For any shops using the “Critter Stack” (Marten and Wolverine), JasperFx Software offers support contracts and custom consulting engagements in support of these tools — or really anything you might be doing on the server side with .NET as well. Something we’ve had some success with, especially lately, is positioning these “support” contracts as essentially having JasperFx on call for adhoc consulting beyond merely assisting with production issues or bugs.
Just to try to illustrate the value of these engagements, I thought it would be interesting to describe what JasperFx has done for clients in just the past 30 days — in very general terms with zero information about our client’s business domain of course.
In no particular order, we’ve:
- Helped several clients with CI/CD related tasks around Wolverine or Marten’s code generation as a way to find problems faster and to optimize cold start times. Also fixed some issues with the codegen for one of our support clients. As always, I’d rather we never had any bugs, but we do try to stomp those out relatively quickly for our clients
- Explained and worked through error handling strategies built into Wolverine with a client who was dealing with a dependency on an external service that has somewhat strict rate limiting
- Planned out identity strategies for importing data from a legacy system into Marten and for interoperability with that legacy system for the time being
- Jumped on a Zoom call to pair program with a client who needed to use some pretty advanced Wolverine middleware capabilities
- Did a Zoom call with that same client to help them plan for future message broker usage. Most of our support work is done through Discord or Slack, but sometimes a real call is what you need to have more of discussion — especially when I think I need to ask the client several questions to better understand their needs and the context around their questions before firing off a quick answer.
- Helped a client troubleshoot usage issue with Kafka
- Added some improvements for Wolverine usage with F# for one of our first clients
- Developed some new test automation support around scheduled message capabilities in Wolverine for one of our clients who is very aggressive in their integration test automation
- Built a small feature in Marten to help optimize some upcoming work for a client using Marten projections. I won’t say that building new features is an official part of support contracts, but we will prioritize features for support clients.
- Interacted with a client team to best utilize the Critter Stack “Aggregate Handler Workflow” approach as a way of streamlining their application code and maximizing their ability to unit test business logic. If you’ll buy into Wolverine idioms, you can build systems with much less code than the typical Clean/Onion Architecture approaches.
- Assisted several clients with using the test automation support features backed into Wolverine, with quite a bit of pure consulting on how to be more successful with test automation efforts in .NET.
- Conducted more Zoom calls to talk through Event Sourcing modeling questions for multiple clients. I’m a big believer in Event Sourcing, but it is a pretty new technique and architectural style, and it’s not necessarily a natural transition for folks who are very used to thinking and building in terms of relational databases. JasperFx can help!
- We fielded plenty of questions about the best usage of projections in Marten
- Helped a client try to optimize their experience with Kubernetes helpfully stopping and starting pods while the pods were quite busy with Marten and Wolverine work. That was fun. Not.
- Talked through Wolverine usages and made some additional changes to Wolverine for a client who is using Wolverine as an in memory message bus for a modular monolith architecture.
And answering plenty of small questions about features or approaches that probably just amount to giving our clients peace of mind about what they were doing.
As I was compiling this, I noticed that there hasn’t been any recent support questions about multi-tenancy or concurrency lately. I’m going to take that as a sign that we’re very mature in those two areas!
I would hope the point I made here is that there’s quite a lot of value we can bring to your organization through an ongoing support contract and engagement with JasperFx Software. Certainly feel free to reach out to us at sales@jasperfx.net for any questions about how we could potentially help your shop!
While I do enjoy interacting with our clients and I most certainly love getting to make a living off of my own technical babies, anytime I do some outright shilling and promotion like this post, I’m a bit reminded of this (and I’m definitely the “Ray”):
The Shade Tree Developer 