Before I Ask AI to Build, I Ask It to Challenge

February 12, 2026February 12, 2026 Daniel DonbavandLeave a comment

Early in my career, I built a feature that was supposed to change everything.

The stakeholder was convinced. “This will transform how the team works,” they said. I took it at face value. We spent weeks on it. Good code, solid architecture, all the edge cases handled. Shipped it. Nobody used it.

The feature fixed a symptom, not the actual problem. By the time I’d finished building, someone else had solved the root cause a different way. The feature just sat there, working perfectly, doing nothing.

That experience stuck with me. I’d built exactly what was asked for without questioning whether it was the right thing to build.

AI makes this mistake easier to make. AI can generate specs, scaffold code, write tests. The gap between “someone suggests a feature” and “feature is built” keeps shrinking. But speed doesn’t help if you’re heading in the wrong direction.

How common is the wrong direction? Pendo analyzed 615 SaaS subscriptions and found 80% of features are rarely or never used. An average of 12% of features generate 80% of daily usage volume. They measured click frequency, so a compliance tool clicked once a quarter could still matter. But the pattern is clear. Most of what gets built does not get pulled into anyone’s week. Pendo 2019 Feature Adoption Report

Claude Code Hooks + Obsidian = A Searchable Dev Journal That Writes Itself

February 4, 2026February 4, 2026 Daniel DonbavandLeave a comment

Last week I was trying to remember how I’d solved a redirect validation bug. I knew I’d worked on it with Claude Code, maybe two weeks ago. I remembered discussing the approach, making a plan, even committing something. But I couldn’t find any trace of what I’d actually done. The session was gone.

This kept happening. I’d close a terminal and lose everything: the prompts I’d sent, the reasoning behind decisions, the plans Claude had written. CLAUDE.md gives Claude project context, but it doesn’t capture what happened in a session.

So I wrote a PowerShell script that hooks into Claude Code’s lifecycle and journals everything to Obsidian automatically. I’ve been running it for about a week now, across ~50 journal entries. Plan archival turned out to be the most valuable piece.

Securing Digital Identities: Streamlining Authentication with AWS Cognito in Blazor .NET 8 Applications

April 10, 2024February 4, 2026 Daniel Donbavand7 Comments

Previously, we explored AWS Cognito, an essential service from AWS for managing identities and access. We delved into its use cases, benefits, and why it’s worth considering for your projects. If you missed that post, you can read it here.

In this post, we’re focusing on integrating AWS Cognito with a .NET 8 Blazor WebApp. This involves using .NET 8’s authentication features, such as OpenID Connect, Authentication, and JWTs. We aim to make this process straightforward, breaking it down into easy steps for better understanding.

This post is organized into three key areas:

Setting Up AWS Cognito Service: Laying the groundwork for integration.
Integrating AWS Cognito with Your .NET 8 Blazor WebApp: Step-by-step implementation.
Adding Authentication to Your Blazor WebApp Using AWS Cognito: Enhancing security and user management.

Securing Digital Identities: A Deep Dive into AWS Cognito and Its Ecosystem

March 12, 2024February 4, 2026 Daniel DonbavandLeave a comment

In our digital world, stories of password breaches and security mishaps are all too common, reminding us of the critical need for tight security. Consider these recent high-profile incidents:

LinkedIn (2012): Over 100 million email and password combinations exposed.
Ashley Madison (2015): Personal details of 32 million users leaked.
eBay (2014): Attackers accessed 145 million users’ records through employee logins.

These incidents highlight the glaring need for robust security measures. AWS Cognito emerges as a powerful tool for managing user sign-up, sign-in, and access, ensuring smooth authentication processes across platforms.

Seamless Rendering: The Magic of Blazor’s Auto Render Mode in .NET 8

October 16, 2023February 4, 2026 Daniel DonbavandLeave a comment

Blazor’s journey from its inception has been marked by continuous enhancements, making it a compelling choice for developers. The advent of .NET 8 brings forth a noteworthy feature – the Auto Render Mode, bridging the gap between Blazor Server and Blazor WebAssembly. This mode is a game-changer as it provides the best of both worlds: the speed of Blazor Server for initial rendering and the client-side capabilities of Blazor WebAssembly for subsequent interactions. By smartly toggling between server and client rendering based on the situation, Auto Render Mode elevates the user experience by reducing load times and improving interactive performance, making Blazor an even more enticing framework for modern web development.

