architecture - Matt Kimber

Matt Kimber

architecture

A collection of 8 posts

A Real-World Scaling Challenge

A Real-World Scaling Challenge

This week I've been solving scaling challenges. Not the kind of CV-embellishing "at global scale" stuff, but some simple and honest problems I actually have. It's all bundled up into one scaling problem, which breaks down roughly across the following areas: * Stuff we deliberately

Avoiding growth by accretion

Avoiding growth by accretion

Software has a tendency to grow by accretion - a gradual build-up of material causing what was a small and simple nucleus to become a large, complex object with many layers. It's the same mechanism by which planets form. A small clump of particles attracts other particles, and

Services in the Monolith

Services in the Monolith

It's become accepted that microservices, when done right, are a Good Thing - helping you keep your responsibilities nicely separated, easily share functionality between applications, and scale in a granular fashion where only the hot spots are spread across a multitude of servers. It's less commonly

The state of TDD

The state of TDD

The state of test-driven development across our industry is terrible. This may seem a rather brazen statement, given pretty much everybody and their dog is writing tests somewhere vaguely around the same point as they write code, and you don't have to scroll far down this blog to

It's a web server, not a task multiplexer

I spent an exciting part of today debugging a service which was failing in production, but not in any demo, UAT or dev installations. In doing so, I discovered one of those architectures which requires me to go and make a cup of tea in order to distract my hands

Pass-through objects

Take a look at this class: public class ThingHandler : IThingHandler { private readonly IUnderlyingThingHandler _underlyingThingHandler; public ThingHandler(IUnderlyingThingHandler underlyingThingHandler) { _underlyingThingHandler = underlyingThingHandler; } public Thing GetThing(int parameter) { return _underlyingThingHandler.GetThing(parameter); } } I've seen variants of this everywhere I've worked. Sometimes it doesn't have the dependency injected,

Architecture Envy

My comment on a failed project: "The architecture looks like someone spent an afternoon throwing darts at the index page of Gang of Four". There's a serious point buried in this, which is that most of us will spend at least some of our time working

Ownership: Architecture

I talked yesterday about what happens when development teams lose ownership of the software requirements. In that, I mentioned that teams need to own their architecture and technology stack. Surely this is so self-evident it barely needs mentioning? Well, not quite. In fact, it's incredibly common for developers