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Software Architecture: After Infatuation Comes the Shock

June 29, 2026

Latest Posts

Development Practice June 25, 2024

HashMap

Hi, HashMap? How can HashMap be a topic for the newsletter? Hold on! The topic came to mind because I was in an interview for a client yesterday and spent quite a long time discussing the HashMap. The experience was a bit of déjà-vu. 2-3 years ago, I was heavily involved in recruiting. During that time, I conducted over 150 technical interviews. And from that period, I learned a lot about our industry. First and foremost, we lack seniority and fail to sufficiently develop young developers.

Marcus Held

Software Architecture June 20, 2024

Surprising Architecture

Hi, “RCoffee [an internal tool for content production] accesses the test servers via SSH and displays the Tomcat logs” Wow. That was surprising. I have been working with this client for a year now. The application is the market leader in its field, and the current version was developed over 10 years ago. A lot has accumulated, of course. And when I am hired, the technical debt is usually very large.

Marcus Held

Software Architecture June 11, 2024

Too Big, Too Small, Just Right

Hi, An old developer joke: There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. – Leon Bambrick Or another version: There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: 2. Exactly-once delivery 1. Guaranteed order of messages 2. Exactly-once delivery – Mathias Verraes And there are many more: There are so many variations on the “there are only two hard problems in computer programming…” joke that I’m starting to suspect that programming isn’t actually very easy. – Nat Pryce

Marcus Held

SME Software Development June 4, 2024

Customer Support

Hi, When “the customer” calls, very different things happen in various companies You probably know this from your everyday life. You have a question about your mobile contract. So, you call the hotline. A computer answers. You press 1… then 3… then refuse to have the call recorded for training purposes, and finally, you end up with some employee in a call center. You explain your problem. The employee has a script in front of them and goes through it with you from top to bottom. If they’re good, you don’t even notice it.

Marcus Held

SME Software Development May 27, 2024

4 Weeks Incident

Hi, What happens when software rots over decades? More than I can list. The software has accumulated so many problems that they can’t be described compactly. The monitoring is incomplete The deployment is cumbersome The infrastructure is heterogeneous Libraries are outdated Knowledge has been lost Background and context for decisions are missing The code is tangled … and has high coupling So far, this is not surprising. Maybe you have worked on such a project yourself.

Marcus Held