Learning CQRS

Command Query Responsibility Segregation is an overloaded “term”. It is often confused or muddled with Event Sourcing. The two can go together nicely, but they do not have to. What Is It CQRS is really the principle and practice of separating data reads and data updates. This does not dictate at which layer that separation … Read more

Learning GraphQL

Sometimes, technologies become such a hot buzzword that they are hard to really figure out what they are about. And where they are useful; what problems they are meant to solve. GraphQL is one of those technologies. Confusion I had originally thought that GraphQL had something to do with Graph databases. That seems to be … Read more

Instana Network Time

Recently we have been running into performance issues with load tests in one of our environments. When digging into the issue with Instana, we do not get much useful information. It just says that the time is spent in “Network”. Instana calculates this network time by seeing when the trace “leaves” one instrumented system, and … Read more

Java Tuning

How much time and effort do you put into tuning the JVM for your application? Do you just accept the defaults and run with it? Do you set the max heap size, and that’s good enough? Or do you reach in and really adjust the settings to fit your app perfectly? Defaults It seems like … Read more

Team Player

Is your application a good member of your team, or a horrible member? Does it let you know when it is feeling down, and can’t handle the work assigned it? Does it let you take a break, without requiring you to hold its hand all the time? Good Team Member How many people are on … Read more

Paying Technical Debt

There seems to be a lot of talk lately about paying down technical debt. Some talk about how after the debt has built up enough it would be best to just scrap the system and rewrite. Some talk about how rewriting is never the solution. Others talk about using this debt as a tool. Many … Read more

When Designing a New System

What kinds of considerations do you take into account when designing a brand new system? Do you just take the current hot buzzword architecture and run with it? Do you exhaustively run through the functional and non-functional requirements (the “ilities”) that are important? Just start banging out code and see what emerges? Growing the System … Read more