Architecture Weekly #109 - 9th January 2023

Jan 9

Welcome to the new week!

Looking for an exciting coding exercise? Or learning a new pattern? Why not build an event store, then?

I showed that in my talk at NDC Oslo, and now summarised together with the self-paced kit, exercises and other resources. Check below to see more and watch the recording.

Oskar Dudycz - Let's build event store in one hour!

Once you’re done, please don’t use it on production; rather, use some mature solutions. Maintaining it won’t be sustainable if it’s not your core business.

Event stores are databases. Just like you won’t say: “hey, let’s build the relational database for our project”, you should not do that with an event store.

Still, it’s a lot of fun, nothing too time-consuming to build a simple one and an excellent exercise in understanding how Event Sourcing works.

Learning usually goes bottom-up or top-down. Different people choose different styles of learning.

In recent years I’m concluding that the more important is to be able to zoom in and zoom out, so going back and forth from the big picture to implementation details.

You need to have a vision of the solution, but then you need to execute it. A grand vision with poor execution won’t succeed. The same thing goes otherwise. I’m a fan of proof of concepts, so doing a quick dive into the code/tools to evaluate assumptions and make sure that they’re not show-stoppers before moving forwards.

That’s also why I am so often picky about understanding patterns and tools as they are. In a nutshell and isolation.

One of the most essential tools to make such judgements is System Thinking. Check more in:

Having the weapon, so proper thinking, we can make concious architectural decisions. For instance, around tech debt:

Adam Tornhill - Prioritizing Technical Debt as If Time & Money Matters

Boundaries:

Ted Neward - You Want Modules, Not Microservices

Udi Dahan - Finding Service Boundaries – illustrated in healthcare

Performance and agility:

Maciej "MJ" Jedrzejewski - Why Good Software Architecture Matters: The Impact on Performance and Agility

We should also check how others are doing and apply critical thinking by doing a lot of “what if I…?” analysis.

T. Winters, T. Manshreck, H. Wright - Software Engineering at Google

Yet, remember that’s easier to scale computer systems than scaling yourself and not getting mad:

Scott Hanselman - Scaling Yourself

Check, also other links!

Cheers
Oskar

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p.s.2. Ukraine is still under brutal Russian invasion. A lot of Ukrainian people are hurt, without shelter and need help. You can help in various ways, for instance, directly helping refugees, spreading awareness, and putting pressure on your local government or companies. You can also support Ukraine by donating, e.g. to the Ukraine humanitarian organisation, Ambulances for Ukraine or Red Cross.