How Neural Machine Translation Actually Works: A Developer's Guide

If you've been following this blog, you know I'm a bit obsessed with machine translation. I've written about using EasyNMT, building background translation services, and even improving EasyNMT. But I realized I've never actually explained how neural machine…

Keeping State Between Requests in ASP.NET Core: A Practical, No‑Nonsense Guide (MVC, Razor Pages, Minimal APIs)

UPDATE (2025-11-10): Added more practical examples from my actual codebase showing real-world patterns, trade-offs, gotchas, and the evolution from simple to sophisticated state management approaches. Includes detailed IMemoryCache patterns, ViewBag usage…

Understanding the ASP.NET Core Request and Response Pipeline - Part 1: Overview and Foundation

202g-11-09T00:16 Introduction The ASP.NET Core request and response pipeline is the backbone of every web application built on this framework. Understanding how a request flows through your application and how responses are generated is crucial for building…

Understanding the ASP.NET Core Request and Response Pipeline - Part 2: Server and Hosting Layer

In Part 1, we explored the overall architecture of the ASP.NET Core request and response pipeline. Now, we'll dive deep into the foundation layer: the server and hosting infrastructure. This is where everything begins—where your application comes to life and…

Understanding the ASP.NET Core Request and Response Pipeline - Part 3: Middleware Pipeline

We've explored the hosting layer and Kestrel server in Part 2. Now we arrive at the heart of ASP.NET Core: the middleware pipeline. This is where your application's logic lives, where requests are processed, and where responses are built. Understanding…

Understanding the ASP.NET Core Request and Response Pipeline - Part 4: Routing and Endpoints

We've journeyed through the hosting layer, explored Kestrel, and mastered middleware. Now we arrive at a crucial question: once a request makes it through your middleware pipeline, how does ASP.NET Core know which code to execute? The answer is routing and…

Understanding the ASP.NET Core Request and Response Pipeline - Part 5: MVC, Razor Pages, and Minimal APIs

We've journeyed through the hosting layer, middleware pipeline, and routing system. Now we arrive at the application layer—where your business logic lives. ASP.NET Core offers three primary programming models for building web applications: MVC…

Understanding the ASP.NET Core Request and Response Pipeline - Part 6: Advanced Pipeline Hooks and Extensibility

Throughout this series, we've explored the ASP.NET Core pipeline from its foundations to application models. Now we'll venture into advanced territory: the extension points and hooks that let you customize the pipeline at a deep level. These advanced…

Building a Remote Markdown Fetcher for Markdig

One of the challenges I faced while building this blog was how to efficiently include external markdown content without manually copying and pasting it everywhere. I wanted to fetch README files from my GitHub repositories, include documentation from other…

LLMApi: Keeping It Lively and Alive, Chunking and Caching

In my LLMApi project I wanted to be able to support asking for LOTS of data; however LLMs have a very limited amount of data they can output at one time; and aren't particularly fast about doing it. So I needed to add a clever way of pre-generting that data…