Architecture Weekly #131 - 12th June 2023
Welcome to the new week!
The last one was crazy for me! I spent the whole in Amsterdam at Domain Driven Design Europe.
First, I did a two days pre-conference workshop with Practical Introduction to Event Sourcing; then, I was responsible for being an MC at the Event Sourcing Live sub-conference. Then on Friday, doing a hands-on on slimming down aggregates. Busy days!
I’ll write a dedicated article with a summary of the Event Sourcing Live, but let me tell you one highlight from the workshop. I was asked about "How to talk with business". Somehow that surprised me, as it's to me, more about how to talk with humans in general.
My first answer was to work on empathy, which wasn't the most actionable.
I needed to rethink that a bit, and here you are, a few words with my advice on what could help:
Surprisingly (?), learning consultant skills can also help with that. Gerald Weinberg’s two tomes of Secrets of Consultancy are great books even for people that don’t want to become such. That’s why I also liked a recent post from Dan North sharing hints on this craft.
It’s also about empathy, not trying to be pushy, and only doing as much as we were invited.
My friend Jeremy D. Miller has also become a consultant! That means that Marten’s core team is a pack of solopreneurs. That’s another mark of the fact that we’re invested in expanding our work in Open Source and making it a real job. Keep your fingers crossed for us!
Is running 1 trillion messages through Kafka sustainable? For some companies, it is! Read a decent case study from CloudFlare on how they’re dealing with that:
Kafka all the things? Definitely not!
Still, if used wisely, it’s an excellent tool for moving data from one place to another. See e.g.
I’m sometimes laughing that we’re using the Kafka Sourcing pattern. We don’t know what we need to build yet, but we have already put Kafka as the design's central backbone. It signifies premature technical focus before doing a proper logical split. It’s also, of course, a sign of success for Kafka. Some years ago, the running joke was that no one was fired for selecting Oracle; now, it’s also applicable to Kafka.
How to focus on strategy and logical split? That resource can help you with that:
Cat Swetel - Democratizing Strategy: An Intro to Wardley Maps
Nick Tune - EventStorming Modelling Tips to Facilitate Microservice Design
Sebastian Gebski - Unicorn's baby steps: what should you know as a 1st-time startup CTO
Don’t forget also about the sociological aspect of shaping your team. Check the next interesting whitepaper from Nicole Forsgren and friends on the importance of the Developer Experience in productivity.
Dave Farley adds a good point about that not investing in Rockstars.
From my experience, a well-shaped, diverse team of engaged people who like to work together will always be more productive than a set of rockstars. From my experience, having a great technical person but a terrible colleague in the team is devastating for the team morale. If we have a rotten apple in the box, we should take it out, or others will become such.
Speaking about quality and productivity, that should also be part of our DevOps process. Read actionable guides on how to test better:
Last but not least, don’t forget about the joy in our work. Sam Aaron’s talk about Sonic Pi, and fun stuff like music you can do with it!
Check also other links!
Cheers
Oskar
p.s. I invite you to join the paid version of Architecture Weekly. It already contains the exclusive Discord channel for subscribers (and my GitHub sponsors), monthly webinars, etc. It is a vibrant space for knowledge sharing. Don’t wait to be a part of it!
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.
Architecture
Matt Boyle - Tales of Kafka at Cloudflare: Lessons Learnt on the Way to 1 Trillion Messages
The NewStack - API Management Is a Commodity: What’s Next?
Cat Swetel - Democratizing Strategy: An Intro to Wardley Maps
Nick Tune - EventStorming Modelling Tips to Facilitate Microservice Design
Sebastian Gebski - Unicorn's baby steps: what should you know as a 1st-time startup CTO
Olena Kutsenko - Using Apache Kafka and OpenSearch to explore Mastodon
InfoQ - Eric Evans Interviews Greg Young on the Architecture of a Large Transaction System
Database
AI
Testing
AWS
JavaScript
JVM
.NET
Cecil Phillip - Building payment flows with Stripe and Azure
Andrew Lock - Using Octokit.GraphQL to interact with the GitHub discussions API
Jeremy D. Miller - I’m doing it my way. Finally. God help me.