Chris “Woody” Woodruff has spent more than 25 years making complex software simpler. A Microsoft MVP in .NET and Web Development (first awarded 2008, re-awarded 2025) and a director on the .NET Foundation board, he has architected distributed systems for companies from startups to Rocket Mortgage, served as a software forensics expert witness, and taught thousands of developers through 50+ conference talks across North America and Europe. He is the author of ASP.NET Core Reimagined with htmx and is writing a second book on network programming with C# and .NET. He co-hosts The Breakpoint Show podcast and publishes The Simplicity-First Review, a newsletter on architecture judgment in the age of AI. Today, Woody works as a fractional architect and leads the emerging practice of Agentic Relations™, helping companies make their APIs, documentation, and SDKs legible to AI coding agents like Claude, Copilot, and Cursor. His thesis is constant across all of it: as AI writes more of the world’s software, the scarce skill is knowing what not to build. He lives in West Michigan and takes his bourbon neat.
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👯 I’m looking to collaborate on more open-source projects.
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💬 Ask me about Web APIs, Network Programming, Leadership, .NET, Relational Databases, EF Core, Open Source etc.
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📫 How to reach me:
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😄 Pronouns: he/him
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⚡ Fun fact: I love bourbon 🥃
- Episode 8: The Forum Pattern
- Episode 7: The Conference Pattern
- Episode 6: The Conference Session Pattern
- Episode 4: The Reference Documentation Pattern
- Episode 5: The User Group Network Pattern
- Release v1.26.0
2026-01-30 — cwoodruff/morespeakers-com