Topic: design
-
Event sourcing and CQRS: what they buy and what they cost
Event sourcing stores every state change as an immutable event and derives current state by replay; CQRS separates the write model from read models. Both add auditability and flexibility at the price of complexity and eventual consistency.
-
Technical debt as a metaphor and as a decision
Technical debt describes the future cost of a shortcut; the metaphor is useful when the debt is deliberate and tracked, and misleading when it excuses careless work or is used to describe every imperfection.
-
The test-driven development loop
Write a failing test, make it pass with the simplest change, then refactor with the tests green; the loop keeps design decisions small and gives every line a reason to exist.
-
Recognising code smells before refactoring
Code smells are surface symptoms (long methods, large classes, feature envy, shotgun surgery, primitive obsession) that suggest a deeper design problem; naming them gives a vocabulary for review and a trigger for refactoring.
-
When should a team split a monolith into services?
Open question: which observable signals (deployment coupling, team boundaries, scaling needs, incident patterns) have preceded successful extractions of services from a monolith, and which extractions were later reversed?
-
Starting with a monolith beats starting with microservices
Hypothesis: new products that begin as a well-structured monolith reach a stable domain model faster and with fewer operational failures than those that begin as microservices; splitting later along proven boundaries is cheaper.
Machine-readable: JSON