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?
13 June 2020
One of the more pervasive myths in software development is that naming things is hard.
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…?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
17 November 2019
Publishing a public API involves many considerations, from billing and metering through to documentation and on-boarding. These are likely to be addressed through a collection of solutions rather than a single all-singing, all-dancing API management platform.
28 October 2019
Persisting aggregates of AppInsights data in a warehouse can be a useful means of distributing summary information or retaining monitoring data over the long term. You can automate the harvesting of these aggregates using Azure Data Factory.
6 October 2019
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.
9 September 2019
There’s more to adopting trunk-based development than deciding to shun long-lived branches. You need a confident development team, a loosely coupled code base and efficient build automation to make it stick.
12 August 2019
Agile process tends not to generate the kind of metrics that management teams feed on. Should this be a problem?
22 July 2019
Attempts at SonarQube adoption often fail to gain traction with development teams. The concern is that it presents a view of code quality that is not relevant to the problems teams face on a day-to-day basis. Does it measure the wrong thing?
4 July 2019
Azure Data Factory has been much improved with the addition of data flows, but it suffers from some familiar integration platform shortcomings. The claim of enabling a “code free” warehouse may be pushing things a bit.