Eliminating Database Lookups with Auth0 Custom Claims
How to enrich JWT tokens with user data during login, eliminating per-request database lookups while keeping your domain logic decoupled from your identity provider.
Michael Pellegrin
Principal Software Engineer
I build distributed systems and cloud platforms, and I stay with the work from architecture through production. Over more than twenty years, I have built event-driven services, secure APIs, identity and mobile credential systems, and applications on Azure and .NET.
My recent work includes a .NET accessibility audit tool with deterministic analysis and optional local AI guidance, a multi-agent delivery system with explicit human approval gates, and Attrakto, a daily puzzle game for iOS and Android. Each system gives me another reason to keep architecture attached to implementation, testing, deployment, and the production decisions that follow.
I have been building in Colorado since 2006. Before that, I studied digital art and telecommunications at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, which turned out to be a more useful path than it sounds. I still show up every two weeks for the same tabletop RPG group I started with back then, so some systems have been running longer than others.
Recent Writing
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Stop Returning HTTP 200 for Failures: RFC 9457 Problem Details in ASP.NET
HTTP already has error semantics. RFC 9457 Problem Details gives your error payloads a standard structure to match. Here's why it matters and how to implement it in ASP.NET Web API using middleware.
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My AI Development Everyday Kit
Everyday kit is not just for gear people. Here's my current AI development workflow, an honest account of what it replaced, and why I'm already working on the next version.