Welcome to the new week!

I was asked multiple times how I’m building the validation flow from the Web requests to storage. The general advice is the same as Fox Mulder got: trust no one!

Yet, if we start implementation, then decisions made around that are not as trivial as they may seem. I wrote about that in my latest article:

• How to validate business logic

Martin Fowler said:

Software architecture is those decisions which are both important and hard to change.

And decision making is one of the most important tools we should be practising. It’s a skill that we need to train. We also need to understand what are good and bad decisions. To find that out, it’s worth looking at resources outside our industry. For instance:

• Art Markman - How You Define the Problem Determines Whether You Solve It

We also need to understand the surrounding environment, as software architecture is not only built from decisions around tech stack.

• Ethan Garofolo - FAA, NOTAM, and failing to learn

• Gregor Hohpe - Debugging Architect

People are essential for applying the design. Good design is not created in a vacuum; we need to consider the stuff we have and how we organise their work. Microsoft recently decided to give employees unlimited time off. It’s a controversial decision, as it doesn’t mean people will work less. The research shows that most of the time, it ends up with longer work time. It’s not enough to allow people to take time off; it’s essential to build an environment where people feel safe to take it. More in:

• The Verge - Microsoft employees are getting unlimited time off

• J. de Bloom, C. J. Syrek, Jana Kühnel, T. Vahle-Hinz - POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS Unlimited Paid Time Off Policies: Unlocking the Best and Unleashing the Beast

If you want to check the report about hiring trends, check the following:

• CodinGame - State of Tech Hiring in 2023

Speaking about trends and “State of something” reports.

My main issue is that they’re not representative, quite often artificial and are not using proper statistical methods.

For instance, the JS dev surveys show that people are mostly using React, Angular, Vue, etc., while comparing that to actual usage, it appears that 81% of the web world is running jQuery.

I understand that they’re more around trends rather than hard numbers. It would be better if they could at least compare that to realistic numbers and analyse the statistical significance of those results. Especially since the results are usually not presented as “made for fun” but as the “State of (...)” and impacting the market. Then people believe in such and make wrong assumptions, overwintering, etc. See also:

• State of JS 2022

If you’d like to get back to basics and find a decent rabbit hole to go down, check out great material on crafting your own scripting language:

• Robert Nystorm - Crafting Interpreters

Check, also other links!

Cheers
Oskar

p.s. I invite you to join the paid version of Architecture Weekly. It already contains the exclusive Discord channel for subscribers (and my GitHub sponsors), monthly webinars, etc. It is a vibrant space for knowledge sharing. Don’t wait to be a part of it!

p.s.2. Ukraine is still under brutal Russian invasion. A lot of Ukrainian people are hurt, without shelter and need help. You can help in various ways, for instance, directly helping refugees, spreading awareness, and putting pressure on your local government or companies. You can also support Ukraine by donating, e.g. to the Ukraine humanitarian organisation, Ambulances for Ukraine or Red Cross.

Architecture

• Oskar Dudycz - How to validate business logic

• Mario Bittencourt - Understanding Coupling with Event-Driven Architecture

• Gregor Hohpe - Debugging Architect

• Art Markman - How You Define the Problem Determines Whether You Solve It

• Patrick Roos - The Ultimate Guide To Software Architecture Documentation

• Google Cloud Blog - Multicloud's moment: Everybody's doing it, but are you doing it right? Here's eight dos and don'ts

• Derek Comartin - Avoid batch jobs! Model the future!

• Ethan Garofolo - FAA, NOTAM, and failing to learn

DevOps

• Anton Yakutovich - Aggressive dependency caching in GitHub Actions

• B Shyam Sundar - Exploring Docker Hub’s WASM technical preview

Compilers

• Robert Nystorm - Crafting Interpreters

Databases

• Brian Sam-Bodden - Probabilistic Data Structures with Redis Bloom

AWS

• AWS - Amazon DynamoDB Labs

.NET

• TurboSharp - A command-line IDE for C#

• Kacper Drejer - How to manage feature flags in ASP.NET Core apps with Azure?

• Maarten Balliauw - Producer/consumer pipelines with System.Threading.Channels

• Khalid Abuhakmeh - The Future of .NET with WASM

Node.js

• State of JS 2022

• Sebastian Weber - Reduce maintenance effort with shared ESLint and Prettier configs

Python

• Vega-Altair - Declarative Visualization in Python

Coding Life

• Ted M. Young - Remote Learning Ensembles

• Jessica Kerr - Velocity defeats itself. Get acceleration instead

• Wojciech Seliga - Ten lessons I painfully learnt while moving from software developer to entrepreneur/CEO role

• Allen Helton - How I Became an AWS Serverless Hero

Management

• The Verge - Microsoft employees are getting unlimited time off

• J. de Bloom, C. J. Syrek, Jana Kühnel, T. Vahle-Hinz - POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS Unlimited Paid Time Off Policies: Unlocking the Best and Unleashing the Beast

Industry

• CodinGame - State of Tech Hiring in 2023

• DarkReading - Biden Signs Post-Quantum Cybersecurity Guidelines Into Law

• ArsTechnica - Twitter rival Mastodon rejects funding to preserve nonprofit status

• CNBC - Here’s how much money Google estimates Microsoft’s cloud business is actually losing

• Bloomberg - Microsoft Sinks as Downgrade Highlights Cloud-Growth Concerns