Design patterns
17 October 2020
Architecture without documentation is incomplete
Designing good architecture is only half the battle. You also need to be able to communicate your architecture to anybody who is likely to use it.
13 June 2020
Naming things is easy. Abstraction is much harder.
One of the more pervasive myths in software development is that naming things is hard.
8 February 2020
When is an event not an event?
Message design in an event-driven architecture can be quite nuanced, especially if you want to achieve any of the benefits of loose coupling that they can be associated with.
14 December 2019
When should you write your own message endpoint library?
Enterprise messaging patterns are complex beasts that often warrant a common implementation across your endpoints. Should you ever be tempted to roll your own?
6 October 2019
Splitting up shared databases
The problem of shared databases is not confined to monolithic systems. A big store of shared state is the guilty secret lurking in many a microservice architecture.
6 January 2019
Finding service boundaries: more than just the bounded context
When you are identifying service boundaries, it’s not enough to consider the domain model alone. There are other, more pragmatic concerns to bear in mind.
27 November 2018
Writing ArchUnit style tests for .Net and C# to enforce architecture rules
ArchUnit is a java library that provides a fluent API for creating self-testing architectures via unit tests. A similar library can be written for .Net Standard that acts on compiled assemblies rather than raw code.
12 October 2018
Messaging anti-patterns in event-driven architecture
Event-driven integration can improve the scalability, resilience and scalability of distributed applications… but this does depend on the design of your event messages…
12 August 2018
Building Twelve Factor Apps with .Net Core
Twelve factor apps provide a methodology for building apps that are optimised for modern cloud environments. It’s only been achievable in the Microsoft world since the advent of .Net Core.
29 July 2018
Autonomous bubbles and event streams: Pragmatic approaches to working with legacy systems
It’s easy to get caught up in unrealistic notions that you can re-write a legacy system or gradually decompose it. There are other, more pragmatic approaches that can help to modernise architectures and enable new development.
18 June 2018
Using architectural “fitness functions” as a guide to system design
Fitness functions can be a useful metaphor for guiding an emerging architecture, but you do have to invest in making sure they describe the right outcome.
3 June 2018
Layers, onions, hexagons and the folly of application-wide abstractions
Not only are layered applications difficult to maintain, but the common abstractions they are built on tend to give rise to inflexible implementations that have serious scalability challenges.
22 July 2017
The poor man’s Cassandra: scaling Azure Table Storage to maximise throughput.
Azure Table Storage can be tuned for high throughput workloads, but you’ll probably be faced with some difficult trade-offs.
12 February 2017
A simple (yeah, right...) guide to using Redux with React.js
Learning React.js always starts so well, but adding Redux into the mix can make things unnecessarily complex. The lack of accessible examples doesn’t help - this is an attempt at writing a stripped down, bare bones introduction that focuses on the main ideas behind Redux.
7 January 2017
Event stores and event sourcing: some practical disadvantages and problems
Event stores and event sourcing are a powerful idea, but they can be vulnerable to a number of technical and operational challenges when faced with real world complexity.