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ModernizationData Management

Migrate or Cry Trying: How to Move Data Without the Drama

It started with one of the tasks on our project kanban board: "Data migration". We were building a new application for a telecom provider. The goal was to unify two old systems into a single custom-built platform. Development was already in motion. Sprints were delivering new features. But no one had touched the data. The legacy systems had mismatched schemas, overlapping records, and different definitions for the same business terms. Some orders were in one system, but not the other. Customer records had conflicting states. Worse, every new feature we built had to be fed by clean, compatible data. Any mismatch would break logic or trigger errors in production.

October 1, 2025•6 min read

Documentation

C4 Model: Architecture Maps That Actually Help

In earlier blog posts, I shared a few C4 diagrams to explain architecture choices. They helped give structure to the messiness of modern systems. But I never really explained the model behind them. So that’s what this post is for. Software architects still struggle with good architecture diagrams. Some draw class diagrams for systems they haven’t even coded. Others scribble some boxes and arrows in Miro and call it a day. And none of it helps new devs understand what they’re joining. That’s why the C4 model exists. It gives us a clear way to show software architecture, using four levels of abstraction. It’s a thinking tool. Think of C4 like maps for your code. In the same way, you would use something like Google Maps to zoom in and out of an area you are interested in.

Sep 3, 20256 min read

Design PatternsIntegration

When Systems Talk Without Knowing Each Other: Pub-Sub

A few years ago, I worked on a customer loyalty platform for a large retailer. Every time a customer made a purchase, multiple systems needed to react. The billing system had to record the transaction. The loyalty engine had to calculate points. The marketing platform needed purchase data to trigger campaigns. At first, the team considered wiring these systems directly together. The billing service would call the loyalty service. The loyalty service would notify marketing. And so on. But within a few weeks, the design looked like spaghetti. Every new requirement added another direct dependency. One change in one system caused a ripple effect across the others. We needed a way for systems to talk without being tightly tied together. That’s when the Publisher-Subscriber pattern became the answer.

Aug 27, 20257 min read

ObservabilityResilience

Health Endpoints: When Production Sleeps with One Eye Open

Picture this. Your team just rolled out a new payments service into production. It’s late Friday night. Everything looks fine at first glance, but suddenly transactions stop flowing. You open the logs and dashboards, but nothing obvious shows up. Was it the database? The service? The network? You don’t know yet. This is where a health endpoint could have been your first line of defense. Instead of digging through half a dozen monitoring tools, you could hit a simple /health URL and instantly know if the service was alive, if its dependencies were reachable, and if it was fit to serve requests.

Aug 20, 20256 min read

Design PatternsResilience

How to Stop One Service from Burning Down the House

It was just past midnight when my phone buzzed. Again. "Payment service failure. Error rate: 96%. Retry storm detected.". I was leading the architecture team of a retail tech platform with millions of daily users. We were in the middle of our summer sales campaign, traffic was peaking, and all eyes were on system stability. A minor hiccup with a third-party payment gateway had escalated into a full-blown meltdown. Shopping carts froze. Transactions stalled. The user experience team was already fielding complaints on Twitter. The root cause? Not the gateway itself, but our system’s reaction to it. We had built something fast and feature-rich, but not fault-tolerant. That night, I learned a hard but transformative lesson about the Circuit Breaker pattern.

Jul 16, 20258 min read

Design PatternsAPI Design

The BFF Pattern: Friendship Goals for Frontend and Backend

It started, like many good architecture ideas, in a meeting room filled with slightly annoyed stakeholders. Marketing was upset because the mobile app was slow to load. The web team couldn’t keep up with changes to the backend. Product complained that adding features to the TV app required weeks of cross-team coordination. And the backend engineers? They were juggling a monolithic API surface area that had grown into a forest of conditional logic, request filtering, and over-fetching madness.

Jul 9, 20256 min read

Design PatternsModernization

The Gentle Art of Strangling Legacy Systems Without Breaking Everything

It started with a phone call late on a Thursday. "We’re bleeding money on support. Customers are churning. And that monolith is held together with duct tape and prayer. Can you help?". As a solution architect, this is the moment the real work begins. The system in question was a 15-year-old CRM built in a now-defunct framework, with business logic buried so deep even the original developers would need breadcrumbs to find their way back. But a full rewrite was off the table. Too risky, too slow. They needed a change that was incremental, controlled, and safe. That’s when we reached for a proven technique: the Strangler Fig Pattern.

Jul 2, 20255 min read

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