Beyond Caching: Building an ASP.NET Core 7 Blazor App with Redis for Real-Time Updates

August 21, 2023February 4, 2026 Daniel Donbavand2 Comments

Introduction

Recently, I’ve been exploring Redis and its potential beyond merely being a cache service. In this post, I’ll show you how to use Redis as a fast and scalable data store for your .NET 7 applications. We’ll create a Blazor Server application with a .NET 7 minimal API back end that uses Redis to implement a real-time scoreboard for multiple players. I’ll also discuss why and when to use Redis, and how it differs from other data stores.

Redis: What’s the Big Deal?

Redis is a fully managed, in-memory data store providing high performance, availability, and scalability for your applications. It supports various data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, streams, and geospatial indexes. Additionally, it supports transactions, Lua scripting, Pub/Sub messaging, and cluster mode for horizontal scaling and high availability.

While commonly used as a cache service to reduce latency and load, Redis can serve as a primary data store for specific use cases that require rapid and frequent read/write operations on small pieces of data.

Continuous Deployment with GitHub Actions to AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

July 6, 2023February 4, 2026 Daniel DonbavandLeave a comment

Welcome to the fourth and final part of our series, where we aim to tie together the knowledge and skills acquired in the previous instalments:

💻 How to Create a Custom Slack Bot with .NET 7

🚀 Creating a Minimal API With ASP.NET Core That Interacts With AWS DynamoDB

🔧 Creating and Hosting An Application on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

🚢Continuous Deployment with GitHub Actions to AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

Today, we focus on the ultimate step in the development cycle: the implementation of Continuous Deployment using GitHub Actions to AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS). We’ll take the elements we’ve built in previous parts, and integrate them into a comprehensive, streamlined deployment process. Let’s begin.

Creating and Hosting An Application on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

June 19, 2023July 6, 2023 Daniel Donbavand3 Comments

In the ever-evolving tech landscape, the call for efficient and reliable ways to deploy applications is ringing louder than ever. But no worries! Thanks to robust tools like GitHub Actions, Docker, and the AWS Services, automating the deployment of ASP.NET Core applications to AWS ECS has become a lot easier.

This is our third post in the series of building a Slack Bot hosted in AWS. In this post we’ll delve into how to create and host our ASP.NET Core API on an Elastic Container Server (ECS).

💻 How to Create a Custom Slack Bot with .NET 7

🚀 Creating a Minimal API With ASP.NET Core That Interacts With AWS DynamoDB

🔧 Creating and Hosting An Application on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

🚢Continuous Deployment with GitHub Actions to AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

Creating a Minimal API With ASP.NET Core That Interacts With AWS DynamoDB

June 7, 2023July 6, 2023 Daniel Donbavand3 Comments

In this blog post, we will guide you through the process of creating a simple .NET 7 API that interacts with DynamoDB. Additionally, we will integrate our SlackBot console application, which we introduced in a previous blog post How to Create a Custom Slack Bot with .NET 7.

This is the second post in the series

💻 How to Create a Custom Slack Bot with .NET 7

🚀 Creating a Minimal API With ASP.NET Core That Interacts With AWS DynamoDB

🔧 Creating and Hosting An Application on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

🚢 Continuous Deployment with GitHub Actions to AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

Before we dive into the details, it’s important to note that we could have created everything within the SlackBot console application. If you prefer that approach, feel free to do so. However, in this post, we are creating a separate Web API to allow for future integration with front-end applications, rather than solely relying on the SlackBot console application.

In this post, we are going to cover creating our ASP.NET Core API first. We will then add a ping endpoint to ensure our Web API is working as expected. Next, we will create an IAM role in the AWS Management Console, create a DynamoDB table in the AWS Management Console, add the AWSDynamoDB SDK and finally the code needed to call our DynamoDB table in AWS.

How to Create a Custom Slack Bot with .NET 7

May 3, 2023July 6, 2023 Daniel Donbavand3 Comments

Welcome, readers!

I am thrilled to launch my new blog series on building a .NET 7 Slack Bot that can interact with AWS Services. In this series, we’ll also walk through the entire process of setting up an AWS Elastic Container Storage (ECS) and a continuous deployment pipeline using GitHub actions.

💻 How to Create a Custom Slack Bot with .NET 7

🚀 Creating a Minimal API Qith ASP.NET Core That Interacts With AWS DynamoDB

🔧 Creating and Hosting An Application on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

🚢Continuous Deployment with GitHub Actions to AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

In this first post, we’ll dive into creating the .NET 7 console application. We’ll be leveraging a 3rd party library developed by Simon Oxtoby to simplify the Slack integration process. Along the way, we’ll guide you through the setup of creating a Slack integration and show you how to implement a simple ping command in our application to verify that everything is functioning as it should.

So, buckle up, grab your favourite beverage, and let’s dive into the exciting world of .NET 7 Slack Bot development!