About Dawn

Dawn Andrews is the Founder and CEO of Free Range Thinking, a boutique Business Strategy Consultancy that enables entrepreneurs to lead their businesses with unwavering confidence, intelligence, and passion.

She’s an executive leadership coach, growth strategist, and acclaimed trainer and speaker. Her work includes collaborations with Maria Shriver, Shriver Media, and leading Women’s History Month programming for global pharmaceutical titan AbbVie. She’s been behind the scenes with the creative genius responsible for the feel-good blockbuster of summer 2023. No need for names – all you need to know is over one billion at the box office and counting.

Up and down the “rolodex” (despite being fluent in cutting-edge communications tech, she still keeps it old school), her clientele’s achievements are EYE-POPPING: from being front and center on the campaign trail to building educational infrastructures in Africa, to catalyzing the end of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, to winning Oscars, Emmys, and Tony awards, leaving indelible marks on audiences worldwide.

Part of her power comes from her unique, creatively analytical approach, crafting growth strategies, enhancing communication skills, and augmenting leadership performance, all while amplifying organizational efficiency. Part of it comes from her no B.S., super real, super empathetic self. Always love. It may be tough sometimes, but it’s always love. And it ensures not just insane professional growth but thriving personal lives.

She’s also the host of the She’s That Founder podcast, like your morning coffee, but for your soul and career ambitions. As the Female Leadership Accelerator (FMxLA) founder, she’s committed to amplifying the influence of the next generation of female leaders to make their reverberations felt in their communities, in the US, and across the globe.

Her insights and perspectives have been sought by platforms such as The Oprah Winfrey Network, CBS, and CNN.

And her passion project? What gets her up in the early am and keeps her up way past midnight? Advancing women. Because while the future might be female, Dawn’s making sure that future is now.

Today We Talked About

• Background
• AI as a pressure valve…
• Burn out
• Communication
• Framework
  • Vision
  • Alignment
  • Execution
• Clearing the path
• Comfort Zone
• Management to leadership
• Human to Enterprise management
• Ask AI. :)
• Digital Clones
• Fear
• Will AI take my job??
• Accountability
  • Systems
  • Don’t make it personal
  • Data with Daily Dashboards
• Transparency
• Advancement for Women

Connect with Dawn

• LinkedIn
• Website

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This week, we discuss AI’s impact on Stack Overflow, Docker’s Hardened Images, and Nvidia buying Groq. Plus, thoughts on playing your own game and having fun.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 554

Please complete the Software Defined Talk Listener Survey!

Runner-up Titles

• It’s all brisket after that.
• Exploring Fun
• Should I go build a snow man?
• Pets
• Innersourcing
• Two books Michael Lewis should write.
• Article IV is foundational.
• Freedom is options.

Rundown

• Stack Overflow is dead.
• Hardened Images for Everyone
  • Tanzu’s Bitnami stuff does this too.
• OpenAI
  • OpenAI’s New Fundraising Round Could Value Startup at as Much as $830 Billion
  • OpenAI Reportedly Planning to Make ChatGPT "Prioritize" Advertisers in Conversation
  • OpenAI bets big on audio as Silicon Valley declares war on screens
  • Sam Altman says: He has zero percent interest in remaining OpenAI CEO, once
• Nvidia buying AI chip startup Groq's assets for about $20 billion in its largest deal on record

Relevant to your Interests

• Broadcom IT uses Tanzu Platform to host MCP Servers.
• A Brief History Of The Spreadsheet
• Databricks is raising over $4 billion in Series L funding at a $134 billion
• Amazon's big AGI reorg decoded by Corey Quinn
• “They burned millions but got nothing.”
• X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill
• Mozilla's new CEO says AI is coming to Firefox, but will remain a choice | TechCrunch
• Why Oracle keeps sparking AI-bubble fears
• What's next for Threads
• Salesforce Executives Say Trust in Large Language Models Has Declined
• Akamai Technologies Announces Acquisition of Function-as-a-Service Company Fermyon
• Google Rolling Out Gmail Address Change Feature: Here Is How It Works
• The Enshittifinancial Crisis
• MongoBleed: Critical MongoDB Vulnerability CVE-2025-14847 | Wiz Blog
• Softbank to buy data center firm DigitalBridge for $4 billion in AI push
• The best tech announced at CES 2026 so far
• Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter
• Manus Joins Meta for Next Era of Innovation
• The WELL: State of the World 2026 with Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky
• Virtual machines still run the world
• Databases in 2025: A Year in Review
• Chat Platform Discord Files Confidentially for IPO
• The DRAM shortage explained: AI, rising prices, and what’s next

