I’m Blake Niemyjski, a software architect from Wisconsin, and I really love to build.

I’ve spent the last 18 years in open source. These days that’s mostly Exceptionless, a real-time error, log, and metrics observability platform, and the FoundatioFx ecosystem, the .NET infrastructure primitives I help maintain with a really great group of contributors.

I’m also VP at CodeSmith Tools, where I work on CodeSmith Generator and the rest of the developer tooling for the teams that depend on it.

Full-time, I’m a Principal Software Engineer at Liaison International, where I work on Outcomes and deep integrations across the broader product suite.

I’m a 3x Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio and Development Technologies (2017, 2018, and 2019), an honorary Visual Studio Insider Partner (2010 and 2012), a beekeeper, and a private pilot.

Open Source

Most of my public open source work lives in .NET, but I do a ton of JavaScript too, plus a fair bit of Python for the Home Assistant tinkering I do on the side. Some of the packages I help maintain have been downloaded a lot across NuGet and npm, and the numbers are fun to look at every great while. But the real reason I keep at it is the chance to help other developers and drive value for the people running this stuff in production.

The goal is the same in every language: ship things that make someone else’s day easier while solving genuinely hard technical problems along the way.

Stuff I Work On

Exceptionless

I’ve been on Exceptionless from the very first commit. Today it’s a real-time error, log, and metrics platform with hosted customers and a long tail of self-hosted deployments running on large Elasticsearch clusters. That kind of scale lives rent-free in my head and shapes every architectural decision I make.

I’ve helped carry the platform through every major migration: MongoDB to Elasticsearch, .NET Framework to modern .NET, Windows and IIS to Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes, and multiple frontend generations. The important part isn’t just that the migrations happened. It’s that they happened with documented upgrade paths for the people running the platform themselves.

FoundatioFx

FoundatioFx is pluggable .NET infrastructure: caching, queues, messaging, distributed locks, file storage, and search. I work across the core libraries, cloud providers, messaging providers, and Elasticsearch integrations.

I care a lot about keeping the patterns consistent across the ecosystem. The same naming, same error model, same async behavior, same release cadence. People shouldn’t have to relearn the library every time they touch a new provider.

When we cut a major release, we coordinate it across a whole stack of NuGet packages. That release-day choreography is honestly one of my favorite parts of the job.

CodeSmith Tools

CodeSmith Generator is a long-running commercial code generation product for .NET. I own a lot of the engineering surface around it, including Visual Studio integration, MSBuild integration, schema and data providers, release pipelines, and the daily technical support that comes with a tool teams have depended on for years. We also work on open source through codesmithtools on GitHub.

What’s Pulling Me In Right Now

Agentic development. The tooling has finally crossed the line where it can take real engineering work off your plate, and the pieces I’m building are reusable enough to hand to anyone else.

If that’s your world too, I’d love to compare notes.

What I Care About

• Quality and craftsmanship. Code I’d be proud to hand to the next maintainer.
• Consistency across an ecosystem. Same patterns, same naming, same release cadence.
• Distributed architecture and scale. Systems that hold up when traffic doesn’t behave.
• Messaging that survives failure. Delivery semantics, fan-out, acknowledgments, retries, and dead-letter queues.
• Concurrency correctness. Race conditions, deadlocks, async lifecycle, and graceful shutdown.
• Search infrastructure. Elasticsearch end to end, query parsers, date math, and application-side join patterns.
• APIs that survive a decade. Small surfaces, primitives that compose, and upgrade paths without surprises.
• Attention to detail. Error messages that actually help, log lines you can grep for, sensible defaults, and small APIs you can hold in your head.

From The Blog

I write about .NET and JavaScript, distributed systems, observability, agentic development, and the occasional home automation rabbit hole. Latest posts live right here on blakeniemyjski.com.