Architecture Weekly #90 - 29th August 2022

Aug 29, 2022

Welcome to the new week!

It’s the 90th edition of Architecture Weekly. Woohoo! Who would have thought that it would last for so long? I wouldn’t. It started and still is a way to organise intriguing resources and not lose them on the Internet. It grew into something bigger than that. Now it’s the real learners’ community, with the Discord channel, webinars, etc. I’m glad that you’re here, and that’s also helpful to you. I’m starting the countdown to the 100 edition!

What would you like to get in the 100th?

Last week I wrote an essay about my observations on the similarities between playing or guitar and programming. I’m a mediocre guitarist and a bit better developer. Both of them require patience and repetition. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. You won’t become skilled in a single day.

Still, that’s dangerous advice. Burnout is a real thing in our industry. So it’s worth trying new things, techniques, and tools and also, taking breaks. I too often over-motivated myself both in guitar playing, and I got the opposite results than I hoped.

Finally, the most important thing is finding a hobby other than programming; best if it’s manual. Something that gives you pleasure and allows your brain to focus purely on mechanical things to clear out your brain. Read more in:

How playing on guitar can help you to be a better developer?

Different paces and perspectives can also be found in our data. We have three main perspectives:

Hot: accessed daily for our transactions/operations needs. That type of data represents active business processes. We’re actively using this data in our business logic (write model).
Warm: data is used sporadically or read-only. They usually represent data we’re accessing for our UI (read model) and data we typically won’t change.
Cold: data not used in our application or used by other modules (for instance, reporting). We may want to keep also for the legal obligations.

Once we realise that, we may discover that we might not separate the storage for each type. We also might not need to keep all data in the same database. Check more in:

Derek Comartin - Data Partitioning! Don’t let growth SLOW you down!

Speaking of the data patterns. One of the most critical concepts in databases and pipeline processing is “Write Ahead-Log”. It enables predictable processing. Do you know that Relational Databases work like event stores? Check the great summary of how that works and how databases recover from failures in a great write-up:

Kevin Sookocheff - Write-ahead logging and the ARIES crash recovery algorithm. How do databases recover from failure?

As we’re into failures, what is worst than spectacular security failures? We hear more and more about them. Recently, the ex-Twitter exec told about the ignorance on the security issues in Twitter:

CNN - Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless and negligent cybersecurity policies

Microsoft also had a huge issue with ADFS. It was found that there’s a trick that allows you to log as anyone:

Microsoft - MagicWeb: NOBELIUM’s post-compromise trick to authenticate as anyone

Those are serious things. Still, as I wrote some time ago in my article, the issue is not only with Big Tech companies and the holes in their products. They’re the easy target, as they’re the biggest. It’s the hardest to breach them, but also for hackers is the high risk, high reward. Still, it’s much less possible that we’d secure ourselves better than specialists hired there. Should we just blindly trust them and outsource our security practices fully to cloud providers? Of course, not. We should control and monitor security practices and guarantees. We should build security as one of our main principles and part of the development process. Not just as the audit done at the end of development.

If you’re looking for how to take granular microservices or a domain-driven approach to Frontend, I got you covered today. Check:

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 Red Cross, the Ukraine humanitarian organisation. You may also consider joining Tech for Ukraine initiative.

Architecture

Distributed Systems

Datbases

Frontend

AI

Azure

.NET

NodeJS

Zod - TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference

Coding Life

Oskar Dudycz - How playing on guitar can help you to be a better developer?

Management

Security

Trivia

Gergely Orosz - Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer: Controversial Advice

Architecture Weekly