Kevin Smith
Coder
York, United Kingdom
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Kevin Smith is an accomplished Principal Software Engineer and technology enthusiast with a strong background in a wide range of technologies. He has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP and MongoDB Champion for his expertise and contributions to the industry.
In his day-to-day work, Kevin focuses on the development of .NET and TypeScript applications, leveraging AWS and Azure Cloud Services to build robust and scalable solutions for his clients. He brings a wealth of experience and expertise to every project he works on, delivering outstanding results and exceeding expectations.
Beyond his work as a software engineer, Kevin is heavily involved in the technology community. He runs three community groups, including dotnet York and dotnetsheff in the North of England, as well as a virtual hackathon group called MiniHack. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge and expertise with others, regularly speaking at user groups and conferences and contributing to the open-source community.
Fixing Broken Messaging: Pitfalls, Failures, and Solutions
Messaging is a fundamental part of distributed systems, but poor messaging practices can lead to performance bottlenecks, increased coupling, and system failures.
In this session, we’ll explore the most common messaging pitfalls—such as excessive locking in handlers, oversized event payloads, improper deduplication strategies, and over-reliance on request-response messaging.
We’ll break down how these issues impact system scalability and reliability, and more importantly, how to avoid them. Expect to see some examples using .NET and MassTransit, and insights into building resilient, event-driven architectures.
Whether you're new to messaging or looking to refine your patterns, this talk will help you design messaging workflows that are scalable, maintainable, and efficient.
How I test my ASP.NET Core APIs
If you know me, I’m passionate about testing, and what better than this talk I’ll be sharing my experience over the last 10+ years of testing APIs. This will cover the basics of how you get started with testing ASP.NET Core APIs, the layers I test at to prove our confidence in production, to how libraries and technology choices such as MongoDB and SQL Server make such a difference on your workflow with testing. We’ll also cover practices I use to ensure I don’t get bitten down the line when refactoring and updating the libraries.
Let's start using MongoDB in our next .NET project!
I’ve been passionate about MongoDB since its very first release, and for good reason—it’s evolved into the most popular general-purpose document database, packed with powerful features. But why should you choose MongoDB over a traditional relational database, and how does it fit into a modern .NET application?
In this talk, we’ll explore MongoDB from the ground up, starting with the raw power of BSON, moving through the MongoDB .NET driver, and finally diving into the brand-new MongoDB EF Core provider—a game-changer for developers familiar with Entity Framework. Whether you’re a seasoned .NET developer or just curious about NoSQL, this session will give you practical insights and techniques to harness the full potential of MongoDB in your applications.
Join me to discover why MongoDB isn’t just an alternative to relational databases—it’s a paradigm shift for building scalable, high-performance .NET applications!
.NET Minimal APIs
In this session, we'll take a look at the "what", "why" and "how" around the .NET Minimal APIs and how we can utilize these to make our API faster and more understandable. We'll also cover the new .NET Minimal APIs coming in .NET 7!
Testing your ASP.NET Core APIs
Testing is becoming one of the most essential skills for developers. We’re pushing quality to the forefront of software development so that we can have more stable builds and faster release cycles.
In this talk, we’ll cover how we can test our ASP.NET Core APIs function correctly at a level that includes the APIs supporting infrastructures, such as the database, file system, and network. We’ll go into the use of the in-memory test server which will host our APIs and how we can configure it for our test runs.
Everything You Need to Know About Configuration in .NET
We will delve into the intricate details of the new ways to configure .Net applications with ease and flexibility in mind.
We’ll take a look at why we need configuration in our application and the types of things that should be configurable. We will then dive into the great developer story that Microsoft has built for .NET to allow us to provide configuration at easily apply configuration in our applications. Starting with the minimal approach, we will explore scenarios where our configuration practices will take advantage of type safety focusing on the IOptions pattern. There are also lots of other scenarios that we’ll cover that you most likely have never touched such as user secrets and validation!
MongoDB vs SQL Server
Project Manager - “So team, what technologies are we going to use to write this great new music tracking application?”
Dev 1 - “blazor + .net core for the frontend, and SQL Server for the database”
Dev 2 - “SQL Server! – It’s 2020 we should be using MongoDB”
In this talk, we hope to end this debate once and for all. David and Kev will go head to head showing the advantages (and disadvantages) of their preferred database technology
Feature Management in .NET Core
Ever heared of a feature toggle? ...or maybe you call it a feature switch, feature flag, feature flipper or conditional feature 🤷?
We'll take a look at what feature toggling is and the diffrent types of feature toggling we can apply in our .NET Core applications.
A more flexible way to store your data with MongoDB
If you've been anywhere near software development, the norm is to store your data in a relational form, but what if there was a different way?
We will take a look at the history of MongoDB and why it continues to be a trending database year on year. We will then go into the advantages of having a flexible document model and how we can utilize MongoDB for our application storage.
DDD 2020 Sessionize Event
DDD North 2020! Sessionize Event
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