38 posts across 30 entries
AgentSkills CLI started in May to install CritterStack AI Skills from a NuGet package. 1.1.0 adds package-level updates, restore, private feeds and package source mapping. Here is how it compares with NuGet's new dotnet-package-skills, and the plan for 2.0.
ReverseMarkdown more than doubled its NuGet downloads this year, from 3.7M in January to 7.5M. The 6.3.0 release cuts allocations by up to 58% on real-world pages by making the unclosed script and style cleanup linear, and adds TextWriter and async output overloads.
Pin the .NET SDK and the Infisical CLI with mise, inject secrets at process start with infisical run, and let .NET configuration pick them up as environment variables. The same tasks on a laptop and in CI, verified against a self-hosted Infisical.
Series · 3 parts
Three search features in the Critter Stack's SQL Server store: keyword search over an inverted index it maintains itself, vector search over SQL Server 2025's VECTOR type, and hybrid search that fuses the two rankings. Vector search shipped in Polecat 5.28, full text and hybrid in 5.29.
Series · 3 parts
A three-part look at Fisher, the Critter Stack's SQLite document store and event store. Part 1 tours the document database, Part 2 the event store and its projections, and Part 3 answers the question a store that lives in a file eventually asks you: how do you back it up without losing committed writes?
Real-world HTML arrives wrapped in navigation chrome, tracking attributes and inline CSS. ReverseMarkdown 6.2.1 adds Config.Preprocess, an ordered pipeline of DOM transformations applied to the source HTML before conversion: remove, unwrap, rename, recover CSS-only formatting, and resolve relative URLs.
Series · 2 parts
A two-part, hands-on guide to retrieval-augmented generation on plain Postgres with Marten, pgvector, and local Ollama models. Part 1 builds semantic search and a RAG pipeline over movie plots. Part 2 turns the same machinery into a question-answering assistant over the Marten documentation.
Series · 4 parts
A four-part walkthrough of Marten's Dynamic Consistency Boundary support. We start with the structural problem aggregates cannot solve, build the solution by hand in Marten, simplify it with Wolverine, and finish with the production traps to avoid.
Set up pgBackRest against S3-compatible object storage (MinIO as the open source example), then recover Postgres to any moment in the past, including the second before someone ran a bad DELETE.
ReverseMarkdown 5.0.0 is out! It’s our biggest leap in years - dramatically faster, more resilient on edge cases, and friendlier .NET HTML to Markdown converter library. Upto to 200× faster on huge HTML via TextWriter refactor. Fixed nested <p> exp...
As macOS developers, creating universal binaries and shared libraries that work seamlessly across both Intel (x86_64) and Apple Silicon (arm64) architectures is critical. Whether you’re building standalone executables or .so` shared libraries, combin...
Protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) has become essential as organizations handle increasing volumes of sensitive data. Regulations like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) mandate strict controls over PII to safeguard indiv...
Protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) has become essential as organizations handle increasing volumes of sensitive data. Regulations like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) mandate strict controls over PII to safeguard indiv...
Protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) has become essential as organizations handle increasing volumes of sensitive data. Regulations like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) mandate strict controls over PII to safeguard indiv...
This is a continuation of the Marten native partial updates patching post. All the native patch operations are driven by a bunch of custom PL/pgSQL functions with prefix mt_jsonb_. Marten uses JSONB for all its JSON storage hence all th...
When writing shell scripts, ensuring that certain variables are set and not empty is crucial. One handy feature in Bash for this purpose is the :? parameter expansion. The :? syntax is a form of parameter expansion in Bash that allows you to check if...
Bash scripts often require the ability to process both positional and named (or optional) arguments. Understanding how to handle these types of arguments can greatly enhance the flexibility and functionality of your scripts. Bash provides several spe...
In Unix-like operating systems, shell scripts can be called from within other shell scripts, either to run in the same process or in a different process. Let's explore both approaches. Let us create a bash script named task.sh with the content below ...
An interesting issue was raised in my ReverseMarkdown GitHub library repository wherein conversion of HTML table containing colspan in cells does not convert properly to Markdown. Let me show you a representative example of the HTML table content for...
Partial update or patching JSON involves making changes to specific parts of a JSON document without replacing the entire document. This is particularly useful when you only need to modify certain fields or elements within a large JSON object, rather...
I was quite intrigued by the recent version of [Bun](https://bun.sh/docs/bundler/executables#embedding-sqlite-databases) supporting a one liner call to embed a SQLite file and use it as part of a single file binary. This is super cool. See the code b...
To set some context, the app itself will need to provide the following functionality Web app serving few web pages and also serves a REST API. CLI based task/commands to do various tasks including serving the web app. Deploy as a single-file binar...
MysticMind.PostgresEmbed v4.0 released with support for .NET 8 and few enhancements. This library provides minimum Postgres binaries for development or unit testing purposes. This library has had around 92K NuGet downloads so far. https://github.com/...
Ollama is a really easy and sleek tool to run OSS large language models. Download the Ollama app from https://ollama.ai, run it. Once you run, it spins up and API and you can use the CLI to install models and ask your questions. You can lookup all th...
Let me set some context to understand the problem at hand, zip command is available by default on all *nix OS flavours which includes both Linux and Mac OS. On latest Windows server, there is no zip as command readily available but GH Actions provide...
For debugging purposes, we had to profile a Python program using cProfile which will create a .prof file with the profiled data. Also, we wanted to create unique file names for each run using a bash shell. We had a couple of options: Use Unix epoch ...
VitePress uses Shiki for syntax highlighting which is a fantastic library. Shiki automatically fetches language grammar from VSCode so the language names etc for the fenced code block comes from it. For .NET, the language names captured are csharp a...
Maintaining and managing documentation for software products or libraries require a good amount of time and discipline to keep it up to date with the latest code base. Typically code samples are the ones which can quickly go out of sync when it is ma...
NAnt was quite a popular build tool used by projects of all sizes targeting .NET Framework on Windows. I have written many complex build systems using NAnt in the past. But XML based DSL was quite clunky to use and maintain. Besides, it was always a ...
I have been a co-maintainer of .NET OSS library Marten and largely involved in taking care of the DevOps stuff pertaining to CI pipeline, build and docs system. In the early days, the build was driven using a RAKE build script written by Jeremy Mille...