Writing architectural design principles that scale decision making

13 June 2021

A good set of architectural principles can help to scale development by laying down some basic guidelines for decision making.

Why the developer experience matters to architecture

17 April 2021

Architects have a key role in setting the direction of travel for development, giving them an opportunity to help foster a good developer experience for an organisation.

Setting an appetite instead of making an estimate for epic-level work

8 January 2021

Estimates are difficult, usually wrong, and frequently misused, especially at the “epic” level. An “appetite” can be a more meaningful measure that defines the amount of time the business is prepared to invest in the solution.

Data Vault 2.0: the good, the bad and the downright confusing

12 December 2020

Data Vault 2.0 modelling can support a more agile approach to data warehouse design and data ingestion. Inevitably, this flexibility does come with a heavy burden of complexity.

Building your own in-house technology radar

20 November 2020

A technology radar can be a great technique for initiating conversations about technology, but there are some challenges in applying it to in-house development shops.

Architecture without documentation is incomplete

17 October 2020

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.

“Goldilocks” governance and agile architecture: balancing team autonomy and alignment

24 August 2020

There can be a tension between the lean, experimental nature of agile development and the more deliberate, planned demands of a large organisation. It does not have to be like this.

What we talk about when we talk about “legacy” systems

22 July 2020

“Legacy” is often used a pejorative term to describe any long-lived code base that a development team finds distasteful to work with. What do we really mean by “legacy” and how should we be dealing with it?

Naming things is easy. Abstraction is much harder.

13 June 2020

One of the more pervasive myths in software development is that naming things is hard.

Do you really need Kubernetes?

22 April 2020

If you are working with a lot of twelve-factor services then probably, yes. That said, you may get a creeping feeling that Kubernetes was designed to solve problems at a scale that most people never reach…?

If “Enterprise Architecture” is failing, what should architects be doing instead?

11 March 2020

The discipline of architecture is an important part of any efficient engineering organisation. It just needs to adapt its game from the process-orientated “Enterprise Architecture” of old to something more collaborative and relevant.

Don’t use test coverage as a target

19 February 2020

Code coverage can be a useful technique for discovering untested parts of your code base, but it makes for a useless target.

When is an event not an event?

8 February 2020

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.

Running serverless containers in AWS Fargate, Google Cloud Run and Azure

26 January 2020

“Serverless” containers could help you to avoid the complexity of Kubernetes, but you may struggle to leverage them for anything beyond small, predictable workloads or batch jobs.

When should you write your own message endpoint library?

14 December 2019

Enterprise messaging patterns are complex beasts that often warrant a common implementation across your endpoints. Should you ever be tempted to roll your own?