Too often in software engineering people are too quick to focus on the latest technology and reticent to develop their knowledge of the fundamentals. I suppose the reason for this is to build marketable skills. Recruiters and employers tend to focus on the technology their hiring managers (often other engineers) ask them for, which is usually the latest shiny thing and so the cycle continues. [read more]

This topics comes up a lot: "how do I do authorization for my service architecture?" or if they are hip with the kids "how do I do authorization for my microservices". The answer to both is the same... [read more]

Developers, software engineers, smart people, people have needs, these needs differ and certainly differ in weighting from person to person but I think the below lists the key desires of most. [read more]

One of the oldest project management concepts I can remember being told about is the project management triangle. Whilst the project management triangle is largely misleading and quite frankly dangerous if taken literally it does at least tell you one thing: there are trade-offs in any given endeavour. [read more]

Once you've been in the industry for a decade or so you start to get a sixth sense of when things aren't right. However even when your sixth sense isn't working here are some signals that should raise alarm bells. [read more]

The microservice term has been around for a while but for as long as it has been around there has been much arm waving around what it was. It continued as one of those nebulous concepts that meant anything and everything to everyone and no one. In this way it caused a little confusion but served as a token to reference something --- but what? [read more]

Service Oriented Architecture is about making IT look like your organisation. In many companies IT systems are broken down in to lumps that aren't the same lumps that the business understands. This article describes why reflecting your business in your systems design is so important [read more]

I do a lot of programming in the large and spend far too much time, according to some, thinking about programming in the large concepts such as SOA and CEP but from time to time I like to keep it real and code something detailed and low(er) level. Recently I've been doing a little investigation around compression and so I ended up reading up on Huffman Coding. [read more]

When people start to service orient their organisation they often focus on exposing APIs and those APIs invariably solely or mostly focus on method calls, what I and others often refer to as RPC. This is great and brings huge benefit but it does miss a huge opportunity and that is being able to observe and react to what's happening in your organisation. [read more]

ESBs irk me, not the technology in and of itself, that can be useful, it's the way they used. Mostly because every architect and his mentor seems to think you can't have an architecture without one. [read more]