My First Release Weekend

At the time of writing this post, I am 41 years old, I've been in the business of writing software for over 20 years, and I have never ever experienced a release weekend. Until now. It's now nearly 1 pm. I've been here since 7 am. There are a dozen or so different applications which … Continue reading My First Release Weekend →

Legislature and Off the Shelf Thinking

I'm always pleasantly surprised when I find an aspect of software delivery which I hadn't previously considered, or seen as fully as I might have. Today I was chatting with a colleague who it turns out has a long history in the business of superannuation (pensions, for those in the UK). I was expressing my … Continue reading Legislature and Off the Shelf Thinking →

Scale or Fail

I've heard a lot of people say something like "but we don't need huge scalability" when pushed for reason why their architecture is straight out of the 90's. "We're not big enough for devops" is another regular excuse. But while it's certainly true that many enterprises don't need to worry so much about high loads … Continue reading Scale or Fail →

What’s Slowing Your Business?

There are lots of problems that prevent businesses from responding to market trends as quickly as they'd like. Many are not IT related, some are. I'd like to discuss a few problems that I see over and over again, and maybe present some useful solutions. As you read this, please remember that there are always … Continue reading What’s Slowing Your Business? →

Don’t Stream JSON Data (Part 2)

I've discussed the merits of JSON streaming in two prior posts: Large JSON Responses and Don’t Stream JSON Data, if you haven't read these yet then take a quick look first, they're not long reads. I'm attracted to the highly scalable proposition of scaling out the consumer, so many requests can be made individually rather than returning a … Continue reading Don’t Stream JSON Data (Part 2) →

Don’t Stream JSON Data

I recently published a post about how to stream large JSON payloads from a webservice using a chunked response, before reading this post it's probably best to read that post here. Streaming is a fantastic method of sending large amounts of data with only a small memory overhead on the server, but for JSON data … Continue reading Don’t Stream JSON Data →

Large JSON Responses

The long slog from a 15 year old legacy monolith system to an agile, microservice based system will almost inevitably include throwing some API's in front of a big old database. Building a cleaner view of the domain allows for some cleaner lines to be drawn between concerns, each with their own service. But inside … Continue reading Large JSON Responses →

DDD Europe 2016

The Domain Driven Design Europe happened in January this year in Brussels. Recently, two presentations were made available: Eric Evan's keynote speech is available here. Greg Young presents 'A Decade of DDD, CQRS and Event Sourcing' here. Both are worth a watch. I was particularly interested to hear some of Greg's opinions on what patterns … Continue reading DDD Europe 2016 →

Going Deep Enough with Microservices

Moving from a monolith architecture to microservices is a widely debated process, with many recommendations and nuggets of advice available on the web in blogs like this. There are so many different opinions out there mainly because where an enterprise finds their main complexities lay depends on the skillsets of their technologists, the domain knowledge … Continue reading Going Deep Enough with Microservices →