Architecture Weekly #180
Architecture Weekly Issue #180. 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
Good System Design 👷♂️
A nicely packed list of attributes of a good system design: few components, minimized use of state, observability and more. Nice read.
#systemdesign
Understanding Reasoning LLMs 🤟
You can't hide from AI today. But you can understand a) when and what to use b) how they work under the hood at least approximately. I recommend this blog post on understanding reasoning LLMs and the blog as a whole - great series on explaining LLM architecture, reinforcement learnings and many other important things.
#llm
Kiro and the future of AI spec-driven software development 🍼
One of the techniques to talk to an LLM is meta-prompting: asking the model to generate a prompt first to use it later. Kiro - a new IDE from Amazon(still in preview though) - is built around this idea. You ask it to come up with a spec, and then it proceeds to build the software by this spec. Marc Brooker explains more.
#llm
Business Oriented System Design Course Cohort #7 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 1st of October. Details, Feedbacks and Enrollment into the course is here.
The Course price is increased to € 499, but you can grab the place by applying a promocode EARLYACCESS20.
Follow-Up
Is Software Architect a Fake Role? 🍼
Wow, what a long read on the painful topic: what is the actual role of a "Software Architect"? Is it a bullshit job? Where does it actually originate from? This piece requires quarter of an hour to read, giving you a great understanding of the job conundrum in return though.
#softwarearchitecture
A note about eventual consistency - Part 1 👷♂️
BASE guarantees(basically available, soft state, eventual consistency) is usually perceived as an opposite of ACID. However, eventual consistency is pretty close to strong consistency outside of edge cases. Uwe Friedrichsen clarifies the details.
#distributedsystems
Enhancing FoodStorm with AI Image Generation 👷♂️
This is a problem I heard about in Bolt: for food delivery you would like good images for goods and dishes; however making the pictures and uploading them is a hustle. You can put AI at it: give the customers(i.e. restaurants) an ability to generate an image with a smart prompt. See how it happened at instacart.
#casestudy
System of Record 👷♂️
It's nice to recall the fundamentals from time to time. Building a product which splits the information across different storages sporadically guarantee a development hell; Peter Ritchie argues there should a system of record - a single source of truth for a particular entity. This principle saved me a lot of pain in my production experience. Find out what makes a good system of record.
#architecture
SLI Compass: Fidelity and Granularity 👷♂️
As usual, a great post from Alex Ewerlöf on SLI properties. A good SLI has organic nature, measures multiple things and hopefully attributes to one team. Alex explains the fidelity, granularity and usefulness of SLIs.
#sre
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!