Architecture Weekly is 5 years old! 🎉

Dec 29, 2025

Welcome to the new week!

Who said that LinkedIn notifications are useless? I did, several times. Yet! Today, I opened my computer for the first time since last Tuesday and just saw a notification that Architecture Weekly is 5 years old now!

At this point, you probably know that I’m not the anniversary-type-of-guy (my wife loves that part of me…), but well, that’s a nice milestone!

Architecture Weekly started as a way to organise my readings. I’m a curious guy, and I like to read a lot about different topics. During my career, I worked on a lot of weird projects, which exposed me to many technologies and approaches. It was not always pleasant, but it taught me that technology is a tool, and there’s a big diversity of tools that can lead you to a proper solution.

So, I had always had hundreds of open browser tabs until my Firefox crashed from time to time (yes, I’m a Firefox-type-of-guy). I’m sure you know that too. I tried multiple ways to organise that: tools like Notion, e-mail threads, etc. None of them was perfect. At some point, my friends treated me like a librarian and asked me for interesting links on a topic or what interesting things I’d read recently. I decided to put my readings publicly into a Git repository and use Markdown, so I can easily share them. This repository still exists: https://github.com/oskardudycz/ArchitectureWeekly. At first, just links organised in groups.

I started sharing it with my friends, and they told me it was useful, so I started sharing it with their friends. It seemed so useful to others that I shared it on the other channels, socials, and groups I was part of. Feedback was still positive, and some people started pushing me to create the newsletter, even though they could subscribe to GitHub release e-mail notifications; they still landed in the same notification swamp, as usual, with other notifications. So they asked if I could set up “a proper newsletter”. I was reluctant to do it, but well, as you already know, I did. I used Substack because it helped me avoid the usual accidental complexity by writing my own blogging engine from scratch.

At some point, I decided to try making a paid version of the newsletter. I decided to build a Discord community for paid subscribers and my GitHub Sponsors. I started to also run webinars every month, also inviting guests.

Complete list of webinars we had so far:

And now, yes, all of them are available for free. You can watch them. It’s around 50 hours of free knowledge. I believe that it is of much better quality than some paid courses. Why did I make them public?

At some point, I realised that I don’t have much fun with organising those links; it was more of a burden, as curating such lists takes a lot of time. I’m also a perfectionist-type-of-guy, so I wanted to ensure that what I recommend is worth the read. It triggers the movement of brain cells. So if you read the article, you might disagree with it, but at least it’s sparking some thought. I also wanted to synthesise them and put my comments. It may seem like a simple thing to provide such articles. But try to keep it at the proper level week after week, and you’ll see it might not be as easy as it seems.

There were not enough paid subscribers to justify the time spent on it, even though I was named a Substack Bestseller. Yes, running a newsletter is not a great business plan. There are some exceptions to that, but even if you’re in the top few per cent, then it might not be enough to even justify the time spent on it.

I decided to try a different angle and made Architecture Weekly a fully paid newsletter. Starting with a deep dive into Database Connection Pooling. I tried to see if I could grind for a while, providing high-quality content that’s not available elsewhere. I think I managed to deliver a lot of articles like that, and the paid subscriber count grew, but it was still not enough to justify my work. I enjoyed writing such articles a lot, and I still do, but it has put more pressure on me. And preparing such content takes time and effort. The effort I could spend elsewhere, e.g., with my family, in better-paid work like my workshops and consulting, or in my OSS projects.

And now, here we are, 10 months later and well, I still delivered a lot of deep dives, but shifted closer to the stuff I do daily, so helping other humans build systems and getting benefit from the Event-Driven approach. As you see, recently I cross-posted articles to my blog and here. I also used the angle of my work on tools like Emmett to explain general concepts.

What’s next? I’ll probably continue doing it as is; I might also consider merging the blog and newsletter into one. I even own domain event-driven.news, so maybe some rebranding will happen. But it’s not yet decided.

I’ll definitely continue sharing what I learned, blogging, but the exact form? We’ll see. I’m open to suggestions! Comment under this post and tell me your thoughts.

What type of content would you like to see here? Or is there some that you’d be even open to paying for?

Can’t promise that I’ll deliver all of them, but it’ll give me a food for thought.

Nevertheless, it’s time for a small celebration!

Thanks for being here with me through this journey!

Cheers!

Oskar

Architecture Weekly

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