Nonsense

• Palantir CEO buys monastery in Old Snowmass for $120 million
• H-E-B gives free groceries to all customers after registers glitch today in Burleson, Texas.

Conferences

• cfgmgmtcamp 2026, February 2nd to 4th, Ghent, BE.
  • Coté speaking - anyone interested in being a SDI guest?
• DevOpsDayLA at SCALE23x, March 6th, Pasadena, CA
  • Use code: DEVOP for 50% off.
• Devnexus 2026, March 4th to 6th, Atlanta, GA. Coté has a discount code, but he’s not sure if he can give it out. He’s asking! Send him a DM in the meantime.
• KubeCon EU, March 23rd to 26th, 2026 - Coté will be there on a media pass.
• Whole bunch of VMUGs, mostly in the US. The CFPs are open, go speak at them! Coté speaking in Amsterdam.
  • Amsterdam (March 17-19, 2026), Minneapolis (April 7-9, 2026), Toronto (May 12-14, 2026), Dallas (June 9-11, 2026), Orlando (October 20-22, 2026)

SDT News & Community

• Join our Slack community
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• Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok
• Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté
• Sponsor the show: ads@softwaredefinedtalk.com

Recommendations

• Brandon:
  • Why Data Doesn't Always Win, with a Philosopher of Art (Apple Podcasts)
  • Why Data Doesn't Always Win, with a Philosopher of Art (YouTube)
• Coté: “Databases in 2025: A Year in Review.”

Photo Credits

• Header

Strategic Technology Consultation Services

This episode of The Modern .NET Show is supported, in part, by RJJ Software's Strategic Technology Consultation Services. If you're an SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) leader wondering why your technology investments aren't delivering, or you're facing critical decisions about AI, modernization, or team productivity, let's talk.

Show Notes

"So the interest plays a lot of a huge role. Like for example a security issue, it can take you maybe half a day to fix, or maybe one hour to fix; so it's very easy to fix. But if you don't fix it, you get so... you'll get so many angry users that it may be, it maybe, it will cost you your entire business; you see. So this can be seen as an interest."— Patrick Smacchia

Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Modern .NET Show; the premier .NET podcast, focusing entirely on the knowledge, tools, and frameworks that all .NET developers should have in their toolbox. I'm your host Jamie Taylor, bringing you conversations with the brightest minds in the .NET ecosystem.

Today, we're joined by Patrick Smacchia to talk about NDepend, technical debt and the interest it accrues (something that's often forgotten about), and how NDepend can help you to keep your tech debt (and it's interest) low.

"But the thing we see is that the edge code is usually the code where you get the bugs. So you end up writing some quick tests that can cover 90% of your code, but your 10% here is not tested. And because it's not well implemented and it's likely to contain the bug. So, maybe you should refactor your code and make your class testable."— Patrick Smacchia

Along the way, we talked about the common pitfalls that most developers make when writing code, and how to keep your code both testable and easy to maintain.

We also took some time to talk about bug reports, the things that you and I can do to ensure that our bug reports are read, providing positive feedback, the Visual Studio teams' velocity, and some of the amazing new features in Visual Studio 2026 like the ... well, I'm getting ahead of myself. You'll have to listen in to the episode to find out what those features are.

Before we jump in, a quick reminder: if The Modern .NET Show has become part of your learning journey, please consider supporting us through Patreonor Buy Me A Coffee. Every contribution helps us continue bringing you these in-depth conversations with industry experts. You'll find all the links in the show notes.

