Ardalis is Steve Smith
Proven Expertise
Steve Smith has been recognized by Microsoft as a Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 2002, and was a member of Microsoft’s Regional Director program for 10 years. He is also a founding member of the ASPInsiders, an external advisory group for the ASP.NET product team. As Microsoft launches their new version of ASP.NET, he has been contributing to the product and authoring many sections of the official documentation on GitHub.
How can I help you
I offer various different professional services that includes private training for corporate customers, accelerate your project with a bit of mentoring or even a home like inspection for your code and a software application.
Mentoring
You or your team can benefit from Steve’s experience with ASP.NET using SOLID development principles, proven design patterns, and Domain-Driven Design (DDD).
“Our team could spend many hours with other developers figuring out a problem or best practice, or we could set up a meeting with Steve.”
“[Steve] is able to quickly understand the problems we are trying to solve and then works with us to solve the problems.”
Online Training
Steve has published many courses on Pluralsight, covering topics from N-Tier architecture to Refactoring to Domain-Driven Design. You can also follow Steve on YouTube for more online video content. See what others say about Steve’s courses.
Assessments
Quickly learn where your application could be improved with an application assessment from Steve. An assessment will reveal “low hanging fruit” that will add the greatest value for the least effort, and can identify security and performance issues as well as maintainability anti-patterns and technical debt. Read more…
Workshops
Look for Steve’s workshops on software craftsmanship, ASP.NET 5, and Domain-Driven Design at an upcoming conference, or schedule one for your team. Contact Steve for more details.
Speaking Engagements
Steve is a regular speaker at tech conferences like Codemash, Stir Trek, DevIntersection, and more. You can find some of his past presentations on SlideShare and SpeakerDeck.
Watch Steve discuss Software Quality on Channel 9 with Seth Juarez:
Interviews and Podcasts
Listen to interviews with Steve Smith on various industry shows and podcasts.
Latest Articles
A new major version of the Ardalis Specification library has been released. This library is used to create and compose specifications for querying data from repositories. It's a key part of the Ardalis Clean Architecture libraries and is used in many applications to help simplify querying logic and make it more testable. If your application suffers from LINQ pollution, with query logic spread…
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Better late than never, as I'm writing this in late February 2025... First, here's a few links to past years in review: My 2017 Year in Review My 2018 Year in Review My 2019 Year in Review My 2020 Year in Review My 2021 Year in Review My 2022 Year in Review My 2022 Year in Review My Year in Review Post Checklist Now on to the various categories... Blogging ✍️ Blogging continues its slide into…
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A developer manager recently reached out with a concern: their new QA team member was finding too many bugs, leading to frustration among developers. Overall velocity of the dev team (in terms of features being shipped) was rapidly falling. The question was, how can they reduce the number of issues being kicked back from QA without discouraging the testers from doing their job well? QA Isn't the…
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This post is part of the C# Advent Calendar 2024 - check out all of the C# articles from this year! C# events are a powerful feature of the language, providing a simple mechanism for building publish-subscribe communication patterns. However, when used in ASP.NET Core applications, events can lead to subtle, hard-to-diagnose issues that can harm the reliability and scalability of your application…
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When working with software development, especially in object-oriented or component-based systems, understanding the distinction between interfaces and implementations is crucial. The two terms often come up in conversations about architecture, design patterns, and coding best practices, but what do they really mean? In this post, we'll break down the difference and why it matters. YouTube What is…
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As a software developer, you might spend most of your time immersed in code, solving problems, and building innovative solutions. But have you ever considered starting a blog? If you haven't, let me give you some compelling reasons why you should. This is advice I frequently give to members of my developer group coaching program at devBetter.com. Watch the Video 1. Sharpen Your Skills One of the…
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What do you do when you find yourself in microservice hell? How do you keep the gains you (hopefully) made in breaking up your legacy ball of mud, without having to constantly contend with a massively distributed system? Migrate to a modular monolith. Microservices Microservices have been all the rage for the past several years. They offer a way to break up large, monolithic applications into…
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One of the key challenges in developing a modular monolith is managing the communication between different modules, especially when it comes to handling data dependencies across module boundaries. Recently, I received an interesting question from one of the students of my modular monoliths course, which I thought others might appreciate. Student Query Modular Monolith course question (EFCore…
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Writing maintainable code should be a goal in most software engineering projects. Although definitions and especially hard measurements of what maintainable means with regard to software may vary, it can be useful to compare maintainable code to the much more easily verified unit testability of that code. Introduction When discussing software quality, two important concepts often arise: unit…
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One of the key challenges in developing a modular monolith is managing the communication between different modules, especially when it comes to handling data dependencies across module boundaries. Recently, I received an interesting question from one of the students of my modular monoliths course, which I thought others might appreciate. Student Query Hi Steve, I have another question for you…
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