Liam Mercer
Startup and tech industry analyst writing about early-stage companies, growth strategy, and the realities behind launching digital products. Focuses on the connection between code, market fit, and sustainable business models.
In Praise of Boring Code
There is a particular kind of pride a developer feels when they compress five lines into one — a dense, clever expression that does somethi…
The Engineering Behind Real-Time Platforms That Never Miss a Beat
Some of the hardest software in the world is the software you never think about because it simply works. A live scoreboard that updates the…
The Middleware Pipeline That Shapes Every ASP.NET Core Request
Every request that enters an ASP.NET Core application passes through a pipeline of middleware before a response returns, and yet many devel…
The Deferred Execution Trap Behind IQueryable in .NET
Some of the most damaging performance problems in .NET applications hide behind two interfaces that look almost interchangeable: IEnumerabl…
Producer/Consumer Pipelines in .NET with System.Threading.Channels
The producer/consumer problem is one of those patterns that every backend eventually needs and almost everyone implements badly the first t…
This Week in .NET — Week 22, 2026
A loaded week: the .NET 11 preview train keeps rolling, the runtime quietly changed how async works under the hood, the C# team poked a hor…
Async/Await in C# — The Mistakes That Cause Deadlocks and How to Avoid Them
async and await are among the most-used keywords in modern C#, and among the most misunderstood. They make asynchronous code read like sync…
.NET Microservices with Docker and Kubernetes — A Practical Guide for 2026
The decision to containerise a .NET application used to feel like a significant architectural commitment. In 2026, it is baseline infrastru…
Why Vertical SaaS Is Winning in 2026 and What .NET Developers Should Build Next
The SaaS market hit $315 billion in 2026. That number appears in the business press primarily as evidence of opportunity — the market is la…
Why More Startups Are Choosing .NET in 2026 (And What's Still Holding Some Back)
For roughly a decade, Node.js was the default answer when a startup founder asked their first engineering hire what to build the backend on…