Hot Topic

SMEs, Steer Clear of Microservices!

April 15, 2024

Latest Posts

Development Practice August 7, 2023

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

Software Architecture August 3, 2023

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

Development Practice July 31, 2023

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

SME Software Development July 27, 2023

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

Development Practice July 24, 2023

The First Ideal: Locality and Simplicity

Hi, I once developed a backend with just two engineers. It was the backend for Sunrise Village . I joined the team already in the pre-production stage, together with my then colleague. For over three years, we were the backend team. The other teams were larger. We had up to 8 frontend developers, a similar number of artists, two game designers, product owners, product managers, and 2 test automators. Even the fact that there were only two of us was actually too many. We kept it that way for risk minimization - in case one of us was unavailable.

Marcus Held