For most of my career, “supply chain” meant the warehouse people fretted about. Then SolarWinds happened. A signed Orion update carried a backdoor. Thousands of customers installed it because the signature looked fine and the vendor looked trusted. Suddenly the question was not only “is our code secure?” but “is the machine that builds our code secure?”

I spent a weekend walking our .NET services with that question in mind. Spoiler: we had strong opinions about TLS and JWT, and almost no opinions about NuGet restore on the build agent.

Last Tuesday I got a Slack ping at 9:40pm: “payments are slow, can you look?” I opened Kibana, typed status:500, and watched a waterfall of red. Five services. Three pods each. Everyone logging something useful. Nobody logging the same something. Twenty minutes later I still could not answer the only question that mattered — which user action started this mess?

That is the night I stopped treating correlation IDs as a nice-to-have and started treating them like a seatbelt.

Our cloud bill went up again last month. Not because traffic exploded — traffic was fine. The cluster just… got fatter. More nodes. Same apps. Same user count. When I dug into it, the villain was not a runaway Deployment. It was a dozen YAML files where someone typed cpu: "2" and memory: 4Gi because that felt safe six months ago and nobody ever looked again.

Kubernetes will happily reserve capacity you never use. The scheduler only cares about requests. Your finance team only cares about the invoice. Those two facts meet in the middle as slack — resources booked, paid for, and idle.

Four months into full-time work from home, my living room table is the office, the standup room, and the lab. The corporate laptop still runs Windows because that is what Visual Studio, Outlook, and the VPN client expect. The services I actually ship, though, are Linux containers. For years that meant Hyper-V VMs, slow bind mounts, and a quiet acceptance that “it works on my machine” was a slightly different machine than production.

Windows 10 version 2004 shipped WSL 2 into general availability earlier this year, and Docker Desktop’s stable channel caught up with a WSL 2 backend in May. I spent a weekend moving my local .NET Core container workflow onto it. Not because I needed another toy — because the old setup was eating evenings I no longer have spare.

Three weeks into working from home full time, I realised the thing I missed most was not the office coffee. It was the five-minute shoulder tap. “Can you look at this exception with me?” used to mean rolling a chair over. Now it means scheduling a call, fighting the VPN, and hoping the screen share does not freeze mid-stack-trace.

I am a .NET person. Most of my day lives in Visual Studio on Windows. So when the whole team got shoved onto home broadband overnight, I needed a pairing setup that did not feel like watching someone else drive through a foggy window. Visual Studio Live Share turned out to be the least bad answer we have found so far — and on a few days, genuinely better than the old way.

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