Notes on data, AI, IT
and security
No marketing fog. The way I think about real problems with founders and managers.
Event sourcing: build the audit trail before the features
Why event sourcing is not an architecture fashion but a practical answer to the question of what happened in your system yesterday.
Trusting the software supply chain
Business depends on other people's components and updates. That is an architecture question, not just a security question.
DevOps is culture first, tooling second
Why buying a CI/CD platform does not make a company DevOps, and what needs to change before you pick a tool.
Architecture questions at year end: what to settle before 2015
A few questions about IT architecture worth asking yourself at the end of the year - not for a report, but so that 2015 starts without unnecessary baggage.
Vendor lock-in is a real cost, not an abstraction
How dependency on a single cloud provider or platform accumulates as a concrete financial and operational liability, and how to think about it before it matters.
Technical debt as a management concept
How to think about technical debt not as engineers complaining, but as a real asset with interest payments - and what to do about it.
On-premise or cloud: how to decide when both are reasonable
A practical approach to choosing between local infrastructure and the cloud for companies that do not have an obvious answer.
Branching strategy as a release discipline
How a team's approach to version control branches shapes the rhythm of releases, hotfixes, and who can ship what without waiting for whom.
An API is a contract, not a piece of code
Why the interface between systems matters more than the implementation behind it, and what that means for how you manage integrations.
Microservices: what the term means for business
A breakdown of what actually sits behind the word 'microservices' and how a manager should think about this architectural choice.
Docker 1.0 and the new discipline of release
The Docker 1.0 release is not about containers. It is about the runtime environment becoming as manageable and reproducible as the code itself.
Microservices: architectural choice or management decision
Why moving to microservices is not purely a technical decision, and what a founder needs to understand before such a project starts.