Matthew Pavey | Faith, Family, Code

Some of my best childhood memories have a cardigan and a pair of blue sneakers in them. I grew up with Mister Rogers, and I have never really outgrown him. Every so often I still find myself reading about the man or pulling up one of his old videos, and the one I return to most runs less than seven minutes and took place nowhere near the Neighborhood.

On May 1, 1969, Fred Rogers sat down in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications. President Nixon wanted to cut public broadcasting funding in half, from twenty million dollars to ten. The chairman, Senator John Pastore, had never seen the show and was not in a patient mood. Most people go to Washington armed with statistics and prepared statements. Rogers spoke about his work and the children it served in the same unhurried voice he used on television, and he closed by reciting the words of a song he had written about helping children handle anger.

When he finished, Pastore said, "I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful. Looks like you just earned the $20 million." Congress went on to authorize the full twenty million. You can watch the full exchange on YouTube, and I would encourage you to. It may be the most effective seven minutes of persuasion ever filmed, and there is not a raised voice in it.

Here is what strikes me about that moment. We remember Fred Rogers as soft, and we forget that he was formidable. He was an ordained minister who saw television as his ministry. He held a degree in music composition and wrote hundreds of songs. Every word on his program was weighed and deliberate. The gentleness was not the absence of strength. It was strength, aimed carefully. He won over a skeptical chairman not by arguing harder, but by refusing to be anyone other than himself.

Two books shaped how I understand him, and both sit on my reading log. The Good Neighbor by Maxwell King tells the full story of his life and how much discipline sat underneath all that calm. The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers by Amy Hollingsworth looks at what was driving it all. Rogers rarely mentioned God on the air, but he described the space between the television set and the viewer as "holy ground." He treated a children's show like sacred work, and it showed in every frame.

Rogers once told a young journalist that "deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex." I think about that line a lot, and not just as a dad of three. It applies to how we write software. It applies to how we talk about our faith. It applies to just about everything worth doing. We live in a loud time, and the temptation is to believe that louder is how you win. Fred Rogers is less than seven minutes of evidence that it is not.

He has been gone more than twenty years, and he is still teaching. That might be the most remarkable thing about him.

I have been writing .NET applications for nearly thirty years, and one of the first decisions on any new project is the data access layer. My answer has been the same for a long time: Dapper, with parameterized T-SQL. Not Entity Framework. Here is why, and it is probably not the reason you expect.

It is not really about performance. Dapper is fast, sitting close to raw ADO.NET, but EF Core has closed most of that gap over the years, and Microsoft documents the tuning work honestly. If raw speed were the whole argument, this post would be out of date already.

The honest reason is control. I have spent as much of my career inside SQL Server as I have inside C#, and SQL is not a problem I need to be protected from. When I write the query myself, I know exactly what is going to hit the database, which indexes it will use, and what the execution plan looks like. When something is slow, I tune a query. I do not reverse engineer what a LINQ expression decided to generate on my behalf.

Dapper was built by the team at Stack Overflow to run Stack Overflow, and it shows. It does one job: run your SQL, map the results to your objects, and get out of the way. The whole library is small enough to actually understand, which is a quality I have come to appreciate more with every year in this business.

To be fair, Entity Framework is a good tool, and I am not here to start a war. If your team lives in LINQ, your schema follows your code, and you lean on migrations, EF Core will serve you well. But my world is usually the opposite: databases that outlive the applications written against them. Just this year I rewrote a web application from 2013 onto .NET 10, and the production database did not change at all. The schema came first, and Dapper never once got in the way of that.

Boring and predictable is not a criticism of a data access layer. After thirty years, boring and predictable is exactly what I want sitting between my application and my data.

My last post here was January of 2018. Seven years is a long time between posts, so this one comes with a little explaining.

The short version is that life got full. I got married. Two more kids came along, which brings us to three. My walk with Christ kept deepening. I kept reading, a lot, and I kept building things. I rewrote MySafeInfo from the ground up, and I launched My Family Devotion, a free devotional for families to read aloud together.

Not all of it was easy. In February of 2023 I was diagnosed with kidney cancer. I had surgery that March, and I have been cancer free ever since. I will not go into the details here, but I cannot tell that part of the story without gratitude. God carried my family and me through it.

Somewhere in all of that, blogging quietly fell off the list. But I never stopped having things I wanted to say. So I am picking the pen back up, with a few changes. Posts will be short. Some will be about programming, since that is how I have spent nearly thirty years of my working life. Some will be about apologetics and theology, since that is where my heart lives now. And some will just be about a book worth reading or an idea worth chewing on.

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

This is a new season. Glad you are here for it.

He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant. He grew up in another village, where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty. Then, for three years, he was an itinerant preacher.

He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family or owned a home. He didn't go to college. He never lived in a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself.

He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While he was dying, his executioners gambled for his garments, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave, through the pity of a friend.

Twenty centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race. I am well within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one, solitary life.
- James Allan Francis, One Solitary Life

The women were terrified and bowed with their faces to the ground. Then the men asked, “Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead!”
- Luke 24 5-6

About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" (which means "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?").
- Matthew 27:46

When Jesus had tasted it, he said, "It is finished!" Then he bowed his head and released his spirit.
- John 19:30

Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.
- Psalm 34:8