with guest Steve “Ardalis” Smith and Steve articulated an issue I’ve tried to highlight in code reviews many times in the past in a very succinct way that I loved: you want to organize your code in such a way as to minimize the “blast radius” when you inevitably make a change.

An illustration of a nuclear explosion, a fiery mushroom cloud rising above a spreading ring of flame.
  • 07 Apr 2024

Software Engineering Character Classes

Software Engineering Culture

Much like a role-playing game, software engineers come in a variety of types, or “builds.” In gaming, these are referred to as “character classes.” Which are you?

A set of orange polyhedral dice scattered across a Dungeons and Dragons character record sheet, with the equipment and skills columns visible underneath.
  • 05 Feb 2024

Dynamically Compiling Protobuf Schemas from Confluent Schema Registry

Software .NET Data Testing

We’re using Kafka in the Confluent Cloud platform with Protobuf schemas a lot at work, and a recent need that came up was for a testing tool which would enable our QA engineers to produce messages to our topics at will, without needing to write a bunch of code first.

The Confluent Cloud web console for a Kafka topic named brad-bridge-target, with a 'Produce a new message' dialog open showing a key of 18 and a JSON order payload.
  • 05 Jan 2024
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© 2026 Brad Westness

Brad Westness

Wisconsinite, Software architect, Brewers baseball fan, he/him

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