Architecture
7 engineering logs on Architecture. Newest first.
- The saga pattern is compensating transactions with better marketing
Why every saga step is visible to the outside world before the saga finishes, why a compensation is a new business action rather than a rollback, and why the hard part is the steps that cannot be undone.
- Two-phase commit is not dead, it is just expensive and you should know the price
What the coordinator actually guarantees, why a participant that has voted yes cannot do anything except wait, and why the blocking window rather than the latency is the reason people abandoned it.
- Glue Work is the New System Design: Why Alignment is the Premium Skill in the Age of AI
AI makes code cheap. The expensive part is getting five teams, three regions, and two data stores to agree on what actually ships.
- Stop Writing RFCs Like Mystery Novels: Why the Best Design Docs Start with the Conclusion
Why architecture docs should lead with the conclusion and why the rest of the content belongs at the bottom.
- Instrumenting distributed messaging: The fallacy of exactly once delivery
Why Kafka exactly-once delivery is a coordination tax and why you should build idempotency at the edge.
- Microservices Deep Dive: Architecting for Scalability and Resilience
How to design, operate, and scale microservices: core principles, when to use them, key patterns, and how to manage complexity in distributed systems.
- System Design: Principles for Maintainability, Scalability, and Reliability
Data building blocks, fault tolerance, latency vs response time, scaling strategies, and the operability-simplicity-evolvability triad for durable systems.