I am a hands on, visual learner. I need to see something and to play with it to understand how it works. When reading a book, I take notes, highlight, underline, and circle the text to help reinforce what I’m reading. Reading Code When reading code, I tend to draw pictures of what the code … Read more
Are you demoralized by your legacy system? Why? Is it hard to work with? Slow? Buggy? Big? Hard to understand? Legacy Story At some point, this legacy system was a green field. The developers were eager to work on it, and it used all the best new tools, technologies, architectures, etc. It became successful. It … Read more
Quick, do you: Go back to the eggnog, ignoring the alert Bravely jump in and firefight the issue Express concern Act surprised Deny everything ?
It is Christmas Day! We see in America that it is becoming less and less “politically correct” to say things like “Merry Christmas!”. It is now just a generic holiday season. Yet at the same time, we still enforce the importance of the holiday. At least the importance of buying tons of stuff for yourself … Read more
If you work with a traditional legacy system, you likely work with a Relational Database. If you work in a Microservice architectural model, you probably work with a NoSQL Database. At some point you probably work with everything in between too. Why does it seem that microservices lean towards the NoSQL or “schema-less” stores, where … Read more
Many small and medium-sized companies have adopted a microservice architecture. The adaptability, scalability, and agility that the microservice patterns unlock are very appealing to these companies. These attributes are also appealing to larger companies too. But other attributes also tend to temper some of these benefits. Adaptability Polyglot is the name of the game. Teams … Read more
The common childish response when Mommy or Daddy is denying the child something. “Everybody is doing it” is apparently supposed to be a good enough reason to do it ourselves. However, children are not the only ones that employ this reasoning. For example, just because “everybody is doing” microservices doesn’t mean that is a good … Read more
Last time, I brought up the concept of template services. Today I want to share more details on what we do with this concept. Reference Architecture Sometimes you will hear architects talk about a reference architecture. This is the concept of having an established pattern out in the wild with real examples. An architecture that … Read more
I have written here before about Architecture Decision Records. I want to dig into this topic more deeply here. Why Why do we need to put effort into making sure developers, and others, are kept up to date with architectural decisions and guidelines? In order to build a cohesive system together, we must share a … Read more
I have written here before about the concept of learning. It seems to me that developers seem to be bad at learning. This is concerning given the pace at which our industry changes. Learning Curves Some of this learning reluctance could be chalked up simply to how daunting the task can be. Many tools have … Read more