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Insights and perspectives on solution and software architecture

Git Hooks: Preventing Your Credentials from Going Viral
DevOpsSecurity

Git Hooks: Preventing Your Credentials from Going Viral

The solution architect leaned back in her chair, coffee in hand, reviewing the morning’s pull requests when Slack exploded. The security team had detected AWS credentials in the company’s public GitHub repository: credentials with full admin access to production. The commit had been live for exactly 47 minutes, just long enough for automated scanners to find them and spin up $12,000 worth of cryptocurrency mining instances. The developer who committed them? A senior engineer with eight years of experience, who’d been pair programming with an AI assistant and simply didn’t notice when it helpfully included the credentials from a local config file.

•11 min read
Test && Commit || Revert: Why Architects Should Master TCR
Quality & TestingDevOps

Test && Commit || Revert: Why Architects Should Master TCR

It was 2:47 AM when Sarah, a principal architect at a rapidly scaling SaaS company, finally admitted defeat. She’d been debugging for six hours, trying to untangle a "quick refactoring" that had somehow metastasized into 847 lines of changed code across 23 files. The tests were failing in mysterious ways, her Git diff looked like a Jackson Pollock painting, and she couldn’t remember which of her "improvements" had actually broken things. Sound familiar?

12 min read
Migrate or Cry Trying: How to Move Data Without the Drama
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.

6 min read
C4 Model: Architecture Maps That Actually Help
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.

6 min read
When Systems Talk Without Knowing Each Other: Pub-Sub
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.

7 min read
Health Endpoints: When Production Sleeps with One Eye Open
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.

6 min read
How to Stop One Service from Burning Down the House
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.

8 min read
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Ajax Hackathon x Team Rockstars
in-person
7
Mar

Ajax Hackathon x Team Rockstars

A 12-hour hackathon with exclusive access to Ajax player tracking data from Eredivisie matches, building innovative solutions at the Glasgow '72 Lounge overlooking the pitch.

08:00 - 22:00
Johan Cruijff ArenA, Amsterdam
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Cyber Legends #5
in-person
17
Mar

Cyber Legends #5

A cybersecurity evening featuring sessions on modern cryptography and post-quantum readiness by Coen Rundberg, and lessons from 2025 on Identity & Access Management by Helmer Berkhoff.

17:30 - 21:30
Team Rockstars IT, Lekkerbeetjesstraat 8, Den Bosch
Register NowLearn More
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