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Welcome to the April 2026 edition of theVar!
In this edition - Twenty year of Amazon S3, the SaaSpocalypse, FastAPI in Production, Spec Driven development, .NET 11 and more
As usual, if you found something interesting that you think should be included here, you're interested in a sponsorship, or you have something to say about the content of this newsletter - drop me a mail at [email protected]
Architecture
Spec-driven development and enterprise scale - Spec-driven development (SDD) is quickly becoming the major way to develop software when using advanced AI code assistants such as Claude Code. But what’s the best way to adopt it in the enterprise, where certain tools and workflows are already in-place?
This InfoQ article details the steps necessary to adopt SSD in the enterprise.
Scaling Kafka Consumers - Kafka was designed from the ground up for high volume data streaming. However, as data volumes and consumer applications grow, it’s becoming quite challenging to keep up with the pace, and you have to make sure your Kafka consumers can scale to meet the new requirements.
This blog post explains how to do that.
Designing a Plugin Based Architecture in ASP.NET - Plugin-based architecture is the best way to design dynamic software that can add and change functionality without compiling the whole pile of code every time. However - you need to know how to do that.
Sandun’s great post will walk you through the actual, practical steps to achieve that in ASP.NET.
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Cloud
How ID.me scaled to 145m users - Having 145m users is a great problem to have. However, if your cloud infrastructure cannot support it - it quickly becomes a real problem. And this is exactly the problem ID.me faced.
Read their case study, and how they used AlloyDB, Cloud SQL and Vertex AI to migrate their legacy infrastructure and support their growing user base.
Introducing GPT-5.4 in Microsoft Foundry - Microsoft Foundry, the AI foundry in Microsoft cloud, just added a new model: the all new GPT-5.4. The model, offering stronger reasoning and improved reliability, can now be used in workflows, agents, and any AI-based app running in Microsoft Foundry.
Read the full announcement here.
Twenty Years of Amazon S3 - Well, that was fast…it might not feel like this, but Amazon S3 was released to the public 20 years ago. The cloud storage engine changed the way we work with the cloud, and now is a great time to look back and reflect on its enormous influence on the industry.
This post on the AWS blog does just this, and also provides a glimpse on things to come in S3. Fascinating read…
AI
Humans and Agents in Software Engineering Loops - It is said that most of the code these days is written using AI agents. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s definitely not far from the truth. Which begs the question - what’s the role of humans on the software engineering loop? Do we just give the prompt and let the AI do its magic, or do ew have something to contribute along the way?
This article on Martin Fowler’s website discusses this topic and provides some interesting answers.
SaaS in, SaaS out: Here’s what driving the SaaSpocalypse - Stocks of SaaS companies have tanked lately in what is now called the SaaSpocalypse. Monday, Service Now, Salesforce and lots more saw their stocks being cut to almost a half. But what’s the real reason behind this, and what does the future holds for these companies?
Read about it in this TechCrunch article.
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Development
FastAPI in Production: What Breaks Under Real Traffic - FastAPI is a one of the more popular web frameworks for Python developers. Its simplicity and performance attracted quite a lot of developers. However, it’s important to be aware of its shortcomings and be ready to handle them.
This article does a good job in outlining these shortcomings and the way to tackle them.
What’s New in .NET 11 - Microsoft is moving forward with its .NET versions, and has released the preview of the next one, .NET 11. There are quite a few exciting features in this version, such as performance improvements, WebAssembly improvements, improvements in ASP.NET 11 and more.
Read the full announcement here.
So, that was the April 2026 edition of theVar.
I hope you enjoyed it, and feel free to suggest and comment on it, simply by replying to this mail.
Also, if you created a unique content you think can be included here - drop me a note!
Looking forward for your feedback!
Cheers,
Memi