Design patterns and anti-patterns that separate maintainable codebases from technical debt graveyards.
Discover the recurring themes in software's grand narrative, where solutions echo across languages and decades of development wisdom. These pattern explorations reveal why some approaches stand the test of time while others become cautionary tales shared over retrospectives.
architecture (5)
System design principles and architectural patterns that shape resilient, maintainable software solutions.automation (6)
Systematic approaches to eliminating repetitive tasks through scripting, version control workflows, and intelligent tooling.configuration (5)
Configuration management strategies that bring order to chaos across development environments and production systems.devops (6)
Containers, reproducible environments, and operational practices bridging the gap between development agility and production stability.industry (2)
Workforce trends, market shifts, and systemic forces reshaping who builds software and how the profession evolves.infrastructure (6)
Networks, cloud platforms, monitoring, and the foundational systems that determine whether digital services scale or collapse.patterns (6)
Design patterns and anti-patterns that separate maintainable codebases from technical debt graveyards.productivity (7)
Workflow optimisations, terminal mastery, and tool choices that multiply developer effectiveness without sacrificing code quality.quality (12)
Software quality principles—from debugging and testing to the practices that distinguish robust systems from those held together by hope.security (5)
Security engineering, credential management, and the defensive practices that protect systems from threats both obvious and obscure.ssh (4)
Secure shell mastery and remote access patterns that turn distributed systems into a unified workspace.standards (7)
Coding standards, process conventions, and the governance practices that transform individual preferences into collective consistency.
The microservices tax: when distributed systems cost more than the problems they solve
The industry adopted microservices as the default architecture for modern systems, but the tax is coming due. When the company that helped popularise distributed services publishes a 90% cost reduction by returning to a monolith, the assumption deserves reexamination.
Null: the billion-dollar mistake that keeps compounding
In 1965, a computer scientist added a feature to a programming language because it was easy to implement. Sixty years and countless production crashes later, every modern language designed for reliability has arrived at the same conclusion: that decision was catastrophically wrong.
The architecture autopsy: when 'we'll refactor later' becomes 'we need a complete rewrite'
Early architectural decisions compound over time, creating irreversible constraints that transform minor technical debt into catastrophic system failures. Understanding how seemingly innocent choices cascade into complete rewrites reveals why future-proofing architecture requires balancing immediate needs with long-term reversibility.
The symptom-fix trap: Why patching consequences breeds chaos
In the relentless pressure to ship features and fix bugs quickly, development teams fall into a destructive pattern of treating symptoms rather than root causes. This reactive approach creates cascading technical debt, multiplies maintenance costs, and transforms codebases into brittle systems that break under the weight of accumulated shortcuts.
Technical debt triage: making strategic compromises
Simple CSV export: one day estimated, three weeks actual. User data spread across seven tables with inconsistent types—strings, epochs, ISO 8601 timestamps. Technical debt's real cost isn't messy code; it's velocity degradation. Features take weeks instead of days. Developers spend 17 hours weekly on maintenance from accumulated debt.
Avoiding overkill: embracing simplicity
A contact form implemented with React, Redux, Webpack, TypeScript, and elaborate CI/CD pipelines—2.3MB production bundle for three fields and a submit button. Two days to set up the development environment. Thirty-five minutes to change placeholder text. This is overengineering: enterprise solutions applied to problems that need HTML and a server script.