Barret Blake
#MicrosoftMVP, speaker, husband, father, architect@NimblePros, developer, former manager, gamer, LEGO enthusiast, Buckeyes fan, model railroader
Columbus, Ohio, United States
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Microsoft MVP, husband, father, speaker, mentor, writer, architect@NimblePros, developer, former manager, gamer, LEGO enthusiast, Buckeyes fan, model railroader. When I'm not doing all that other stuff I also occasionally develop applications. Find links to my previous speaking, podcasts and sessions at my website: https://barretblake.dev
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Soft Skills for Developers: The Key to Success in Tech
Technical skills may get your foot in the door—but it’s soft skills that open the next one. In today’s fast-paced, collaborative, and remote-friendly work environments, developers who can communicate clearly, solve problems creatively, and work well with others have a distinct advantage.
In this session, we’ll dive into the core soft skills that elevate developers from good to great: communication, collaboration, adaptability, time management, and emotional intelligence. You’ll learn why these skills matter just as much as your technical stack—and how to start building them intentionally.
Whether you're early in your career or a seasoned pro looking to grow into leadership, you'll walk away with practical techniques to strengthen your interpersonal toolkit, improve team dynamics, and thrive in any organization.
Rediscovering Entity Framework Core: Speed, Flexibility, and Power for Modern Development
Are you tired of wrestling with data access layers and managing complex database interactions in your applications? It’s time to give Entity Framework Core (EF Core) another look. This session will show you how EF Core has evolved and why it’s now an even more powerful and flexible tool for modern application development.
Whether you’re building cloud-native apps, microservices, or just looking for a faster and more efficient way to interact with databases, EF Core has significantly improved in performance, scalability, and ease of use. We’ll dive into the latest features, optimizations, and best practices that make EF Core an indispensable tool for developers in today’s fast-paced world.
From raw performance gains to advanced querying capabilities, to the flexibility of working with various databases (SQL Server, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and more), EF Core has become a highly capable, cross-platform solution for all your data access needs.
In this session, we’ll explore the latest EF Core performance enhancements, how they can supercharge your apps, and how to leverage new features like improved raw SQL support, better LINQ performance, and advanced migrations. We'll also talk tips and tricks for making the most of EF Core in your projects, including best practices for working with complex models and optimizing queries.
If you’ve written off EF Core in the past, this session will change your mind. Come see why it’s time to give EF Core a second chance and why it might just be the perfect fit for your next project!
From Setup to Running in Minutes: Distributed Apps with Aspire
Distributed application development is complex by nature, often requiring significant time and effort just to wire together services, infrastructure, and dependencies. Aspire, now generally available, provides a modern, cloud-ready approach that dramatically simplifies this process for .NET developers.
In this session, attendees will learn how Aspire enables rapid development of distributed applications through built-in orchestration, opinionated components, and seamless service integration. We’ll cover the core concepts behind Aspire and demonstrate how to quickly scaffold, configure, and run a multi-service application—including web frontends, APIs, data stores, and supporting infrastructure—using minimal configuration.
By the end of the session, participants will understand where Aspire fits into the .NET ecosystem, how it improves local development and deployment workflows, and how to apply it immediately to accelerate their own distributed application projects.
Mastering Code Reviews: Fundamentals for Better Collaboration and Quality
Code reviews are an essential part of the development process, but how often do we pause and think about how to make them truly effective? In this session, we’ll explore the core principles of good code reviews that lead to better collaboration, higher-quality code, and a more cohesive development team.
Whether you're new to code reviews or looking to refine your process, we’ll dive into the key elements that make a code review valuable—not just for the author of the code, but for the whole team. We’ll cover how to foster a positive and constructive review culture, create clear guidelines for reviewing, and identify the common pitfalls to avoid.
In this session we'll focus on developing the proper mindset for code reviews, best practices for reviewers and developers, tips on how to present feedback to promote teamwork and improvement, and leveraging tools to streamline the process and reduce friction.
Whether you’re a developer looking to improve your review skills or a team lead building a healthy review culture, this session will give you the practical strategies to make every code review more effective, efficient, and beneficial for your entire team. Let’s build better code together—one review at a time!
From Code to Community: A Developer's Journey into Speaking, Content, and Community Involvement
You’ve spent years honing your skills as a developer, but now you’re wondering how to take the next step and share your knowledge. Whether it’s writing blog posts, speaking at conferences and meetups, mentoring others, or building your brand online, becoming involved in the developer community can be both fulfilling and career-changing.
In this session, we’ll break down how any developer—regardless of experience level—can start contributing to the broader tech ecosystem. You’ll learn practical tips for:
--Finding your voice and creating technical content (blogs, videos, open source contributions)
--Preparing and submitting your first talk (and surviving the nerves!)
--Engaging with local and global developer communities
--Building credibility and growing your network without burning out
This talk isn’t about being famous or chasing followers—it’s about creating impact, forming connections, and giving back to the community that helped shape you. Whether you’re introverted, unsure where to start, or simply looking for a way to level up, you’ll walk away with actionable steps to start your journey. And maybe build up some confidence along the way.
You Get Nothing Without Data: Adding Database Functionality to .NET Aspire
From SQL Server and PostgreSQL to CosmosDB, most applications are meaningless without data. In this session, we’ll explore how to seamlessly bring database support into your .NET Aspire projects—whether you’re working with containerized services or cloud-hosted databases.
You’ll learn practical techniques and proven best practices for configuring connections, managing secrets, and integrating data access layers using Entity Framework Core or Dapper. Through real-world examples, we’ll cover how to structure projects for maintainability, manage schema migrations, seed data, and architect for scalability in modern, distributed environments.
