Code, Noted· Modernization · 4 min
The strangler fig, twenty years on
Martin Fowler named the incremental-replacement pattern in 2004. Two decades later it is quoted more than it is followed, and the gap is where modernizations die.
Software that has to keep standing.
Essays on architecture, modernization and delivery inside large organizations. Long-form, sourced, and unhurried: the systems in question took decades to build, so the essays can take a few weeks.
October 2026
· Leadership · 3 min
When the internal platform goes on sale
Spotify opened a storefront for its internal engineering platform on October 8. An essay on what a platform team becomes when its customers start paying, and what Amazon learned about that in 2006.
· Delivery · 2 min
On the outage that came back ninety-six minutes later
GitHub went down twice on October 7, ten minutes each time. The second incident's own status update called it a reoccurrence, which is the word that separates a mitigation from a fix.
September 2026
· Architecture · 1 min
Everything ships a database
The most deployed software in the world has no server, no company, and no sales team. A short note on what SQLite's ubiquity says about infrastructure.
· Architecture · 6 min
Whatever happened to capacity planning
For forty years someone owned the forecast. Autoscaling did not eliminate the discipline; it moved it to the other side of the invoice. An essay on a job title the cloud dissolved.
· Modernization · 3 min
Y2K, reconsidered as a success
The disaster that did not happen is remembered as a panic that was wrong. The record says otherwise, and the difference matters for every deadline since.
· Practice · 3 min
On the colour of the bikeshed, sixty-nine years on
Parkinson's law of triviality is from 1957; the email that renamed it for software is from 1999. Both are quoted weekly and obeyed nowhere. On attention, consequence, and a budget for reviews.
August 2026
· Leadership · 2 min
The bus factor has a literature
Knowledge concentration can be measured from the repository itself, and researchers have been doing it for a decade. On the number nobody computes until the resignation.