Anyway, without further ado, let's sit back, open up a terminal, type in `dotnet new podcast` and we'll dive into the core of Modern .NET.

Full Show Notes

The full show notes, including links to some of the things we discussed and a full transcription of this episode, can be found at: https://dotnetcore.show/season-8/ndepend-with-patrick-smacchia-scaling-net-code-quality/

Useful Links:

• NDepend
  • Trial download
  • Blog
  • Videos
  • Use Cases
• Episode 112 - NDepend with Patrick Smacchia
• CQLinq
• Patrick on LinkedIn
• NDepend on LinkedIn
• Supporting the show:
  • Leave a rating or review
  • Buy the show a coffee
  • Become a patron
• Getting in touch:
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  • joining the Discord
• Podcast editing services provided by Matthew Bliss
• Music created by Mono Memory Music, licensed to RJJ Software for use in The Modern .NET Show
• Editing and post-production services for this episode were provided by MB Podcast Services

Supporting the show:

• Leave a rating or review
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Getting in Touch:

• Via the contact page
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Remember to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or wherever you find your podcasts, this will help the show's audience grow. Or you can just share the show with a friend.

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You can support the show by making a monthly donation on the show's Patreon page at: https://www.patreon.com/TheDotNetCorePodcast.

Music created by Mono Memory Music, licensed to RJJ Software for use in The Modern .NET Show.

Editing and post-production services for this episode were provided by MB Podcast Services.

One predictable pain point with contrast-color() is that it only returns black and white named colors. From a design systems perspective, that’s not ideal because you want your colors. You want your harmonious brand and the colors you and your team spent thousands of man hours in meetings deciding on. Those colors.

In fact, an earlier version of Safari had color-contrast() (confusing I know, naming is hard) which allowed you to pass in a list of best candidates to choose from. I beleive that proposal got mired in standards discussions, color contrast algorithms, and competing proposals; and contrast-color() is what survived which got simplified down to a binary result.

In the future though, we can use contrast-color() and if() together to help pick the value we want. Alas, at the time of writing no browser supports both if() and contrast-color(). But we can use Lea Verou’s --contrast-color() workaround to experiment with how this will work in Chromium today.

See the Pen contrast-color() powered design system colors by Dave Rupert (@davatron5000) on CodePen.

The CSS to get this working looks something like this:

@property --captured-color {
  syntax: "<color>";
  inherits: true;
  initial-value: white;
}

/* https://lea.verou.me/blog/2024/contrast-color/ */
@function --contrast-color(--bg-color) {
  --l: clamp(0, (l / var(--l-threshold, 0.623) - 1) * -infinity, 1);
  result: oklch(from var(--bg) var(--l) 0 0);
}

:root {
  --ds-text-white: wheat;
  --ds-text-black: darkslategray;
}

button {
  background-color: var(--ds-button-bg);
  --captured-color: --contrast-color(var(--ds-button-bg));
  
  color: if(
     style(--captured-color: oklch(1 0 0)): var(--ds-text-white);
     else: var(--ds-text-black);
  );
}

And that’s it! Using (a form of) contrast-color() you can select the proper tokens from your design system. Cool.

One quirky bit needed to make it work is defining a type for --captured-color using CSS @property, a trick I learned from Roma Komarov. To be honest I don’t fully understand the why behind Registered Custom Properties and the Computed Value Time Behavior superpower, but my simple brain created a rule “If you’re going to compare a variable to a <color> in a CSS if() statement, make sure to register the variable as a <color>.”

If/when any of the browsers start supporting both features, I expect we’ll have to update oklch(1 0 0) in the style query to white or rgb(255 255 255). At least, I hope it works that way.

One unexpected challenge that I encountered with this demo was that if I abstracted out the if statement out into its own custom function, it would break. I’m not 100% sure why but I think it’s based on how CSS functions cache results. I’ll have to dig into this more, but I’m happy the inline if statement works. Hopefully someone smarter can figure it out.

Anyways, exiting times. And can we pause for a moment and marvel at how this is all vanilla 2026 CSS?! What a world.