Whether you're building APIs, microservices, or cloud-native apps, this session will equip you with the tools to make your .NET Aspire applications truly data-driven.
When Logs Tell the Whole Story: OpenTelemetry for Beginners
Failures in production are a certainty. When something goes wrong, the difference between a quick fix and a prolonged outage often comes down to whether your logs tell a clear, connected story.
In this session, we’ll introduce OpenTelemetry as a language-agnostic, vendor-neutral approach to application observability. We'll start with the fundamentals—what logs, traces, and metrics are, why they matter, and how they work together—before focusing on how to use logging effectively rather than excessively.
Attendees will learn how to structure logs for clarity and correlation, how trace context connects logs across services, and how to choose log levels that provide insight without noise. We’ll also cover common logging anti-patterns, including over-logging and unstructured messages, and how to avoid them to keep both troubleshooting effort and observability costs under control.
Using practical, real-world examples, this session will show how OpenTelemetry logging improves debugging, incident response, and overall system understanding. Whether you’re new to observability or replacing a legacy logging approach, you’ll leave with a clear mental model and concrete best practices you can apply immediately.
Spec-Driven Development with GitHub Spec-Kit: From Intent to Implementation
Spec-driven development flips the traditional workflow on its head: instead of code being the source of truth, the specification becomes the backbone of design, collaboration, and delivery. In this session, we’ll explore how GitHub Spec-Kit enables teams to treat specifications as first-class artifacts—living documents that drive architecture, implementation, and verification.
You’ll learn how Spec-Kit helps teams clearly express intent using structured, version-controlled specs that live alongside code. We’ll walk through a practical workflow that starts with defining system behavior and constraints, then progressively refines those specs into testable, automatable outcomes. Along the way, we’ll show how specs can reduce ambiguity, improve cross-functional collaboration, and make design decisions explicit before a single line of production code is written.
This talk will cover:
--What spec-driven development is (and what it isn’t)
--How GitHub Spec-Kit fits into modern developer workflows
--Using specs to align product, engineering, and AI-assisted development
--Real-world examples of turning specs into implementations with confidence
Whether you’re building greenfield systems, integrating AI into your stack, or trying to reduce costly rework, spec-driven development offers a scalable way to move faster without sacrificing clarity. Attendees will leave with concrete patterns and a clear mental model for adopting GitHub Spec-Kit in their own projects.
One App, Three Architectures: Multi-Tenancy in .NET Without the Guesswork
Sooner or later, someone says the words: "We're going multi-tenant." Suddenly you're making a decision that will shape your data access layer, your deployment pipeline, and your on-call rotation for years, usually with about an afternoon to think it over.
There are three common answers, and they're often presented as a simple ladder from "cheap and messy" to "expensive and safe." That framing is wrong, and it often leads teams to the wrong choice. Every step up the isolation ladder actually deletes application code, from the global query filter to the TenantId column to the SaveChanges stamp. The tradeoff replaces it with operational complexity somewhere else. You don't buy safety with complexity. You move the complexity from your code to your infrastructure, and you'd better know which one your team is better at handling.
In this session, we'll build the same application three times. We'll start with a shared database using EF Core global query filters. Then we'll add SQL Server table partitioning so the database physically keeps each tenant's rows in their own drawer. Next, we'll move each tenant into its own schema and watch a surprising amount of code disappear, in exchange for exactly one new thing you have to get right. Finally we'll go all the way to a database per tenant, with a catalog database, connection-string routing, and the "joy" of running migrations against N databases on every single deploy.
Along the way we'll talk about the things that decide this for you in practice: compliance requirements, noisy-neighbor performance, tenant count and size distribution, cost per tenant, the "can we restore just one customer?" question, and what happens the day your biggest client asks to be moved somewhere else. You'll leave with a clear mental model of the trade-offs, working patterns for all three approaches, and a set of questions to ask before you commit , plus a frank look at what it takes to change your mind later.
I Let AI Write It -- Now What?
Every conference has AI talks right now. Most of them are either a demo of how fast you can generate a to-do app, or a warning about how it's all going to fall apart. Neither one helps you on Monday, when you have real work, a real codebase, and a tool on your machine that will confidently write a hundred lines of anything you ask for.
So I did the boring version of the experiment. I had an actual problem: years of digital photos and video scattered across drives in no discernible order. I built a real .NET utility to fix it, leaning hard on AI assistance. Then I shipped it, used it on files I genuinely could not afford to lose, and kept notes the whole way.
In this session we'll go through that project honestly. Where the AI was legitimately faster than I would have been, and why. Where it produced code that looked completely correct and was subtly, dangerously wrong, the kind of wrong that only shows up when you point it at ten thousand irreplaceable files. We'll look at real diffs: what I accepted, what I rewrote, and what I deleted without reading twice.
From there we'll get to the part that actually matters, which is the review discipline. Reviewing AI-generated code is a different skill than reviewing a teammate's pull request. Your usual signals are gone: there's no author intent to ask about, no hesitation in the naming, no rough edges where someone wasn't sure. It's uniformly confident, which means uniformly plausible, which means you have to verify rather than skim. We'll cover concrete techniques: writing the test first as a specification, constraining scope so output stays reviewable, treating destructive operations as a special category, and knowing which kinds of problems to simply not delegate.
Whether you're already using these tools daily or still deciding how much rope to give them, you'll leave with a practical approach for getting real value without shipping something you can't defend in a postmortem.
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Building Distributed Apps in Minutes with .NET Aspire: Simplifying Complexity
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