· 2 min read
When does a platform team pay for itself?
The internal platform is a product with one captive customer and no price signal. A briefing on the arithmetic, and the two failure modes it prevents.
#platform-teams#organizations#tradeoffs
Design
9 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