Blog

Insights on software architecture, technology leadership, and engineering excellence

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?

Feb 4, 202612 min read

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.

Oct 1, 20256 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

Design PatternsResilience

The Ambassador Pattern: Because APIs Have Bad Days Too

A solution architect at a mid-sized fintech startup was wrapping up a Friday afternoon design review when an alert came in. The customer onboarding API was intermittently failing. Not enough to trigger a full incident, but enough to raise eyebrows in the compliance team. At the root of the problem? A background verification callout to a third-party KYC (Know Your Customer) service. When that service hiccupped, the onboarding flow stalled. And because it was a synchronous call in a tightly coupled microservice, retries weren’t consistent. Worse, the core service logs showed nothing. The failures were silent.

Jun 25, 20257 min read

Organizational Design

Conway’s Curse: When Your Org Chart Haunts Your Codebase

It was 08:47 AM. A coffee-fueled stand-up in a hybrid team where microservices were meant to be the new golden standard. Yet, a nagging pattern kept surfacing: services were tightly coupled, boundaries misaligned, and ownership blurred. The architecture diagram said one thing, but Jira tickets, team handoffs, and production logs told another.

Jun 18, 20256 min read

Quality & TestingArchitecture Practices

Architects, Don’t Skip Leg Day: Fitness Functions Matter

"How do we know the architecture is still good?" I remember the question clearly. It was halfway through a large-scale microservices migration at a fintech I was consulting for. The CIO asked it in a steering meeting, eyes scanning the room. Silence. Until one engineer muttered, “We hope so…”. That moment stuck with me. It echoed a deeper truth: without feedback loops, architecture drifts. The elegant diagrams fade, entropy creeps in, and assumptions go stale. That’s when I started embedding Architecture Fitness Functions into every significant architecture I touched.

Jun 11, 20256 min read

Business Architecture

Mind the Gap: Making Business Architecture Deliverables Work for You

It was day one of a new strategic initiative at a European telco. The CIO had called us in a cross-functional team of enterprise and solution architects to "make sense" of the business transformation underway. The ask? Launch a new B2B digital marketplace within 12 months, tightly integrated with legacy billing and CRM systems. Before diving into cloud-native platforms, APIs, or integration middleware, we had to do the architect’s equivalent of checking the map: define the baseline and target business architectures, and more importantly, identify the gaps.

Jun 4, 20257 min read

SecurityCloud & Infrastructure

From Login to Least Privilege: A Practical IAM Playbook

The crisis didn’t start with a breach. It started with a routine audit. For the lead architect, the previous months had been spent immersed in crafting what felt like their most elegant solution yet. A new customer engagement platform, fully containerized, multi-region, API-driven, scalable to millions. They had solved for failover. They had solved for latency. They had modeled domain boundaries down to the bounded context. It was, on paper, nearly flawless.

May 28, 20259 min read

Architecture Practices

The Architecture Playbook: Principles That Win the Game

Picture a soccer team stepping onto the field, full of talent and energy, but without a playbook. Everyone has their own idea of what the next move should be. Chaos ensues. There are moments of brilliance, but no consistency, no strategy, and ultimately, no win. This is what enterprise transformation looks like without architecture principles. These principles are not just corporate buzzwords or procedural fluff. They are your playbook, the guiding strategies that help every part of your organization move in sync toward a common goal.

May 21, 20256 min read

Security

The Threat We Didn’t See Coming: Awakening to Threat Modeling

It started like any other digital transformation project: a multinational client, a tight deadline, and the excitement of architecting a greenfield platform in the cloud. We had microservices humming in Kubernetes, event streams flying through Kafka, and pipelines buzzing in CI/CD. Security? Of course, we had it: identity via OpenID Connect, TLS everywhere, secrets in Vault. We had checked the boxes.

May 14, 20256 min read

Documentation

Building an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) Library

A colleague asked why we had chosen Kafka over RabbitMQ for a specific integration layer we implemented last year. I paused. I knew the choice had been debated, analyzed, and agreed upon in one of our architecture review sessions. But the details? The trade-offs? The alternative paths we explored and the final rationale? They had slipped into the fog. I found myself wishing we had a simple, structured way to capture architectural decisions as they happened, not just the what, but the why, and even the what-we-left-behind. That’s when I stumbled upon Architecture Decision Records, or ADRs.

May 7, 20256 min read

Governance

Architecture Governance: The Invisible Backbone of Success

It always started the same way: Bold visions, ambitious strategies, and the promise of seamless digital transformation. Yet, within a year, enterprise architecture efforts would crumble into fragmented systems, unchecked technical debt, and a battle between IT and business leaders. The reason? A lack of governance.

Apr 30, 20254 min read

Architecture Practices

The Architect View-Master: Architecture for Every Stakeholder

Imagine you’re a kid again, holding a red plastic View-Master in your hands. You pop in a reel, click the lever, and like magic, a new scene appears. Each click gives you a different perspective: Scooby Doo, dinosaurs, the Grand Canyon, space adventures. The magic lies not in the toy itself, but in how it delivers views tailored to your curiosity.

Apr 23, 20255 min read

Stakeholder Management

Architect and Stakeholders: Power, Interest, and the Unseen Architecture

Every solution architect knows that systems aren’t the only things with dependencies, people are too. The APIs we integrate are predictable. Stakeholders? Not so much. You’re mapping domains, aligning systems to business capabilities, wrestling with legacy constraints, and just when you think you’ve nailed the architecture, a sponsor with high power and low interest torpedoes your roadmap with a casual "I don’t see the value."

Apr 16, 20256 min read