Architect4Hire: Thoughts and Musings

Robert Felkins

Robert Felkins

Chicago - Rogers Park

Software Architect | .NET & Cloud-Native Systems | Scalable App Design | Hands-On Tech Leader

The Prompt Is the Plan: How I Built a 1,200-Line Angular Component With a Framework You've Never Heard Of

The Prompt Is the Plan: How I Built a 1,200-Line Angular Component With a Framework You've Never Heard Of

Or: what happens when you stop typing instructions at the AI and start engineering them* TL;DR - wanna check out the framework and sample application I built, grab the code at https://github.com/architect4hire/brandforge I want to tell you about a bug. Not a dramatic one. No crash.

Behind the Scenes: Why AspireHire’s UI Started with an Angular + Bootstrap Template

The UI Crossroads When I first mapped out AspireHire’s architecture, the backend came together fast. ASP.NET Core 9, .NET Aspire for orchestration, Azure SQL and Cosmos for persistence, and microservices for Profiles, Jobs, Recruiters, Contracts, Messaging. That’s my comfort zone. I could sketch it out in five

Why We Built an Audit Trail into AspireHire (And Why You Should Care)

Why We Built an Audit Trail into AspireHire (And Why You Should Care)

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Data Accountability Hey folks! So, I've been deep in the trenches building AspireHire lately, and I wanted to share something that might not seem sexy on the surface but is absolutely crucial for any serious application: our audit framework.

Kicking Off AspireHire

Kicking Off AspireHire

Building a Proof of Concept and Teaching Developers How to Master Modern ASP.NET Core, Aspire, and Azure Development Setting the Stage Let’s be real for a second. The world does not need another side project that fizzles out after a GitHub repo and a half-finished README. What

Outbox Pattern and the Two-Stage Commit Problem

Outbox Pattern and the Two-Stage Commit Problem

In the world of microservices and distributed systems, ensuring reliable message delivery while maintaining data consistency is one of the most challenging problems developers face. The Outbox Pattern provides an elegant solution to this dual-write problem, guaranteeing that business operations and event publishing happen atomically. This comprehensive guide will

Lessons Learned: Building Cloud-Native Microservices with ASP.NET Core 9 for Our Enterprise Client

Lessons Learned: Building Cloud-Native Microservices with ASP.NET Core 9 for Our Enterprise Client

A Real-World Journey from Requirements to Production Hey fellow developers and architects! 👋 I wanted to share some insights from a recent project we completed for a major retail client who needed to modernize their monolithic e-commerce platform. They came to us with a classic story: "Our system

Mastering Entity Framework Core: A Guide to Efficient Data Access and Common Pitfalls

Mastering Entity Framework Core: A Guide to Efficient Data Access and Common Pitfalls

A few months ago, I found myself staring at a query that was way slower than it should’ve been. What started as a simple request for a list of blog posts ballooned into hundreds of queries hitting the database, one for each related author, category, and comment. My CPU