Matt

I'm 37, and I've been writing .NET since I was 20 — long enough to have watched it change almost completely and to have picked up a stack of Microsoft certs along the way. I've lived in Basel since 2019, which is where the most recent chunk of that has happened.

These days it's mostly Azure: pulling apart legacy monoliths, moving workloads into Container Apps, and dealing with everything that comes loose when you decompose a service that's been running for a decade. SQL Server and the web side of .NET are still where I'm most at home, but the cloud migration work is what I plan to write about here — mostly because it's where I keep learning things the hard way.

Away from a keyboard, I like to be out hiking — I like tackling Switzerland's staged long-distance trails a section at a time, the Trans Swiss Trail and Jura Crest Trail among them. I also do a handful of running events a year, things like the Basler Stadtlauf and Zuri Silvesterlauf. I passed my German Fide B1 exam a while back and I'm now just waiting on the clock: ten years of residency before I can apply for Swiss citizenship - I should make enough time to study up and get my C2 before that! Beyond that, I travel when I can and I'm always up for trying a new sport or picking up something I don't already know.

Expect the odd post here about football, other sport, and life as an immigrant in Switzerland alongside the technical stuff.