Design

8 articles

· 3 min read

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.

#event-sourcing#design#tradeoffs

· 2 min read

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.

#design#services#boundaries

· 2 min read

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.

#design#decision-records#governance

· 3 min read

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.

#state#memory#design

· 3 min read

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.

#design#decision-records#tradeoffs

· 2 min read

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.

#design#monolith#boundaries

· 3 min read

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.

#microservices#design#tradeoffs

· 2 min read

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.

#design#queues#asynchrony