IDEAS, DECISIONS & LESSONS

Journal

Notes on AI, architecture and building useful products.

155 articles

22 Feb 2026 · 25 min read

architecture

Testing Clean Architecture: From Unit Tests to Architecture Enforcement

Part 6 of 7 — Testing strategy per layer for Kids Learn. Domain unit tests without mocks, Application tests with NSubstitute, integration tests with Testcontainers, and NetArchTest for enforcing the Dependency Rule.

21 Feb 2026 · 23 min read

architecture

Vertical Slices Inside Clean Architecture: The Best of Both Worlds

Part 5 of 7 — Why pure Clean Architecture scatters features across projects, how Vertical Slice Architecture solves this, and the hybrid approach we use in Kids Learn.

20 Feb 2026 · 11 min read

The Voice AI Interview Playbook: Cascaded vs. Speech-to-Speech — Choosing Your Pipeline Architecture (Part 2 of 12)

Part 2 of 12 — The cascaded STT→LLM→TTS pipeline gives you control. Speech-to-speech models give you speed. Here's how to choose — and why the best systems use both.

20 Feb 2026 · 29 min read

architecture

EF Core 10, Minimal APIs, and the Outer Layers Nobody Gets Right

Part 4 of 7 — Implementing Infrastructure with EF Core 10 (pgvector, JSON columns), AI service integrations, Minimal APIs with Route Groups, authentication, and wiring it all together in Program.cs.

19 Feb 2026 · 10 min read

The Voice AI Interview Playbook: Why Real-Time Voice Changes Everything (Part 1 of 12)

Part 1 of 12 — The landscape of real-time voice AI has shifted. Gemini Live, OpenAI Realtime, Bedrock Nova Sonic, and Grok make sub-500ms AI conversations possible. Here's the reference architecture for building a production voice interview platform.

19 Feb 2026 · 25 min read

architecture

CQRS, Wolverine vs MediatR, and the Application Layer That Keeps Your Sanity

Part 3 of 7 — Command/Query separation for Kids Learn, pipeline behaviors, the MediatR licensing debate, Wolverine as the modern alternative, and the Repository Pattern in 2026.

18 Feb 2026 · 25 min read

architecture

Building a Domain Layer That Actually Has Behavior (Not Just Properties)

Part 2 of 7 — Rich domain models for Kids Learn with C# 14. Entities with invariants, value objects, domain events, aggregate roots, and architecture tests to enforce the rules.

17 Feb 2026 · 20 min read

architecture

Clean Architecture in .NET 10: Why I Stopped Copy-Pasting Templates and Started Understanding the Rules

Part 1 of 7 — What Clean Architecture actually means in .NET 10, the Dependency Rule explained with real code, C# 14 features that matter, and setting up the Kids Learn solution structure.

16 Feb 2026 · 19 min read

From Idea to Production: Building a SaaS Product with Claude, Gemini, and Agentic AI

How I designed, analyzed, implemented, and tested Kids Learn — an AI-powered educational SaaS platform — using Claude as my development partner, Gemini for AI features, Next.js, PostgreSQL, and pgvector. A complete walkthrough from napkin sketch to production.