And avoid losing momentum while doing it
Building modern apps is exciting. You get to learn new technology, converse with people in the industry that follow the same patterns, and explore new designs every day.
Imagine you are given the opportunity to build a greenfield application and you opt for tech decisions that have good industry backing…
Event-driven architectures are hard technical concepts to understand. But if you’ve ever been car shopping, you might know more about them than you realize.
Webhooks. Some developers love them, some developers hate them. Non-developers love saying it. It’s a fun word. Sounds like something Spiderman would use in a fight.
But they aren’t. They are a modern software principle used in pub/sub architectures to notify subscribers when certain events occur in a system.
Woah…
As we get further into the 2020s, APIs are becoming more and more relevant. But how do you explain them to your friends, coworkers, or mom? With a metaphor of course!
For those of you who know me, I’m an API guy. They’re kind of my thing. I blog about them regularly, give talks at conferences, and even talk about them on podcasts.
They are the building blocks of software. The heart of integrations. The keys to our future. We need…
Distributed computing is an advanced software strategy that is difficult to understand for many. Now you can explain it simply with ducks
I’ve always been a fan of a good metaphor. It’s one of the best ways you can get people to understand a complex problem. If you can find something your audience can relate to, you have a significantly higher likelihood of them comprehending what you’re saying.
This is especially true…
Modern software is about being agile. To be agile, you have to iterate. To iterate successfully, you must understand these three things
Iteration is important.
I’ll say it again. Iteration is important.
It’s something I talk about regularly because, well, it’s worth repeating.
Software is never done. Requirements change over time, your understanding of the business problem will change, and your application will be enhanced as you add new features. As you…
With such an ominous name, you’d want to avoid a death march at all costs. But they do have some benefits
I recently got out of my first death march.
For the uninitiated, a death march is a term used in the software industry to describe a development project that is one of the following:
- destined for failure as a result of unrealistic scope
- a prolonged period of overwork to hit…
Being a solutions architect is fun. You get to design systems, talk to a bunch of different people, and offer guidance to other developers
If you’ve recently made the move from developer to solutions architect, congratulations! Welcome to the technical world of system design.
A misconception I see regularly with new SAs is that they think their job is solely to come up with a way to solve a business problem. …
Discover how these principles translate to guidelines for architecting new projects
If you’ve worked with AWS in any sort of capacity, you’ve probably learned they have a unique way of doing things. They start off meetings reading documents in silence, they begin new projects by working backward, and no matter what they do, they drive their leadership principles… hard.
There’s a…
Did you know you can automatically build infrastructure diagrams in your CI pipeline?
Last week, I was giving an introductory class to my company’s technical support team on a new product we’ve been building.
The new product is completely different than anything else we’ve built before. The tech stack, programming languages, methods of deployment, you name it — it’s different.
As I was…
The flow, service, persona, infrastructure, and developer diagram
Have you ever been in a meeting where someone is trying to explain how a software system works?
I was having a conversation with a relatively new solutions architect who was trying to describe a system they had come up with. …
