Ben Hooper
Enterprise .NET & DevOps Consultant | Bridging Legacy Systems, CI/CD Reality & AI-Driven Delivery
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I'm a Kansas-based software consultant who loves writing code almost as much as I love figuring out why an enterprise system isn't shipping the way it should. Recovering monolith wrangler. Perpetual pipeline tinkerer. Firm believer that the real problem is rarely the one on the ticket.
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Area of Expertise
Real-World .NET in the Enterprise: What Changes When Your Codebase Has 10 Years of History
Greenfield .NET projects are a joy. Clean architecture, modern patterns, the latest NuGet packages. Then you get your look at the codebase that's been running in production since .NET Framework 3.5, and everything you know gets stress-tested. I'll walk through the most common patterns I've encountered in decade-old .NET systems: the tightly coupled monoliths where everything depends on everything else, the business logic buried in SQL stored procedures, the God classes no one dares touch, and the complete absence of any seam to refactor against. Then I'll share the practical, incremental strategies that actually work inside organizations that can't just stop the world and rewrite.
What I hope you walk away with:
How to read and map a tightly coupled codebase quickly so you can find safe entry points.
The Strangler Fig and other incremental modernization patterns applied to real .NET solutions.
How to introduce interfaces, dependency injection, and testability into code that was never designed for it.
When to modernize and when to leave well enough alone (a more important skill than people admit).
Lessons learned from enterprise .NET modernization engagements.
Whether you're inheriting a legacy system or trying to future-proof what you're building today, I hope that I give you a pragmatic toolkit to keep you grounded.
GitOps in Practice: What Nobody Tells You About Multi-Environment Deployments
The theory of multi-environment CI/CD pipelines is clean and satisfying: code flows from dev to staging to production, environments are identical, deployments are predictable. The reality is messier and the biggest culprit is something almost nobody talks about: environment drift. Staging never actually matches production. It starts small like a config value here, a slightly different connection string there. Then one day your staging pipeline goes green and production goes on fire. If you've been there, this talk is for you. Drawing on hands-on experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines across Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Octopus Deploy, and Jenkins for large organizations, I'll share what the documentation doesn't cover: the operational realities of keeping multiple environments honest over time.
What I hope you walk away with:
Why environment drift happens and the organizational and technical patterns that accelerate it.
Infrastructure-as-Code strategies that actually enforce environment parity (and what to do when IaC isn't fully adopted).
How to use pipeline gates, automated environment validation, and deployment manifests to catch drift before it hits prod.
Config and secret management approaches that don't become a maintenance nightmare at scale.
Hard-learned lessons from real enterprise pipelines — including what I'd do differently.
This is a practitioner's session. We'll skip the happy-path demos and focus on what happens after your pipeline has been running in the wild for 18 months.
TechBash 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
KCDC 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Ben Hooper
Enterprise .NET & DevOps Consultant | Bridging Legacy Systems, CI/CD Reality & AI-Driven Delivery
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