Blog Page - Gökhan Gökalp

Keeping Specs and Shared Understanding Aligned at AI Speed

With AI-assisted engineering, we engineers are moving faster and changes are getting shipped faster. This is also true for my own daily work. But I must say, the work surrounding those changes doesn’t really get smaller. Part of it simply moves somewhere else.. I have always believed that complexity never goes away, it just moves […]

From AI Conversations to Durable Engineering: What Spec-Driven Development Changed in My Workflow

Over the last couple of months, like probably many developers, I have been using AI coding agents more and more as part of my daily engineering workflow. I would say they are great thinking partners… I can explore an architecture, challenge an idea, ask them to inspect an existing codebase and iterate on a design […]

Runtime Governance for AI Agents: Policy-as-Code with OPA

In my previous article, I tried to show how we can build a simple but practical AI Agent using Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) with deterministic routing and intelligent search. I also mentioned that I kept things simple on purpose and that in a production scenario there are other concerns that need to be addressed. Building the agent itself is really […]

Building an AI Agent in .NET: Deterministic Routing and Intelligent Search with Microsoft Agent Framework

Nowadays wherever I look, everyone talks about AI coding agents, agentic systems or LLM powered applications and so on. It has been almost a year that I have been working on different domains where we integrate LLMs into our applications, as well as getting my hands dirtier by integrating AI assisted coding practices into our […]

DevEx Series 03: Laying the Azure Focused Platform Foundation for an IDP with ASO and KRO

In the first two parts of this DevEx series, I tried to show how golden paths in Backstage can enable developer self‑service without chaos and how extending the catalog into copilots with MCP servers transforms discoverability into a conversational experience. Both of these steps were about reducing friction and giving developers paved roads to move […]

DevEx Series 02: From Catalog to Copilots. Boosting Backstage with MCP Server

In the first part of this DevEx series, I tried to explain Platform Engineering and DevEx and showed how Backstage can help make an organization’s assets discoverable while creating golden paths that enable developer self-service without chaos. The goal is to increase developer productivity. In this second part, I will dive deeper into Backstage’s catalog […]

DevEx Series 01: Creating Golden Paths with Backstage, Developer Self-Service Without Losing Control

As an architect involved in platform engineering and DevEx transformation within a large-scale organization for the past few years, I’ve seen firsthand how developer experience directly shapes not just the speed and quality of software delivery, but also how effectively teams can adopt governance, security, and compliance practices as enablers rather than blockers. I can […]

Overcoming Event Size Limits with the Conditional Claim-Check Pattern in Event-Driven Architectures

In today’s technological age, we typically build our application solutions on event-driven architecture in order to make them as scalable, resilient, and flexible as possible. While event-driven architecture sounds good, it also brings along many complexities and limitations. In my previous articles, I also tried to touch on topics such as the best practices we […]

Securing the Supply Chain of Containerized Applications to Reduce Security Risks (Policy Enforcement-Automated Governance with OPA Gatekeeper and Ratify) – Part 2

In the first part of the article, we talked the importance of Software Supply Chain security and the measures that can be taken throughout the SDLC processes to mitigate the security risks of containerized applications. In this context, we emphasized the importance of the shifting-left approach, highlighting the benefits of integrating various security elements into […]

Securing the Supply Chain of Containerized Applications to Reduce Security Risks (Security Scanning, SBOMs, Signing&Verifying Artifacts) – Part 1

As we know, the adoption of containerization in modern software development environments has significantly changed the way applications are built and deployed. The lightweight and self-contained nature of containers provides various advantages and flexibilities, such as the ability to easily move applications consistently across different environments and quickly scale them. In addition, containers are also […]

Delegating Identity & Access Management to Azure AD B2C and Integrating with .NET

As we know, when developing a product, taking advantage of as many different cloud solutions as possible not only saves time and complexity but also allows us to minimize various administrative costs. Nowadays many of us are developing cloud-native applications or migrating to the cloud. During this time, we try to benefit from different solutions […]

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How to Order Events in Microservices by Using Azure Service Bus (FIFO Consumers)

Sometimes there are some scenarios that we can’t avoid or have to implement even though we know their complexity or drawbacks. I think, having a need to process some events/messages that are relevant to each other in a certain order (that they are published) in a distributed environment is also one of them. For example, […]

Providing Atomicity for Eventual Consistency with Outbox Pattern in .NET Microservices

As we know, adapting to microservice architecture has many benefits, but unfortunately, it also has some challenging points. Especially on the data consistency side. For example, in the monolithic world, we can use ACID database transactions to easily perform multiple operations in a consistent way. However, in the microservice world, as transactions need to be […]