Neil Sorensen

Neil has been professionally developing software for more than 10 years. He started at Pluralsight in March of 2014, and has been helping grow the site ever since. Recently, he’s been helping experiment with running .NET core applications on Linux, to great success.

Neil is passionate about learning better ways to develop software and helping others learn. For the past 5 years, he has been one of the organizers of the Utah Software Craftsmanship group. He also enjoys speaking publicly about technology and practices, and is a regular speaker at Utah Big Mountain Data & Dev.

In his spare time, Neil enjoys playing board games. Thanks to some equally enthusiastic co-workers, he has played over 500 games of Dominion.

Blogging as Code

By: Neil Sorensen

You may have noticed that our blog recently got a facelift. While redesigning front end sites is fairly common, in our case, this represented a bigger change. We noticed that we weren't treating our blog with the same principles we apply to the rest of our work. And so we embarked on a journey to find a better way, which lead to our current implementation.

Moving to .NET Core: HttpModules to Middleware

By: Neil Sorensen

With .NET Core, Microsoft introduced a new way to build pipeline behavior—middleware. Middleware solves many of the challenges with HttpModules, and makes building a custom request pipeline easy. Converting our custom behavior to middleware was fairly easy, but there were a few surprises waiting for us.

On Beyond Frameworks: Architecting for a Changing Reality

By: Neil Sorensen

Before we get too technical in our look at migrating to .NET Core, however, let's take a moment to review the architectural choices we made before we tried to switch frameworks. A large part of the reason that we were able to migrate from .NET Framework so quickly was because we separated our application logic from the decisions made by the framework.

.NET Core: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

By: Neil Sorensen

This past summer, we converted one of our production webservices from WebApi2 to .NET Core. In this first post, I'll summarize our findings about the platform itself - where it shines, where it falls down, and the little quirks that give it "character". We'll be following up with posts that address some of the technical hurdles we went through in converting our application, as well as some insights we gained when rolling our first application to production.

Finding a Community of Professionals

By: Neil Sorensen

I recently had the opportunity to speak at a local developer conference, Big Mountain Data and Dev. While preparing my talk, I was struck by how important the communities I belong to have been for me. I first learned about Pluralsight while attending the local Software Craftsmanship meetup, and without the relationships that I developed there, I probably wouldn't be working here today.

Modern Comments

By: Neil Sorensen

I recently read a blog post arguing that comments are an important part of code, and the people who claim otherwise are missing out. While I tend to fall on the opposite side of the argument, I would certainly agree that there is a time and a place where comments in code make sense. More interestingly, I realized that I haven't seen many explanations of why comments are sub-optimal, and when they are still important. So, in an effort to improve that situation, here's my take on the principles behind comments, and when those same principles are better served with different tools.

Broadening Our Horizon

By: Neil Sorensen

In the face of technical complexity, we sometimes forget that the human aspect of software development can be even more challenging. Fortunately, we can gain a lot of insight into how other disciplines have overcome similar challenges. In fact, those insights have lead to several of the more revolutionary ideas in our field.