Diligence
What does August 2nd ask of your architecture?
The EU AI Act's high-risk obligations begin applying in weeks. Most of the readiness work is architecture, not paperwork. The two-week version.
· 1 min
Briefings
29 briefings, written from real engagements.
Scaling
When does caching make it worse?
A cache is a bet that the past predicts the present. Four ways the bet goes wrong, and the questions that price it before you place it.
· 2 min
Reviews
What does the incident history say?
The postmortem folder is the most honest architecture document an organization owns. How we read a year of incidents before we read a single diagram.
· 2 min
Scaling
What does backpressure tell you?
Backpressure is the system stating its true capacity. The design question is who receives the message: a queue, a caller, or a customer.
· 2 min
Scaling
Where does the OLTP boundary belong now?
Analytics platforms ship serverless Postgres and the old wall between transactional and analytical estates is now a product decision. A review checklist.
· 2 min
Design
Is event sourcing worth it?
The pattern with the best demo-to-production regret ratio in our files. Where it earns its complexity, where it manufactures it, and the middle that usually wins.
· 3 min
Scaling
Is the database the bottleneck?
It is blamed first and guilty about half the time. A short diagnostic sequence that settles the question with evidence instead of instinct.
· 2 min
Design
How big should a service be?
Size is the wrong ruler. Services are sized by the decisions they hide and the team that must hold them, not by lines of code.
· 2 min
Design
What does a decision record owe you?
Four debts every ADR must pay: context, options, consequences, and the condition that reopens it. Most records pay two.
· 2 min
Scaling
Is multi-region worth it?
The most expensive default in modern architecture. What the second region truly costs, what it truly buys, and the three cases where it earns its keep.
· 2 min
Reviews
What does the diagram leave out?
Every architecture diagram is a claim about what matters. The review is not about the boxes you drew; it is about the arrows you did not.
· 2 min
Reviews
What did 2025's public incidents agree on?
A grid, a cloud, and everything between them. The year-end read of the incidents that published enough detail to learn from.
· 2 min
Scaling
How short can a certificate live before your process breaks?
The CA/Browser Forum voted certificates down to 47 days by 2029. The countdown is really a deadline for automation, and it names its dates.
· 1 min
Reviews
What would have to be true?
The five-word question our whole practice runs on. A long briefing on using it to audit claims, size risks, and end the meetings that should not have started.
· 5 min
Design
What should a system forget?
Every architecture review asks what the system remembers. Almost none ask what it deliberately discards, and the omission has a compounding price.
· 3 min
Design
What does a deadline do to a design?
Deadlines do not just compress schedules. They select architectures, in a predictable direction. A briefing on designing under a date without designing for one.
· 3 min
Scaling
What is the load path?
Every request your system serves travels a load path, and most teams have never traced one end to end. The first question of every review we run.
· 2 min
Diligence
How many nines do you need?
Availability targets are purchases, and each nine costs roughly ten times the last. Pricing the promise before signing it.
· 2 min
Reviews
How do you read a latency histogram?
The average is a fiction and the p99 is a person. Reading latency distributions the way the review reads them, shape first.
· 2 min
Scaling
How do capacity models fail?
Four recurring ways the spreadsheet diverges from the system: averages, linearity, the forgotten dependency, and the model nobody re-ran.
· 2 min
Design
When does a monolith end?
Not at a size. At a set of observable symptoms that network boundaries would actually treat. The checklist we use, with the false positives labeled.
· 2 min
Diligence
What does technical debt cost, in numbers someone will sign?
The metaphor is twenty years old and the invoices are real. A briefing on pricing debt honestly, with the two industry estimates worth citing and their limits.
· 4 min
Design
When is the answer not microservices?
More often than the conference circuit admits, and the discriminating variable is not scale. A briefing on the question that precedes the pattern.
· 3 min
Diligence
How deep does your dependency graph go?
On June 12 a Google Cloud failure took down Cloudflare services, which took down their customers. Three levels of transitivity, one afternoon. A briefing.
· 3 min
Scaling
What does a black start teach a software architect?
In April, the Iberian grid went dark and was rebuilt generator by generator in a day. The restart discipline is one most software estates have never priced.
· 2 min
Scaling
When do you shard?
Later than the conference talks say, earlier than the outage. The conditions that genuinely require sharding, and the key choice that decides the next decade.
· 2 min
Design
When is a queue the answer?
Queues buy time-shifting and decoupling at the price of visibility and ordering. The three conditions under which that trade pays.
· 2 min
Reviews
What makes an architecture reviewable?
Some systems can be reviewed in a day; others resist a month of workshops. The difference is a property of the architecture, and it can be designed in.
· 3 min
Diligence
What does technical due diligence actually check?
Not code quality. Diligence prices three risks: key people, standing obligations, and the distance between the story and the system.
· 2 min