Too Big, Too Small, Just Right

7.500 Euro Loss

Hi,

Our intuition often plays tricks on us. Especially in statistics.

Humans are not made to intuitively understand statistical relationships.

For example, the Birthday Paradox .

What do you think? What’s the probability that in a room with 23 people, two have the same birthday? 5%? 10%? 20%?

…

Wrong.

The probability is 50%. If you look at two classrooms, statistically, one class will have a shared birthday.

In a room with 50 people, the probability is even over 97%.

Marcus Held

Improvement of Daily Work: The Third Ideal

Hi,

In Chinese, there is a famous saying:

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

We know this in software development too. We keep complaining about the mistakes we made back then.

“Should do that someday.”

This is a sentence that comes up in every second retrospective.

Technical debt is piling up. “Should do that someday.”

The daily usually takes too long. “Should do that someday.”

Marcus Held

Sliced Onion Architecture

Hi,

A week ago, Oliver Drotbohm published an expanded idea of the Onion Architecture: The Sliced Onion Architecture .

Most software developers are familiar with Hexagonal Architecture and its extension, the Onion Architecture . The idea (simplified): One decouples their business code from infrastructure code using adapters.

This makes it less likely to create the “Big Ball of Mud” .

What do I see in practice?

Most developers have understood that it’s a good idea not to mix business code with infrastructure code.

Marcus Held

The Second Ideal: Focus, Flow, and Joy

Hi,

When was the last time you lost track of time? Just keep going. Without it being hard. With full concentration. You shut out everything around you. You forget to eat. You delay going to the toilet.

For me, it was the last time I was designing backendhance.com .

I was totally absorbed. And it was so satisfying. I build my website with Hugo. And it’s super fast.

Should the header be a bit larger? font-size adjusted. I click on my browser to view the change and BAM it’s compiled.

Marcus Held

Are You in a New Project?

Hi,

You are new to a project. Maybe you have just changed jobs. Or an opportunity has arisen internally - whether you wanted it or not.

Your first day. You really don’t know anything about the project. So almost nothing.

You know what it’s about. You may have even tried the product yourself.

But you don’t know what the architecture looks like. You don’t know how many services the product operates. What they run on. How they’re interconnected. Where the data is persisted. Is it relational at all?

Marcus Held