gRPC + .NET: Lessons from the Trenches Retrospective

Now that I've had a chance to slow down a bit let's do some creative writing. Let's talk about the "gRPC + .NET: Lessons from the Trenches" talk I gave at the North Houston .NET User Group. As I said previously, the talk was received well and I was really happy about that.

The inspiration or the idea to talk about gRPC came from the work I was doing at a large oil & gas company located in the Energy Corridor in Houston, Texas. My stint on the project lasted about 20 months.

This was actually the 3rd time I've given the talk. The first time was for an internal BJSS event in April of 2024. The second was at the Houston .NET User Group back in June 2024. The neat thing about taking a talk from scratch all the way through several iterations is how the presentation "feels". You should find potholes as you go and make notes to double back to correct and/or add to them.

The intent with the talk was to answer the following questions:

• What is gRPC?
• Can you give some evidence that shows that gRPC out-performs REST API?
• Have you ever used gRPC on a real project?
• What were some of the issues/problems you encountered and how did you work around them?
• When should you use gRPC?
• When should you NOT use gRPC?

I feel like when I got to the 3rd iteration of the talk I was answering all those questions completely and coherently. Including the benchmarks in this version of the talk was a good addition and I'll credit Daniel Wright, Principal Technologist @ BJSS Houston with the idea for that one.

I was surprised that the audience this time around had more experience with gRPC than I was expecting. This lead to alot of good questions and some leading questions that came up right before I answered them on the next slide. The talk started to take on more of a conversation kind of feel than a lecture.

While I did have fun putting this talk together and giving it, I don't think I'm going to hang up my developers hat yet. I'm sure there is still a project out there that needs my help! Now it's time to find another topic to talk about and then probably re-do the circuit next year.