· 2 min read

Hello World — Why I'm Building in Public

After 12 years of enterprise software engineering, I'm making my work visible. Here's why, and what I'll be writing about.

.NET AI career building-in-public

After 12 years of building enterprise systems with C# and Azure, most of my work has been invisible to the outside world. That changes now.

What I’ve been doing

I’ve spent over a decade at enterprise-scale organizations building the software that quietly keeps things running — APIs, integrations, event-driven pipelines, the kind of systems where failure has a dollar cost and reliability is non-negotiable.

That work has been genuinely interesting. I’ve cut workflow processing times by 96%, automated away thousands of hours of manual labor, and reduced critical system failures from thousands per day to essentially zero. Useful problems with measurable outcomes. Not flashy, but real.

The thing is, almost none of that is visible online. Which turns out to matter if you’re trying to position yourself for consulting work, contribute to the .NET community, or just have something to point to when someone asks “what have you built?”

So: this site.

What’s changing

The .NET + AI space is moving fast and it’s almost entirely underserved by practical content. Most agentic AI tutorials assume you’re writing Python. The enterprise .NET developer who wants to integrate Semantic Kernel, MCP, or Azure AI Foundry into an existing production system has very few useful resources — mostly marketing pages and “getting started” demos that stop well before the questions get interesting.

That’s the gap I’m writing for.

What I’ll be covering

  • Practical .NET + AI integration — the architectural decisions you’d actually face, not contrived examples
  • Semantic Kernel, MCP server implementations in C#, Azure AI Foundry
  • AI agent governance and lifecycle management (my current project: AIAgentMinder)
  • Honest tool evaluations — what works, what doesn’t, what the hidden costs are

Why here instead of just Medium

Medium is a distribution channel. This site is the canonical source. Everything I write will live here first, with canonical URLs, so the SEO authority builds on lwalden.dev rather than on someone else’s platform.

More coming soon.