Architecture Weekly Issue #171. Articles, books, and playlists on architecture and related topics. Split by sections, highlighted with complexity: 🤟 means hardcore, 👷♂️ is technically applicable right away, 🍼 - is an introduction to the topic or an overview. Now in telegram and Substack as well.
Highlights
The Top Challenges in Making Software Architecture Decisions 🍼
Making architecture decisions impact business, technical roadmap and the project future. It is a tricky endeavour, and here are the top 5 challenges.
#architecturedecisions
Architecture as Code Interview with Neal Ford and Mark Richards 🍼
In this episode of the Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, Neal Ford and Mark Richards introduce the concept of Architecture as Code—a practical approach to defining and validating software architecture through executable specifications. They discuss using fitness functions to enforce architectural rules across code, data, and infrastructure layers, and explore how generative AI can automate test generation and architectural insights. This lightweight, dynamic method offers a compelling alternative to traditional, static models. A must-listen for architects seeking precision, automation, and governance at scale.
#interview
Behind the Scenes: Building a Robust Ads Event Processing Pipeline at Netflix 👷♂️
We all hate ads - except people who run them and earn from it. Yes, we are talking about Netflix: and they need to serve relevant ads timely. A complex pipeline includes Kafka installation, Ad Servers, Event Handlers and Metadata registry.
#casestudy
Business Oriented System Design Course Cohort #6 is officially open!
Looking for a way to advance your career? Felt you overgrew the mere feature development, but lack skills to design complete systems? This course got you covered. 10 hours of content packed lectures, engaging practice and the final work you will be proud to showcase as well as Credly(by Pearson)-based digital certificate proving your experience. More than 70 engineers already passed the course with amazing feedback and advanced their careers. New cohort starts on 23rd of July. Details, Feedbacks and Enrollment into the course is here.
Follow-Up
Booting Databricks VMs 7x Faster for Serverless Compute 👷♂️
Booting a VM with useful payload takes multiple steps: OS boot, pulling a docker image and initialize a container. Databricks run millions of VMs, so optimizing startup saves millions of hours annually. Follow the post to understand how both obvious - like caching - as well as sophisticated tactics - like lazy filesystem - can improve performance almost an order of magnitude.
Xinyang Ge
#performace #vm
Local-first data layer for high-performance apps 👷♂️
Redux, Mobx, nano-store... They all allow you to manage the store of webapps. But what if you need to sync the state with other clients, like Google Docs or Figma? This is where livestore shines, because it can do both efficiently and at scale. Find the explanation, demo and feedbacks on the page.
#distributedsystems #localfirst
My Dos and DON'Ts of Software Architecture 🍼
Nice checklist of the recommended actions and known anti-patterns when working on the architecture problems. Making decisions, communicating tradeoffs, recognizing misunderstandings - grab a list.
#softwarearchitecture
Can AI Replace Software Architects? 🍼
LLMs are able to write code, but can they do architecture work? Find the post where 4 LLMs are presented with the architecture task. TL;DR: they provide pretty high-level answers without analyzing the trade-offs which is a crucial part of the work.
#architecture #llm
Migrating to Postgres 👷♂️
Sean Callahan shared his story of migrating the CockroachDB to PostgreSQL with a single script ending up saving more than $100,000 annually and discovering dozens of queries which were easy to replace on the pure PostgreSQL, than in CockroachDB due to difference in query planners and available tooling.
#postgresql #db #casestudy
Big thanks to Nikita, Constantin, Anatoly, Oleksandr, Dima, Pavel B, Pavel, Robert, Roman, Iyri, Andrey, Lidia, Vladimir, August, Roman, Egor, Roman, Evgeniy, Nadia, Daria, Dzmitry, Mikhail, Nikita, Dmytro, Denis and Mikhail for supporting the newsletter on Patreon!