The principles of clean architecture have been around for years. The same goes for hexagonal and onion architectures. Sadly I don’t see it applied too often. Too bad as these principles are simple yet powerful. They lead to better design, clear separation of concerns and improved testability. This article is my attempt at evangelizing these principles.

When replacing legacy software, a common strategy is the so called big bang release. As we saw with Argenta, this can literally lead to a big bang. In a single weekend they replaced a core legacy system with a new one. It failed miserably, resulting in customers not being able to access their bank accounts. The release at Argenta was a very public failure, but they are not alone. A lot of companies have tried and failed replacing their legacy systems in a single go. Quite often multi-million euro projects don’t even reach production. Years of development have been thrown in the trash attempting a replacement. Is there an alternative strategy?

One of the most compelling movements I currently see is Serverless Architecture. So what is serverless architecture? The most interesting definition is not technical, but rather comes when looking from a financial perspective.

I recently read an interesting book Product Roadmaps Relaunched. In most companies, there is a desire to create a long-term roadmap. Quite often this results in quite a few conflicts with principles of agile software development. There is little point in creating a backlog of user stories for the next 3 years and planning them sprint-per-sprint. This book describes a better way of handling things. In this blogpost, I’ll provide a short summary.

The lead developer

Yesterday I was at The Lead Developer conference. The talk on microservices by Russ Miles started of with a live performance of Highway to Hell, talked about Anti-fragility, DDD, CQRS and ended with a marriage proposal. Clearly this isn’t your average conference. While the technical content was great, it was the people-oriented topics that made it truly worthwhile. Here is a little summary on what I learned thanks to all the wonderful speakers.